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The beautiful dissociation of the Japanese language

351 points by mrcgnc 2y ago

layman51 2y ago
I really liked this article. I really love the examples given. The part about names and pronunciation, and the manga examples actually reminded me of a anime scene that appears confusing at first. In the scene, there’s a character that receives a business card from another and he ends up pronouncing his name incorrectly.[1] I guess it does seem weird that a written name can be mispronounced, but isn’t the same kind of phenomenon as when you have an artificial English word like “ghoti” which is meant to be pronounced as “fish”? [1]: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=b4dysjr5-FE https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=b4dysjr5-FE
Aeolun 2y ago
Some people think things are more fun if they are more complicated. The only thing I want to do is learn the damn language already, but study is just no substitute for actual usage with Japanese (like author says, since the pronounciation is often 10x simpler than figuring out all the different readings).
anigbrowl 2y ago
By the way, Japanese with Anime (cited in the article) is an absolutely great resource for digging into the fine details of language and language use, without the pomposity that often infects technical discussion coughStackExchangecough* https://www.japanesewithanime.com https://www.japanesewithanime.com
danielscrubs 2y ago
Most surprising for me is the humor part. Let a normal everyday Japanese person watch ANY of the greatest US comedians of all time (translated or not) and they just won’t find it funny. Now use the techniques in the article with ambiguous meanings and they will be rolling on the floor laughing. This works in the reverse too, westerners won’t find everyday Japanese comedians funny (it is pretty much untranslatable though).
- autoexec 2y ago
  I wonder how much grammar interferes with comedy. It seems like there would be certain jokes which would be ruined depending on how a sentence is structured. Revealing a surprising punchline before the set up for example.
achr 2y ago
Another interesting "anomaly" is that the same concept can be expressed both with 漢語 (kango: Chinese-origin vocabulary) and 和語 (wago: Japanese-origin vocabulary). Kango is mostly nouns but one can easily add する (to do) and turn a noun into a verb. So, for example, if one wants to say "to compare" there's both kango version: 比較する (hikaku suru) and wago version: 比べる (kuraberu). Usually kango sounds a little bit more formal and used in writing more often but plenty of them are also used in casual contexts. However, even though they often share a common character, the reading is different (onyomi for kango and kunyomi for wago). Non-native speakers need to basically learn both versions separately and one cannot easily deduce one from another (which is the case for example in English: comparison - to compare; or Polish: porównanie - porównać).
minmax2020 2y ago
I'm a Korean currently learning Japanese, and while I do understand that this mash of Chinese characters and kana writing system can be appreciated for its exoticness, as a learner I can't help but feel it's more of a hassle resulting from it being a not yet fully optimized writing system. (I mean, do we really need both hiragana and katakana?) I'm definitely not claiming that Korean is a more "optimized" language overall, but at least when it comes to the writing system, we had exactly the same problem as the Japanese (if you look at Korean newspapers just a few decades ago they are littered with Chinese characters), and at some point we fully ditched Chinese characters and have no problem going on with our lives. In fact, it made our lives easier in many cases, especially in keyboard typing. As a side note, we obviously have some side effects from switching to entirely phonetic alphabet system. For example, the words "tea" and "car" have the same pronunciation (차=cha) and so they are indistinguishable in writing, but it wasn't the case when Chinese characters were used (茶/車). I'm not sure how this side effect propagates into some sort of sociolinguistic phenomenon, but at least for average people it doesn't seem to have much significance.
- StefanBatory 2y ago
  I began studying Korean recently for fun because of video games influence (I'm huge Project Moon fan and then I got into Korean literature). When I saw things like ㄱ for k/g or ㅏ for i I was in awe, like that's is so damn clever.
- shiroiushi 2y ago
  >I mean, do we really need both hiragana and katakana? It is pretty redundant, but it's helpful sometimes: foreign loanwords (esp. from English these days) are almost exclusively written in katakana, so they stand out. Also, having some stuff in katakana and some in hiragana helps to distinguish the different words, since Japanese doesn't use spaces. >For example, the words "tea" and "car" have the same pronunciation (차=cha) and so they are indistinguishable in writing, but it wasn't the case when Chinese characters were used (茶/車) 1. I'm surprised "car" isn't called "sha" instead (as it is in the onyomi reading of 車 in Japanese, which was borrowed from Chinese). 2. This would be a good place to borrow from Japanese: the kinyomi (stand-alone word) pronunciation is "kuruma", which probably won't be confused with anything in Korean. :-) As for Korean ditching Chinese characters, it seems like Japanese is doing that too, just very very slowly. There are many words that have kanji versions that no one uses any more, preferring hiragana instead. And there's a lot of stuff being borrowed from English. For instance, 切符 (kippu) is the normal Japanese word for "ticket", but these days, everyone's calling it "チケット" (chiketto) which is borrowed from English.
pyinstallwoes 2y ago
Has anyone looked into Woshite?
space_oddity 2y ago
Off topic. I'm learning Korean and I am really fascinated by the fact that Korean language and communication are deeply intertwined with Korean culture
- shiroiushi 2y ago
  Why is that fascinating? This is the case for every language! Every language is deeply intertwined with the culture that created that language, and every language changes over time as the culture that uses it changes.
allen_berg 2y ago
Cool stuff but I found hard to have to waddle through all the cutesy story telling (techie? really?) to get to the point. Poetic wordplay based on meaning vs sound is quite interesting but not that deep.
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rauljordan2020 2y ago
As someone who speaks Chinese and is learning Japanese, I have been so surprised at just how incredibly complicated and obtuse Japanese is. Chinese (Cantonese) 7-9 tones, loads of characters, but after memorizing the first 2000-3000, you pick up on all the radicals, patterns, and meanings which help you fill in the gaps. Grammar is barebones: I only had to learn 5 to 10 different grammar rules for Chinese that I recall, and basically everything else is incredibly easy. Whereas in Japanese, I am learning 2-3 grammar rules per LESSON. Having each character pronounced a single way in Chinese is also super easy, and communication is even more direct than English. With Japanese, the cultural context, the phrasing, the end particles, and subtle vocab changes the meaning significantly. I think for me, it took 5 years to reach fluency in Chinese but I feel that even after 10 years I will barely reach conversational fluency in Japanese. It just feels like an inefficient language for communication. Why does it have to be so complicated?
- huytersd 2y ago
  Memorizing 3000 characters seems impossible. I know I would never be able to do it.
  - StefanBatory 2y ago
    How about memorizing 20 characters over 150 days, though? Or 10 over 300? ;) And there's a pattern to them too in the end.
  - qingcharles 2y ago
    The way I approached it: if every Japanese person can manage it, I can manage it too.
- kingkawn 2y ago
  Guess they weren’t thinking of you when they made it
- nonrandomstring 2y ago
  > Why does it have to be so complicated? I know nothing about Japanese, or Chinese. (Edit: actually that's not true, I learned this today [0]) Maybe a little about language in general from studying linguistics (for compilers), but I think the answer to your question is; Because it is able to express things that we can't in English. That is beautiful, necessary and precious. The fact that groups of people exist in the world who can have whole ideas and worldviews that we barely conceive or express at all, seems so valuable. [0] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=40119457 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=40119457
