Читать книгу Japanese Language - Haruhiko Kindaichi - Страница 6

Publisher’s Foreword

No one would believe it now, but sixty years ago, the Japanese language was living on borrowed time. In the agonizing national reappraisal that followed defeat in World War II, even the most hallowed national institutions were subjected to keen scrutiny. The language itself was no exception.

Some people—and not just the Americans—blamed the war itself on the formality and complexity of the national idiom. At one time, the occupying authorities seriously considered replacing Japanese with English as the sole offcial language. And a renowned literary figure of the prewar period proposed the adoption of French.

It was in 1956, barely four years after the end of the occupation, that Haruhiko Kindaichi wrote his classic defense of the national language under the title of Nippongo. Rejecting the arguments of those who had predicted linguistic decline or degeneration, he pointed instead to the language’s sturdy powers of assimilation. Far from collapsing under a tide of foreign words, Japanese was becoming bolder and more innovative.

Kindaichi was determined to explore all facets of his forbidding subject. To do so, he drew not only on the resources of the literature but also on Japan’s numberless dialects and professional jargons, about which he is the acknowledged expert. No one can emerge from this book without a feeling for the richness and complexity of the language spoken today throughout the world by over 130 million Japanese in all fields of human endeavor.