Japanese Language. Haruhiko Kindaichi

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language is the only one that has been proven scientifically to belong to the same family as Japanese. There are some, including T

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language is so similar to Japanese that it is in fact a dialect of Japanese. Next to the Ry

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language comes Korean, but it hardly fills the bill. Shimmura Izuru’s² theory, that a dialect akin to Japanese must have existed in ancient Korea, attracted considerable attention. His theory is based on a study of Korean place names and numerals that appear in the chapter entitled “Geography” in Sangokushiki (The History of the Three Kingdoms), but as there were few examples it isdifficult to form a definite opinion. Though the view that Japanese belongs to the Altaic languages, including Korean, has the support of a number of prominent linguists and is most influential, it is still very far from being proved. Hence, we cannot ignore the theory advocated by Shiratori Kurakichi that Japanese is an isolated language.

Originality

      In his book Kokugo Kenkyh (The Methods of Research into the Japanese Language),³ Tokieda Motoki writes that once while he was lodging at an inn in Paris, his French landlady and a Spanish lodger were engaged in a conversation. He overheard them say that they could understand each other when one spoke Spanish and the other Italian, but not when one of them spoke French. In short, people who had nothing to do with philology were discussing problems like “The Relation between the Romance Languages” in daily conversation.

      This is an interesting story. When a Japanese hears Korean or Chinese, he thinks how entirely different it is from Japanese. In Europe, however, the degree of difference between languages can generally be illustrated as follows: one person speaks Swedish, one Danish, and another Norwegian, and yet they all understand one another. The Japanese equivalent might be a conversation among three people, one speaking the T

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dialect, one the

saka dialect, and the third the Yamaguchi dialect. When one hears about Russian, Serbian, Czech, and Polish, he imagines that they are quite different languages, recalling the complicated colored maps of Europe. It is astonishing, however, to find that people from these countries can understand one another even when each uses his native tongue. For example “good evening” is dobry vyecher’ in Russian, dobry wieczór’ in Polish, doby veer’ in Czech, and dobra veer in Serbo-Croatian. Indeed, if this is all the difference there is, it is not hard to believe that they can understand one another.

      Hearing the term Indo-European comparative philology, most Japanese think of something terribly esoteric that a scholar studies up in his ivory tower, his face screwed up in a look of intense concentration. Although this notion is probably not true of Indo-European philology, which has its origins in very simple and common facts, it is, I think, a fair characterization of Japanese philology. When Western philology was introduced into Japan in the middle of the Meiji period, the lineage of the Japanese language became a subject of much discussion, and it was thought that failure to produce a conclusive answer would bring disgrace to Japanese scholarship. However, try as they would, Japanese philologists could not establish a clear-cut relationship between Japanese and any other language. It is now obvious that, unlike the European languages, Japanese cannot be easily linked with any family of languages, and it will only be after the continuous efforts of many scholars that the question of the origin of the Japanese language is answered, if it ever is. It is definitely not the type of problem that can be suddenly solved by the novel theory of some ambitious scholar. The Basque language mentioned above, the Caucasian language at the foot of the Caucasus, Burushaski in northwest India, the language spoken in the Andaman Islands in the Indian Ocean, Lati mentioned above, Ainu of Hokkaid

, and Gilyak, spoken in some parts of Sakhalin, have all been left behind in the course of world progress. Together with these languages, the Japanese language seems like a one-man party occupying a lonely corner of an assembly hall. Such an isolated condition is something very rare for the language of a civilized people.

Role of isolation

      What influence does the isolation of their language have on the Japanese people? On the plus side, it was thought during World War II that the enemy, owing to language difficulties, would be hindered in gathering intelligence. After the war, however, it was found that this was not the case at all. From the standpoint of national defense, isolation does not seem to have been of much help.

      There are a great many entries on the minus side. The fact that Japanese differs greatly from the languages of highly civilized countries like England, Germany, and France has put Japan at a disadvantage in various ways. It is well known howdifficult it is for a Japanese to master the languages of these nations. Even though he studies English in high school eight hours each week for five years, he is barely able to read the labels on canned goods. Of course, foreigners who wish to learn Japanese and study Japanese culture are also confronted with tremendous obstacles. Some time ago there was a newspaper article about some foreign students from Southeast Asia who complained that although they had come all the way to Japan to study modern technology, they were frustrated by the difficulty of the Japanese language. Similarly, in the field of literature, it is a pity that the numerous outstanding Japanese works cannot be more widely appreciated by the people of other countries.

      Recently, international conferences on physics and genetics were held in Japan. According to some Japanese scholars who attended, while they welcomed scholarly authorities from distant lands, as soon as technical discussions started, language immediately became such a barrier that they could not help feeling a little frustrated. Some years ago when the American film The Moon Is Blue was produced, separate sound recordings were made in German, French, and Italian while the film was still being made, so that the movie could be shown immediately in those countries. But the Japanese had to resort to subtitles, which marred the film’s visual effect.⁴

      According to engineer Seki Hideo, a translation machine was devised sometime ago in the United States. When an English sentence such as “I love you” is typed into the machine, sentences like Ich liebe dich or Je t’aime come out. But a great deal of time and money will be needed to make a machine that can translate into Japanese, because Japanese sentence structure is entirely different from that of European languages.⁵

       2Contact with Other Languages

       Linguistic isolation

      Another point we notice about Japanese when it is compared to other languages is that it has very little direct contact with them. In other words, the region where Japanese is spoken is completely different from the regions where other languages are spoken. To be more specific, very few Japanese people speak languages other than Japanese.

      It is said that Queen Cleopatra of ancient Egypt used eight different languages to entertain state guests, and President Tito of Yugoslavia reportedly speaks seven languages. Japanese are struck with admiration when they hear such stories. In such small countries in Europe as Switzerland, it is very common to hear people speaking two or three different languages. Father W. A. Grotaas, a scholar in Eastern languages residing in Japan, says that during the annual national census in his homeland Belgium, there is an accompanying questionnaire