komali2 2y ago
I learned both Japanese and Mandarin over the last 15 years and I gotta say, this was an interesting article, but I'm mildly disappointed. > In particular, a whole realm of consciousness exists in the sphere of Japanese speakers that's perhaps truly unique in the world, more so than the sushi and the nature and decorum. It even allows for new literary techniques that are unimaginable in any other language. I was expecting some kind of insight into the super complex multitude of ways to say something as simple as "thank you" in Japanese, complex not only today but also historically. The linguistics tie into socioeconomics, class, and history, in a really fascinating way. A highly educated person has, in my opinion, a far greater "resolution" with Japanese than with English, in terms of what they can convey with a simple "thank you." Though I think English has the best "resolution" in most cases out of the three languages. It's extraordinarily difficult in Mandarin (especially if you aren't fluent and educated on top of that) to for example speak subtle differences such as "how would you feel about helping John with the dishes tonight?" vs "can you help John with the dishes tonight?" vs "It would mean a lot to me if you could help John with the dishes tonight" vs "I think John would appreciate if you helped him with the dishes tonight" vs "I need you to help john with the dishes tonight." Especially in sales and marketing, I really want that kind of granular resolution in Mandarin. It's a little possible of course, but you'll simply lose your audience. 99.99% of the time Mandarin speakers will expect to hear "tonight can you please help me with the dishes?" The notes about combining kanji and root characters to construct larger complex characters e.g. cousins male/female is interesting, but really in the brain of a native reader it just doesn't work like that, you simply memorize the meaning and move on. It takes the same sort of education to learn latin roots and the attention to notice them in English, as it does in Japanese / Mandarin.
- spidersouris 2y ago
  So does that mean Mandarin can be considered as more "straight to the point" and as not featuring a system of "gradual politeness" compared to other languages? Does that also mean that Mandarin speakers will express themselves more or less the same regardless of the social status of the person they're talking to? It's funny because I've had the opportunity to speak with a few Mandarin speakers, and sometimes when they were asking things in English, I felt something quite different. I wouldn't say that they were not polite, because that was not the case in their attitude, but the way they formulated their request was rather direct and as if the result of the request was a given.
Jun8 2y ago
Interesting and well-illustrated article. The claim that Japanese (or any other language) totally unique is a romantic one, showing the ignorance of the author with the very wide variety of languages and writing systems (the effect go writing system on language is not covered a lot in Linguistics, whose focus is the spoken language). For example, they mention furigana, characters that aid in reading Kanji characters (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Furigana https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Furigana). There are many examples of similar use in the languages, one that I'm familiar with is the use of determinatives in Ancient Egypt (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Determinative https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Determinative). Their use is similar to radicals in Mandarin, which is to provide additional semantic clarification. If you want phonetic clarification, examples are even more numerous, e.g. the use of shaddah in Arabic (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Shaddah https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Shaddah). The idea expressed in the "Dissociation from Birth" section sounds interesting until you learn that all alphabetic systems arose from a similar process, e.g. aleph was a drawing of an ox's head, etc. The part that I find really interesting about Japanese is it's well-developed system of honorifics (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Honorific_speech_in_Japanese https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Honorific_speech_in_Japanese).
- bradrn 2y ago
  > the effect go writing system on language is not covered a lot in Linguistics, whose focus is the spoken language I’d frame this a little differently: the vast majority of languages in the world are not regularly written, so linguists must focus on the spoken language. For languages which are written more often, linguists can and do focus on the relationship between the written and the spoken language.
  - keiferski 2y ago
    Philology tends to be more focused on texts than spoken languages, too.
  - Jun8 2y ago
    That's correct. A fascinating topic is how the written representation shapes the user's language, and, by association, their thinking - a written word version of teh Sapir-Whorf Hypothesis if you will. For example, for the aliens in the (story and) movie Arrival, was their superior all-temporal thinking capability due to their language, or their interesting written form? Interesting personal anecdote: My son is learning French in school, he's native in both English and Turkish, but not very good with Turkish spelling and does not use it often. I've seen him struggle with memorizing French words and their pronunciation, because he doesn't have an alternative phonetic representation of them (he doesn't know IPA, naturally :-). But Turkish spelling is (almost 100%) phonetic and I remembered that's how I memorized English when I was kid, I would think about their pronunciation in Turkish! E.g. cheese would be "çiyz".
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huhtenberg 2y ago
Re: Anomaly 6 - Providing two versions of the same sentence bit is not that uncommon in non-Japanese literature as well. For example, War and Peace in its original (Russian) language is sprinkled with French words and phrases, all duly translated via footnotes. This might not be as user-friendly as gikun as it requires glancing down and up the page a lot, but the idea is the same. Even in spoken language mixing in foreign words often helps conveying nuances of what's being said. Some words don't exist in some languages or require longer phrasing or don't mean exactly that, etc. This sort of thing a very common in multi-lingual families. So that "Anomaly 6" is not that much of an anomaly if you think about it. PS. It was a good read regardless.
- senkora 2y ago
  > For example, War and Peace in its original (Russian) language is sprinkled with French words and phrases, all duly translated via footnotes Amusingly, my English edition kept the French and didn't have footnotes. I read it as a kid and had no hope of understanding the French so I just skipped over it whenever it came up.
- basscomm 2y ago
  >Even in spoken language mixing in foreign words often helps conveying nuances of what's being said. Some words don't exist in some languages or require longer phrasing or don't mean exactly that, etc. This sort of thing a very common in multi-lingual families. So, in other words, adding in foreign words can add some je ne sais quoi
- ogurechny 2y ago
  “War and Peace” has more complex history. First revision had nobles speaking French when suitable, because “everyone” could still speak some French in Tolstoy's times (just like people in IT all across the world link to original English documentation every day without even thinking about it). Then it was found that “everyone” meant “well-educated nobles like Tolstoy”. For second revision, Tolstoy rewrote all French utterances into Russian (and moved most of philosophical sections to dedicated postscripts). Then it was reverted to original form (with later corrections), but with translations of French text in footnotes. Second revision was printed in “cheap” editions, third revision was used in higher quality ones. Later Soviet prints follow Collected Works version based on French-enabled revision (and thorough comparison of printed editions and manuscripts). Depending on the age of your translation and its source, you may find any of those. Some translators also chose to translate French instead of using footnotes.
kazinator 2y ago
Here is a nut: 糾す (tadasu) ascertain; confirm; verify; make sure of 糾う (azanau) twist (something)
