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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 Ryky Islands (B. H. Chamberlain and others), Ainu (J. Batchelor), Korean (W. G. Aston, Kanazawa Shzabur, 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 Shir¹ 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, the Ryky language is the only one that has been proven scientifically to belong to the same family as Japanese. There are some, including Tj Misao, the foster parent of Japanese dialectology, who are of the opinion that the Ryky language is so similar to Japanese that it is in fact a dialect of Japanese. Next to the Ryky 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 Tky 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