the war, a series of language reform policies were put into practice, such as the establishment of the T
y
Kanji
* and the revision of the use of
kana. These reforms were made possible through the efforts of the People’s Federation of the Japanese Language Movement organized under Yamamoto Y
,
11 the major driving force, and the Ministry of Education’s Japanese Language Section, the executive organ led by Kugimoto Hisaharu. All these reforms properly aimed at the simplification of Japanese. It is fitting that we, too, search out the areas where our language is deficient and devise possible means to correct them.
Characteristics of Japanese
Clear establishment of the nature of the Japanese language is essential to its improvement and will make for other benefits as well.
Soon after the war, San’y
, a
rakugo storyteller, was run over by an American jeep and died. A Japanese reported this to an American in English, translating word for word the Japanese
jidsha ni butsukatte as “by running into the car.” That made the American stare in amazement and say, “Why would the man do such a stupid thing?” It is natural that he should ask such a question, for actually the jeep collided with Kash
, and not Kash
with the jeep. But in Japanese we use the same form, “Kash
ran into the jeep,” to describe both situations. This shows how English can be misused due to ignorance of the peculiarities of Japanese expressions. Thus, it is also desirable for us to understand the characteristics of Japanese in order to correctly translate Japanese into other languages.
This knowledge of Japanese is also necessary in teaching Japanese to foreigners. Furthermore, one must not disregard the peculiarities of Japanese in applying educational theories written in foreign languages to Japanese schools.
Again, a firm grasp of the characteristics of Japanese is important in discussing the genealogy and history of Japanese. Since Yasuda Tokutar
’s book
Man’ysh no Nazo (The Riddle of the Man’y
sh
)
12 raised the question of the relationship between the Japanese language and the language of a small race of people called the Lepcha at the foot of the Himalayas, the problems of the outstanding characteristics and, especially, the lineage of Japanese, have been much discussed. The characteristics of the Tibeto-Burman languages, including the Lepcha language, are similar to Japanese in various aspects, and therefore cannot be disregarded when one discusses the lineage of Japanese. In present-day Japanese, there are the following two types of characteristics: (1) those transmitted from the ancestor language before it split into other languages, and (2) those formed under the influence of other languages after the separation of Japanese from the ancestor language and its establishment as the Japanese language. If there is a language whose inherited characteristics resemble those of the Japanese language, that language must belong to the same lineage. If this is so, through which aspects of Japanese will the character of the ancestral language be conveyed? Generally speaking, when a language changes with the times, the sound changes least, and grammar only slightly more. This is an established theory in linguistics. Thus, the aspect that retains the ancestor’s traces longest is, first, the sound system, and second, the grammar. What, then, are the peculiarities of the Japanese sound system and grammar, and what languages do they resemble?
The significance of clarifying the nature of Japanese is not limited to these points. In cultural anthropology, speech is called “the vehicle of culture,” and the words of a language in particular are called “the index of culture.”13 This shows that language can be looked upon as a reflection of culture and not simply as a tool for the transmission of thought. In other words, the clarification of the Japanese language— especially its vocabulary and the characteristics of its expressions— will surely be helpful in any reconsideration of the life and way of thinking of the Japanese people.
Footnotes
* Kana: two syllabic alphabets. Katakana is angular, and hiragana is curvi-form.
* The 1,850 kanji offcially selected for daily use in 1946.
PART I
THE POSITION OF JAPANESE
1An Isolated Language
What are the characteristics of the Japanese language? In thinking about this question, I would like first of all to consider the language as a whole, as “a system of signs,” without breaking it into components such as pronunciation or vocabulary. There are two kinds of characteristics: those found when comparing Japanese with other languages, and those found when looking at the construction of the Japanese language itself, as something apart from other languages.
Origin
The Japanese language has a unique position among the languages of civilized countries. That is, there is absolutely no other language of a similar nature. This characteristic catches our eye when we compare Japanese with the languages of the world.
In the middle of the Meiji period when Western linguistics was introduced to Japan, the lineage of Japanese became a subject of much discussion. The Japanese language was said to be related to almost every known language, including: the language of the Ry
zabur, and others), Chinese (Matsumura Ninz), Tibeto-Burman (C. K. Parker), Ural-Altaic (H. J. Klaproth and others), Altaic (G. L. Ramstedt, Fujioka Katsuji, Hattori Shir), Uralian (Izui Hisanosuke), the Mon-Khmer languages (Matsumoto Nobuhiro), and Malayo-Polynesian (V. H. Lablerton). There were even some who linked Japanese with the Indo-Germanic languages (Taguchi Ukichi), and with Greek (Kimura Takatar). And, as mention ed above, Yasuda Tokutar thought Japanese to be from the same linguistic family as the language of the Lepcha people in the Himalayas.
Hattori Shir
1 says that no other language has been the subject of so many attempts to link it with other languages. This is particularly noteworthy, for it really signifies that Japanese cannot be conclusively linked with any particular language. In fact, of the many languages given above,