- just-throwaway 2y ago
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anthk 2y ago
>Mottainai Que aproveche/aprovéchalo from Spanish. (May you take advantage/do benefit from something). Aprovechar it's the literal opposite of desperdiciar, to waste. >Exotic subject-object-verb Not for a Basque.
TheRealNGenius 2y ago
pretty big death note spoiler
Symmetry 2y ago
Nice article, but if I were writing it[1] I'd list having subjects, topics, and objects as first class nouns in sentences rather than just subjects and objects of sentences as a big fascinating difference from what I was used to[2]. And also the role of timing[3] in pronunciation with cases like Yuki being a common girl's name meaning "snow" and Yuuki being a less common boy's name meaning "courage" distinguished only by how long you hold the first vowel. [1] My Japanese is terrible and I couldn't come close to writing it, but lets leave that aside. [2] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Topic_and_comment https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Topic_and_comment [3] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mora_(linguistics)#Japanese https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mora_(linguistics)#Japanese
samus 2y ago
It's admittedly less common, but also in Chinese lots of characters have multiple pronunciations. Sometimes they are associated with different meanings. Even if the other pronunciation is just considered formal or poetic, it can carry a different shade of meaning.
999900000999 2y ago
What a great article. I've long since given up on trying to learn( Mandarin is slightly easier for me, while Korean is even harder) , but I'll always be fascinated by Japanese.
worldsoup 2y ago
Super interesting article, as a native english speaker who lived in Japan for many years and speak Japanese fluently, he pointed out a lot of things I always took for granted in Japanese (and never recognized as unique). One things I was hoping he would point out, and that I always found extremely unique in Japanese, was the giyongo (basically onomatopoeia). Japanese uses these extensively and the sounds can have extremely sensory driven meanings. They use these giyongo to describe physical textures (tsuru-tsuru is something smooth and slippery), hard to describe souns (pera pera is the sound of speaking a foreign language), flutently), actual sounds (tatata is the sound of fast running), a general feeling (bisho bisho is the sound of being soaked), specific actions (gussuri is the sound of being out cold), even specific emotions (zukizuki is the sound of extreme pain). There are hundreds if not thousands of these and I think they also make the language, as the author describes, 'rich and quirky and different'.
- latentsea 2y ago
  There are thousands at least. I recall seeing an entire dictionary of them once in the library at my university. To this day I still discover new ones that constantly amaze me someone was able to put a sound to it. I think my favorite to date is probably mozomozo. My wife used it to describe a baby flailing it's arms around. I was like ok... What do you mean? She repeated the action of flailing the arms around. I laughed. Oh the Japanese.
- thedailymail 2y ago
  Minor pedantry (sorry!), but it's giongo (擬音語) not giyongo. There's a related term gitaigo (擬態語）, both of which fall under the catgeorical giseigo (擬声語). All are generally translated as onomatopoeia in English. The basic distinction is that giongo are used to express sounds made by physical things, both living and inaminate, whereas gitaigo are used to express abstract effects, such as emotional states, energy levels, etc. The Japanese-language wikipedia page goes into it in more detail: https://ja.wikipedia.org/wiki/%E6%93%AC%E5%A3%B0%E8%AA%9E https://ja.wikipedia.org/wiki/%E6%93%AC%E5%A3%B0%E8%AA%9E
  - ternaryoperator 2y ago
sova 2y ago
As the creator of Japanese Complete I would like to mention on this article about Japanese that we're hard at work making a multiplayer version of our curriculum to add to the excitement of learning Japanese intuitively. I really appreciate discussions about the beauty of Japanese and its contextually-dependent vagueness, as it is a wholly new way of framing the world when the situation itself is a memetic moment of dynamism, where the ongoing vibrational nature of phenomena is highlighted constantly via active verb endings similar to how we use -"ing" in English. I must apologize (as would be custom in Japan) for the delay in offering our multiplayer version of our award-winning curriculum. I am looking forward to helping the world master Japanese, and get an insight into a new way of framing the world and our experience of it.
- deleted 2y ago
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shiomiru 2y ago
Good article, but misses one very interesting detail. E.g. in the example with 司る (tsukasadoru "be in charge"): the article says they "gave" the phrase a kanji. I would however assume that it happened the other way: the kanji was approximated with two Japanese words. What's the difference? Let's go back to when kanji was adopted. The article notes Japanese writers approximated sounds with Chinese kanji readings, but there's another overlooked part: they also approximated Chinese text with Japanese words. That is, traditionally they would often write in classical Chinese, but read it out loud in Japanese. Indeed, they developed a system[0] that let them retrofit an entire language, with a completely different sentence structure, phonetics, etc. into their own. Or, in short: they could read Chinese in Japanese. This is likely where 司る comes from; some classical text using 司 in a way that was at some point best approximated by the Japanese word tsukasadoru in that context. [0]: Example from https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Kanbun https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Kanbun (abridged): > 楚人有(下)鬻(二)盾與(一)(レ)矛者(上) > [...] the word 有 'existed' marked with 下 'bottom' is shifted to the location marked by 上 'top'. Likewise, the word 鬻 'sell' marked with 二 'two' is shifted to the location marked by 一 'one'. The レ 'reverse' mark indicates that the order of the adjacent characters must be reversed. > Following these kanbun instructions step by step transforms the sentence so it has the typical Japanese subject–object–verb argument order. > Next, Japanese function words and conjugations can be added with okurigana, [...] > The completed kundoku translation reads as a well-formed Japanese sentence with kun'yomi: > 楚（そ）人に盾と矛とを鬻（ひさ）ぐ者有り Obviously, the system comes with limitations; it's more of a system to analyze classical Chinese text than a way to magically translate it into Japanese. Still, I find it the most fascinating part of the language, because you can view it as a sort of "machine translation" from a millennium before computers existed, simply by abusing the fact that they used the same sort-of-semantic alphabet. This is also where the "many readings of a single word" property of kanji comes from. Modern Japanese writing is the fusion of the phonetic and semantic interpretation of kanji - kana being the simplification of phonetic forms, and kanji's weird readings being derived from kanbun-kundoku.
- kybernetikos 2y ago
  > That is, traditionally they would often write in classical Chinese, but read it out loud in Japanese. I seem to remember something similar from the Tarzan novel. He learns to read in English, but his first spoken language is French, so his understanding of how to make the words into sounds is all wrong.
hbn 2y ago
I get hung up when people say there are terms that are "untranslatable". What does that mean? Is it just a series of sounds that people use in a certain context to convey a certain meaning, but the greater phrase can't be broken down into individual words, tokens, or concepts? Do we have anything like that in English?
- Swizec 2y ago
  > Do we have anything like that in English? "You are shit" vs "You are the shit". Explaining "the shit" to someone who's fluent in English but not culturally fluent in American is almost impossible. There's a qualitative difference between "You are very good" or "You are the best" and "You are the shit". They're not exactly synonyms. Another good example: Dude or Guy as used in Californian.
  - hbn 2y ago
    I wouldn't really say that's untranslatable though. I feel like you could pretty easily translate something like "you are poop" into any language and explain that in the English phrase, adding "the" is modern cultural slang that means it's "the best" instead. Or you skip all the context and just say it means "you're great", very easy translation. "Eres el mejor" - I just translated it into Spanish
    - TillE 2y ago
      Every language is built on a mountain of cultural context and assumptions. That's the part which is impossible to translate. You can translate the words but you're missing layers upon layers of subtle meaning.
      - hbn 2y ago
        Perhaps I'm just taking the word "untranslatable" more literally than some, but I think if you can explain the surrounding cultural context, you've translated it. Different scenarios require different methods of translation, sometimes you'll want something literal, and sometimes you can just translate the intent behind the words. As long as you can do that, I would consider it "translatable".
RyEgswuCsn 2y ago
> Japanese has a lot of compound words of Chinese origin, where two or more kanji appear as a set. In the original Chinese language, a "word" mostly consists of a single character. Interestingly, many of the compound words commonly seen in modern Chinese were in fact coined by the Japanese scholars during their attempts to translate western writings around the 19th century and were later "imported" back into Chinese language. Interestingly, the two examples in the article, "art" (美术) and "science" (科学) are both of Japanese origin, though one can still tell whoever coined the terms chose the individual characters due to their meaning being relevant to the concepts the words are describing.
- bluquark 2y ago
  According to this paper https://www.lingref.com/cpp/decemb/5/paper1617.pdf https://www.lingref.com/cpp/decemb/5/paper1617.pdf the natural linguistic evolution towards compounds in Chinese was well under way by the time of Middle Chinese (~800CE). And most of the cultural exchange with Japan happened after that.
  - smallnamespace 2y ago
    That’s true, but many Japanese terms for describing the modern world were mass-imported into Chinese during the late Qing and Republican eras (think 1900-1930). The Chinese republicans looked towards Japan as a model for how to develop, and part of that was importing new lexicon wholesale, since Japanese scolars had already helpfully transliterated Western concepts into new compounds during the Meiji era.
    - qingcharles 2y ago
      And lets not forget the enormous number of English (and other) words imported into Japanese that look crazy to a non-Japanese speaker, but once you spell out the katakana you realize it is just English (e.g. ホテル / hoteru = hotel, シングルルーム / shingururūmu = single room)
bluquark 2y ago
One interesting thing about gikun is the widely different forms it can take according to the stylistic purposes of the text. - Most of the time it's simply a pragmatic way to introduce a clarification without breaking the flow of the text, essentially a more concise form of parenthetical or footnote. - In classical poetry it is used for a variety of effects, for example novel synecdoches. One side of the gikun might refer to a season, and the other side might refer to a key detail the poet idiosyncratically associates with that season. - But the contemporary Japanese learner usually notices them the most in fantasy/sci-fi manga and novels. In this genre it's used to introduce in-universe jargon while showing its meaning in parallel. At the extreme, it can allow writers to go over-the-top with how much special jargon the universe includes, without slowing down the pace of storytelling. (This can pose quite a challenge for translators!)
t3rra 2y ago
Kanji is believed to be introduced by Korea, and Katakana is originated from Korean Buddhism monks' scripting system for representing grammatical particle of Korean language in Korean Silla kingdom period. Please original writer, either don't say anything about history if you don't know actual history or do better research.
- _cs2017_ 2y ago
  Ah yes, katakana was invented by The Dear Leader Kim Jong Il. On behalf of the author, please accept the apology.
ThinkingGuy 2y ago
For an alternative viewpoint on the supposed “vagueness” of Japanese, I would recommend “Gone Fishin: New Angles on Perennial Problems,” by Jay Rubin, from the Power Japanese series. https://openlibrary.org/works/OL5609329W/Gone_Fishin%27 https://openlibrary.org/works/OL5609329W/Gone_Fishin%27
- emodendroket 2y ago
  Quick, amusing read and well worth the time.
- tkgally 2y ago
  I recommend that book, too. (I translated and wrote several books in the same series and knew the editor.) Claims that Japanese is inherently vague are often made by people who either don't understand the language fully yet, are frustrated at trying to translate expressions that have precise meanings in Japanese but no equivalents in another language, or are focusing on literary or creative language, which, yes, can be ambiguous and allusive. When necessary, Japanese can be as clear and precise as any other language. The design, manufacture, and operation of the Shinkansen, for example, have been implemented through millions of documents and conversations that were nearly all in Japanese. In sixty years of operation, the train system has never had a major accident. That would not be possible if the language were inherently vague.
bitcurious 2y ago
Interesting article. The history of the various scripts actually does have at least a limited parallel in the world - Ancient Egypt. >Although many people think of Egyptian hieroglyphs as logographic or pictographic, it actually combines symbols for entire words with symbols for individual sounds. That is, it is a system that is partly logographic and partly alphabetic. It can be called logophonetic. [0] This evolution continued for a while yet! The monumental hieroglyphs into a more easy to write cursive called "hieratic". The hieratic script further evolved into "demotic" - this was closer to a real alphabet, with directionality and ease of writing driving this change. The hieroglyphic roots are essentially lost at this point. Demotic then mixed with the greek alphabet by the Coptic community into the Coptic script! > Generally, Hieroglyphics were used for monumental inscriptions and decorative texts, and Hieratic was used for administrative texts which placed more importance in content than appearance, which were written by hand, and which needed to be written quickly. Demotic writing developed around 600 BC. It was derived from Hieratic writing, but developed into a highly cursive form so that the pictographic element of some symbols was lost. Although many single symbols were still used to write whole words or concepts, the symbol did not necessarily visually resemble the concept it represented. [1] Script comparison (see page 5): https://www.egyptologyforum.org/bbs/Stableford/Roberson,%20A_Very_Brief_Introduction_to_Hieratic.pdf https://www.egyptologyforum.org/bbs/Stableford/Roberson,%20A... Hieratic: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hieratic https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hieratic Demotic: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Demotic_(Egyptian) https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Demotic_(Egyptian) Coptic: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Coptic_script https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Coptic_script [0] https://web.mnstate.edu/houtsli/tesl551/Writing/page4.htm#:~:text=Although%20many%20people%20think%20of,It%20can%20be%20called%20logophonetic https://web.mnstate.edu/houtsli/tesl551/Writing/page4.htm#:~.... [1] https://scriptsource.org/cms/scripts/page.php?item_id=entry_detail&uid=yhvayd2uk7 https://scriptsource.org/cms/scripts/page.php?item_id=entry_...
- zilti 2y ago
  >Demotic then mixed with the greek alphabet by the Coptic community into the Coptic script! At that point, it already was a looong time since the greek alphabet evolved - via a few other cultures in between - from hieroglyphs, so it went back to egypt the long way around
jwrallie 2y ago
One interesting thing I observed is that many talk shows will have something akin to subtitles to things being said in order to bring the power of quickly getting the meaning from Kanji to the spoken language. Once you understand the meaning of some Kanji, turning on subtitles feels like a superpower on understanding what is going on even for people still learning the language.
SuperNinKenDo 2y ago
Wonderful article. The author really nailed it. Reminded me why this stuff is so interesting, and reminded me to not be so frustrated with the difficulty it can pose sometimes. It really is one of the reasons I fell in love with written Japanese in the first place, and I should remember that.

351 points by mrcgnc 2y ago

I really liked this article. I really love the examples given. The part about names and pronunciation, and the manga examples actually reminded me of a anime scene that appears confusing at first. In the scene, there’s a character that receives a business card from another and he ends up pronouncing his name incorrectly.[1] I guess it does seem weird that a written name can be mispronounced, but isn’t the same kind of phenomenon as when you have an artificial English word like “ghoti” which is meant to be pronounced as “fish”? [1]: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=b4dysjr5-FE https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=b4dysjr5-FE

Aeolun 2y ago

Some people think things are more fun if they are more complicated. The only thing I want to do is learn the damn language already, but study is just no substitute for actual usage with Japanese (like author says, since the pronounciation is often 10x simpler than figuring out all the different readings).

anigbrowl 2y ago

By the way, Japanese with Anime (cited in the article) is an absolutely great resource for digging into the fine details of language and language use, without the pomposity that often infects technical discussion coughStackExchangecough* https://www.japanesewithanime.com https://www.japanesewithanime.com

danielscrubs 2y ago

Most surprising for me is the humor part. Let a normal everyday Japanese person watch ANY of the greatest US comedians of all time (translated or not) and they just won’t find it funny. Now use the techniques in the article with ambiguous meanings and they will be rolling on the floor laughing. This works in the reverse too, westerners won’t find everyday Japanese comedians funny (it is pretty much untranslatable though).

autoexec 2y ago
I wonder how much grammar interferes with comedy. It seems like there would be certain jokes which would be ruined depending on how a sentence is structured. Revealing a surprising punchline before the set up for example.

achr 2y ago

Another interesting "anomaly" is that the same concept can be expressed both with 漢語 (kango: Chinese-origin vocabulary) and 和語 (wago: Japanese-origin vocabulary). Kango is mostly nouns but one can easily add する (to do) and turn a noun into a verb. So, for example, if one wants to say "to compare" there's both kango version: 比較する (hikaku suru) and wago version: 比べる (kuraberu). Usually kango sounds a little bit more formal and used in writing more often but plenty of them are also used in casual contexts. However, even though they often share a common character, the reading is different (onyomi for kango and kunyomi for wago). Non-native speakers need to basically learn both versions separately and one cannot easily deduce one from another (which is the case for example in English: comparison - to compare; or Polish: porównanie - porównać).

minmax2020 2y ago

I'm a Korean currently learning Japanese, and while I do understand that this mash of Chinese characters and kana writing system can be appreciated for its exoticness, as a learner I can't help but feel it's more of a hassle resulting from it being a not yet fully optimized writing system. (I mean, do we really need both hiragana and katakana?) I'm definitely not claiming that Korean is a more "optimized" language overall, but at least when it comes to the writing system, we had exactly the same problem as the Japanese (if you look at Korean newspapers just a few decades ago they are littered with Chinese characters), and at some point we fully ditched Chinese characters and have no problem going on with our lives. In fact, it made our lives easier in many cases, especially in keyboard typing. As a side note, we obviously have some side effects from switching to entirely phonetic alphabet system. For example, the words "tea" and "car" have the same pronunciation (차=cha) and so they are indistinguishable in writing, but it wasn't the case when Chinese characters were used (茶/車). I'm not sure how this side effect propagates into some sort of sociolinguistic phenomenon, but at least for average people it doesn't seem to have much significance.

StefanBatory 2y ago
I began studying Korean recently for fun because of video games influence (I'm huge Project Moon fan and then I got into Korean literature). When I saw things like ㄱ for k/g or ㅏ for i I was in awe, like that's is so damn clever.
shiroiushi 2y ago
>I mean, do we really need both hiragana and katakana? It is pretty redundant, but it's helpful sometimes: foreign loanwords (esp. from English these days) are almost exclusively written in katakana, so they stand out. Also, having some stuff in katakana and some in hiragana helps to distinguish the different words, since Japanese doesn't use spaces. >For example, the words "tea" and "car" have the same pronunciation (차=cha) and so they are indistinguishable in writing, but it wasn't the case when Chinese characters were used (茶/車) 1. I'm surprised "car" isn't called "sha" instead (as it is in the onyomi reading of 車 in Japanese, which was borrowed from Chinese). 2. This would be a good place to borrow from Japanese: the kinyomi (stand-alone word) pronunciation is "kuruma", which probably won't be confused with anything in Korean. :-) As for Korean ditching Chinese characters, it seems like Japanese is doing that too, just very very slowly. There are many words that have kanji versions that no one uses any more, preferring hiragana instead. And there's a lot of stuff being borrowed from English. For instance, 切符 (kippu) is the normal Japanese word for "ticket", but these days, everyone's calling it "チケット" (chiketto) which is borrowed from English.

pyinstallwoes 2y ago

Has anyone looked into Woshite?

space_oddity 2y ago

Off topic. I'm learning Korean and I am really fascinated by the fact that Korean language and communication are deeply intertwined with Korean culture

shiroiushi 2y ago
Why is that fascinating? This is the case for every language! Every language is deeply intertwined with the culture that created that language, and every language changes over time as the culture that uses it changes.

allen_berg 2y ago

Cool stuff but I found hard to have to waddle through all the cutesy story telling (techie? really?) to get to the point. Poetic wordplay based on meaning vs sound is quite interesting but not that deep.

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rauljordan2020 2y ago

As someone who speaks Chinese and is learning Japanese, I have been so surprised at just how incredibly complicated and obtuse Japanese is. Chinese (Cantonese) 7-9 tones, loads of characters, but after memorizing the first 2000-3000, you pick up on all the radicals, patterns, and meanings which help you fill in the gaps. Grammar is barebones: I only had to learn 5 to 10 different grammar rules for Chinese that I recall, and basically everything else is incredibly easy. Whereas in Japanese, I am learning 2-3 grammar rules per LESSON. Having each character pronounced a single way in Chinese is also super easy, and communication is even more direct than English. With Japanese, the cultural context, the phrasing, the end particles, and subtle vocab changes the meaning significantly. I think for me, it took 5 years to reach fluency in Chinese but I feel that even after 10 years I will barely reach conversational fluency in Japanese. It just feels like an inefficient language for communication. Why does it have to be so complicated?

huytersd 2y ago
Memorizing 3000 characters seems impossible. I know I would never be able to do it.
- StefanBatory 2y ago
  How about memorizing 20 characters over 150 days, though? Or 10 over 300? ;) And there's a pattern to them too in the end.
- qingcharles 2y ago
  The way I approached it: if every Japanese person can manage it, I can manage it too.
kingkawn 2y ago
Guess they weren’t thinking of you when they made it
nonrandomstring 2y ago
> Why does it have to be so complicated? I know nothing about Japanese, or Chinese. (Edit: actually that's not true, I learned this today [0]) Maybe a little about language in general from studying linguistics (for compilers), but I think the answer to your question is; Because it is able to express things that we can't in English. That is beautiful, necessary and precious. The fact that groups of people exist in the world who can have whole ideas and worldviews that we barely conceive or express at all, seems so valuable. [0] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=40119457 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=40119457

komali2 2y ago

I learned both Japanese and Mandarin over the last 15 years and I gotta say, this was an interesting article, but I'm mildly disappointed. > In particular, a whole realm of consciousness exists in the sphere of Japanese speakers that's perhaps truly unique in the world, more so than the sushi and the nature and decorum. It even allows for new literary techniques that are unimaginable in any other language. I was expecting some kind of insight into the super complex multitude of ways to say something as simple as "thank you" in Japanese, complex not only today but also historically. The linguistics tie into socioeconomics, class, and history, in a really fascinating way. A highly educated person has, in my opinion, a far greater "resolution" with Japanese than with English, in terms of what they can convey with a simple "thank you." Though I think English has the best "resolution" in most cases out of the three languages. It's extraordinarily difficult in Mandarin (especially if you aren't fluent and educated on top of that) to for example speak subtle differences such as "how would you feel about helping John with the dishes tonight?" vs "can you help John with the dishes tonight?" vs "It would mean a lot to me if you could help John with the dishes tonight" vs "I think John would appreciate if you helped him with the dishes tonight" vs "I need you to help john with the dishes tonight." Especially in sales and marketing, I really want that kind of granular resolution in Mandarin. It's a little possible of course, but you'll simply lose your audience. 99.99% of the time Mandarin speakers will expect to hear "tonight can you please help me with the dishes?" The notes about combining kanji and root characters to construct larger complex characters e.g. cousins male/female is interesting, but really in the brain of a native reader it just doesn't work like that, you simply memorize the meaning and move on. It takes the same sort of education to learn latin roots and the attention to notice them in English, as it does in Japanese / Mandarin.

spidersouris 2y ago
So does that mean Mandarin can be considered as more "straight to the point" and as not featuring a system of "gradual politeness" compared to other languages? Does that also mean that Mandarin speakers will express themselves more or less the same regardless of the social status of the person they're talking to? It's funny because I've had the opportunity to speak with a few Mandarin speakers, and sometimes when they were asking things in English, I felt something quite different. I wouldn't say that they were not polite, because that was not the case in their attitude, but the way they formulated their request was rather direct and as if the result of the request was a given.

Jun8 2y ago

Interesting and well-illustrated article. The claim that Japanese (or any other language) totally unique is a romantic one, showing the ignorance of the author with the very wide variety of languages and writing systems (the effect go writing system on language is not covered a lot in Linguistics, whose focus is the spoken language). For example, they mention furigana, characters that aid in reading Kanji characters (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Furigana https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Furigana). There are many examples of similar use in the languages, one that I'm familiar with is the use of determinatives in Ancient Egypt (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Determinative https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Determinative). Their use is similar to radicals in Mandarin, which is to provide additional semantic clarification. If you want phonetic clarification, examples are even more numerous, e.g. the use of shaddah in Arabic (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Shaddah https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Shaddah). The idea expressed in the "Dissociation from Birth" section sounds interesting until you learn that all alphabetic systems arose from a similar process, e.g. aleph was a drawing of an ox's head, etc. The part that I find really interesting about Japanese is it's well-developed system of honorifics (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Honorific_speech_in_Japanese https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Honorific_speech_in_Japanese).

bradrn 2y ago
> the effect go writing system on language is not covered a lot in Linguistics, whose focus is the spoken language I’d frame this a little differently: the vast majority of languages in the world are not regularly written, so linguists must focus on the spoken language. For languages which are written more often, linguists can and do focus on the relationship between the written and the spoken language.
- keiferski 2y ago
  Philology tends to be more focused on texts than spoken languages, too.
- Jun8 2y ago
  That's correct. A fascinating topic is how the written representation shapes the user's language, and, by association, their thinking - a written word version of teh Sapir-Whorf Hypothesis if you will. For example, for the aliens in the (story and) movie Arrival, was their superior all-temporal thinking capability due to their language, or their interesting written form? Interesting personal anecdote: My son is learning French in school, he's native in both English and Turkish, but not very good with Turkish spelling and does not use it often. I've seen him struggle with memorizing French words and their pronunciation, because he doesn't have an alternative phonetic representation of them (he doesn't know IPA, naturally :-). But Turkish spelling is (almost 100%) phonetic and I remembered that's how I memorized English when I was kid, I would think about their pronunciation in Turkish! E.g. cheese would be "çiyz".

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huhtenberg 2y ago

Re: Anomaly 6 - Providing two versions of the same sentence bit is not that uncommon in non-Japanese literature as well. For example, War and Peace in its original (Russian) language is sprinkled with French words and phrases, all duly translated via footnotes. This might not be as user-friendly as gikun as it requires glancing down and up the page a lot, but the idea is the same. Even in spoken language mixing in foreign words often helps conveying nuances of what's being said. Some words don't exist in some languages or require longer phrasing or don't mean exactly that, etc. This sort of thing a very common in multi-lingual families. So that "Anomaly 6" is not that much of an anomaly if you think about it. PS. It was a good read regardless.

senkora 2y ago
> For example, War and Peace in its original (Russian) language is sprinkled with French words and phrases, all duly translated via footnotes Amusingly, my English edition kept the French and didn't have footnotes. I read it as a kid and had no hope of understanding the French so I just skipped over it whenever it came up.
basscomm 2y ago
>Even in spoken language mixing in foreign words often helps conveying nuances of what's being said. Some words don't exist in some languages or require longer phrasing or don't mean exactly that, etc. This sort of thing a very common in multi-lingual families. So, in other words, adding in foreign words can add some je ne sais quoi
ogurechny 2y ago
“War and Peace” has more complex history. First revision had nobles speaking French when suitable, because “everyone” could still speak some French in Tolstoy's times (just like people in IT all across the world link to original English documentation every day without even thinking about it). Then it was found that “everyone” meant “well-educated nobles like Tolstoy”. For second revision, Tolstoy rewrote all French utterances into Russian (and moved most of philosophical sections to dedicated postscripts). Then it was reverted to original form (with later corrections), but with translations of French text in footnotes. Second revision was printed in “cheap” editions, third revision was used in higher quality ones. Later Soviet prints follow Collected Works version based on French-enabled revision (and thorough comparison of printed editions and manuscripts). Depending on the age of your translation and its source, you may find any of those. Some translators also chose to translate French instead of using footnotes.

kazinator 2y ago

Here is a nut: 糾す (tadasu) ascertain; confirm; verify; make sure of 糾う (azanau) twist (something)

just-throwaway 2y ago
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anthk 2y ago

>Mottainai Que aproveche/aprovéchalo from Spanish. (May you take advantage/do benefit from something). Aprovechar it's the literal opposite of desperdiciar, to waste. >Exotic subject-object-verb Not for a Basque.

TheRealNGenius 2y ago

pretty big death note spoiler

Symmetry 2y ago

Nice article, but if I were writing it[1] I'd list having subjects, topics, and objects as first class nouns in sentences rather than just subjects and objects of sentences as a big fascinating difference from what I was used to[2]. And also the role of timing[3] in pronunciation with cases like Yuki being a common girl's name meaning "snow" and Yuuki being a less common boy's name meaning "courage" distinguished only by how long you hold the first vowel. [1] My Japanese is terrible and I couldn't come close to writing it, but lets leave that aside. [2] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Topic_and_comment https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Topic_and_comment [3] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mora_(linguistics)#Japanese https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mora_(linguistics)#Japanese

samus 2y ago

It's admittedly less common, but also in Chinese lots of characters have multiple pronunciations. Sometimes they are associated with different meanings. Even if the other pronunciation is just considered formal or poetic, it can carry a different shade of meaning.

999900000999 2y ago

What a great article. I've long since given up on trying to learn( Mandarin is slightly easier for me, while Korean is even harder) , but I'll always be fascinated by Japanese.

worldsoup 2y ago

Super interesting article, as a native english speaker who lived in Japan for many years and speak Japanese fluently, he pointed out a lot of things I always took for granted in Japanese (and never recognized as unique). One things I was hoping he would point out, and that I always found extremely unique in Japanese, was the giyongo (basically onomatopoeia). Japanese uses these extensively and the sounds can have extremely sensory driven meanings. They use these giyongo to describe physical textures (tsuru-tsuru is something smooth and slippery), hard to describe souns (pera pera is the sound of speaking a foreign language), flutently), actual sounds (tatata is the sound of fast running), a general feeling (bisho bisho is the sound of being soaked), specific actions (gussuri is the sound of being out cold), even specific emotions (zukizuki is the sound of extreme pain). There are hundreds if not thousands of these and I think they also make the language, as the author describes, 'rich and quirky and different'.

latentsea 2y ago
There are thousands at least. I recall seeing an entire dictionary of them once in the library at my university. To this day I still discover new ones that constantly amaze me someone was able to put a sound to it. I think my favorite to date is probably mozomozo. My wife used it to describe a baby flailing it's arms around. I was like ok... What do you mean? She repeated the action of flailing the arms around. I laughed. Oh the Japanese.
thedailymail 2y ago
Minor pedantry (sorry!), but it's giongo (擬音語) not giyongo. There's a related term gitaigo (擬態語）, both of which fall under the catgeorical giseigo (擬声語). All are generally translated as onomatopoeia in English. The basic distinction is that giongo are used to express sounds made by physical things, both living and inaminate, whereas gitaigo are used to express abstract effects, such as emotional states, energy levels, etc. The Japanese-language wikipedia page goes into it in more detail: https://ja.wikipedia.org/wiki/%E6%93%AC%E5%A3%B0%E8%AA%9E https://ja.wikipedia.org/wiki/%E6%93%AC%E5%A3%B0%E8%AA%9E
- ternaryoperator 2y ago

sova 2y ago

As the creator of Japanese Complete I would like to mention on this article about Japanese that we're hard at work making a multiplayer version of our curriculum to add to the excitement of learning Japanese intuitively. I really appreciate discussions about the beauty of Japanese and its contextually-dependent vagueness, as it is a wholly new way of framing the world when the situation itself is a memetic moment of dynamism, where the ongoing vibrational nature of phenomena is highlighted constantly via active verb endings similar to how we use -"ing" in English. I must apologize (as would be custom in Japan) for the delay in offering our multiplayer version of our award-winning curriculum. I am looking forward to helping the world master Japanese, and get an insight into a new way of framing the world and our experience of it.

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shiomiru 2y ago

Good article, but misses one very interesting detail. E.g. in the example with 司る (tsukasadoru "be in charge"): the article says they "gave" the phrase a kanji. I would however assume that it happened the other way: the kanji was approximated with two Japanese words. What's the difference? Let's go back to when kanji was adopted. The article notes Japanese writers approximated sounds with Chinese kanji readings, but there's another overlooked part: they also approximated Chinese text with Japanese words. That is, traditionally they would often write in classical Chinese, but read it out loud in Japanese. Indeed, they developed a system[0] that let them retrofit an entire language, with a completely different sentence structure, phonetics, etc. into their own. Or, in short: they could read Chinese in Japanese. This is likely where 司る comes from; some classical text using 司 in a way that was at some point best approximated by the Japanese word tsukasadoru in that context. [0]: Example from https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Kanbun https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Kanbun (abridged): > 楚人有(下)鬻(二)盾與(一)(レ)矛者(上) > [...] the word 有 'existed' marked with 下 'bottom' is shifted to the location marked by 上 'top'. Likewise, the word 鬻 'sell' marked with 二 'two' is shifted to the location marked by 一 'one'. The レ 'reverse' mark indicates that the order of the adjacent characters must be reversed. > Following these kanbun instructions step by step transforms the sentence so it has the typical Japanese subject–object–verb argument order. > Next, Japanese function words and conjugations can be added with okurigana, [...] > The completed kundoku translation reads as a well-formed Japanese sentence with kun'yomi: > 楚（そ）人に盾と矛とを鬻（ひさ）ぐ者有り Obviously, the system comes with limitations; it's more of a system to analyze classical Chinese text than a way to magically translate it into Japanese. Still, I find it the most fascinating part of the language, because you can view it as a sort of "machine translation" from a millennium before computers existed, simply by abusing the fact that they used the same sort-of-semantic alphabet. This is also where the "many readings of a single word" property of kanji comes from. Modern Japanese writing is the fusion of the phonetic and semantic interpretation of kanji - kana being the simplification of phonetic forms, and kanji's weird readings being derived from kanbun-kundoku.

kybernetikos 2y ago
> That is, traditionally they would often write in classical Chinese, but read it out loud in Japanese. I seem to remember something similar from the Tarzan novel. He learns to read in English, but his first spoken language is French, so his understanding of how to make the words into sounds is all wrong.

hbn 2y ago

I get hung up when people say there are terms that are "untranslatable". What does that mean? Is it just a series of sounds that people use in a certain context to convey a certain meaning, but the greater phrase can't be broken down into individual words, tokens, or concepts? Do we have anything like that in English?

Swizec 2y ago
> Do we have anything like that in English? "You are shit" vs "You are the shit". Explaining "the shit" to someone who's fluent in English but not culturally fluent in American is almost impossible. There's a qualitative difference between "You are very good" or "You are the best" and "You are the shit". They're not exactly synonyms. Another good example: Dude or Guy as used in Californian.
- hbn 2y ago
  I wouldn't really say that's untranslatable though. I feel like you could pretty easily translate something like "you are poop" into any language and explain that in the English phrase, adding "the" is modern cultural slang that means it's "the best" instead. Or you skip all the context and just say it means "you're great", very easy translation. "Eres el mejor" - I just translated it into Spanish
  - TillE 2y ago
    Every language is built on a mountain of cultural context and assumptions. That's the part which is impossible to translate. You can translate the words but you're missing layers upon layers of subtle meaning.
    - hbn 2y ago
      Perhaps I'm just taking the word "untranslatable" more literally than some, but I think if you can explain the surrounding cultural context, you've translated it. Different scenarios require different methods of translation, sometimes you'll want something literal, and sometimes you can just translate the intent behind the words. As long as you can do that, I would consider it "translatable".

RyEgswuCsn 2y ago

> Japanese has a lot of compound words of Chinese origin, where two or more kanji appear as a set. In the original Chinese language, a "word" mostly consists of a single character. Interestingly, many of the compound words commonly seen in modern Chinese were in fact coined by the Japanese scholars during their attempts to translate western writings around the 19th century and were later "imported" back into Chinese language. Interestingly, the two examples in the article, "art" (美术) and "science" (科学) are both of Japanese origin, though one can still tell whoever coined the terms chose the individual characters due to their meaning being relevant to the concepts the words are describing.

bluquark 2y ago
According to this paper https://www.lingref.com/cpp/decemb/5/paper1617.pdf https://www.lingref.com/cpp/decemb/5/paper1617.pdf the natural linguistic evolution towards compounds in Chinese was well under way by the time of Middle Chinese (~800CE). And most of the cultural exchange with Japan happened after that.
- smallnamespace 2y ago
  That’s true, but many Japanese terms for describing the modern world were mass-imported into Chinese during the late Qing and Republican eras (think 1900-1930). The Chinese republicans looked towards Japan as a model for how to develop, and part of that was importing new lexicon wholesale, since Japanese scolars had already helpfully transliterated Western concepts into new compounds during the Meiji era.
  - qingcharles 2y ago
    And lets not forget the enormous number of English (and other) words imported into Japanese that look crazy to a non-Japanese speaker, but once you spell out the katakana you realize it is just English (e.g. ホテル / hoteru = hotel, シングルルーム / shingururūmu = single room)

bluquark 2y ago

One interesting thing about gikun is the widely different forms it can take according to the stylistic purposes of the text. - Most of the time it's simply a pragmatic way to introduce a clarification without breaking the flow of the text, essentially a more concise form of parenthetical or footnote. - In classical poetry it is used for a variety of effects, for example novel synecdoches. One side of the gikun might refer to a season, and the other side might refer to a key detail the poet idiosyncratically associates with that season. - But the contemporary Japanese learner usually notices them the most in fantasy/sci-fi manga and novels. In this genre it's used to introduce in-universe jargon while showing its meaning in parallel. At the extreme, it can allow writers to go over-the-top with how much special jargon the universe includes, without slowing down the pace of storytelling. (This can pose quite a challenge for translators!)

t3rra 2y ago

Kanji is believed to be introduced by Korea, and Katakana is originated from Korean Buddhism monks' scripting system for representing grammatical particle of Korean language in Korean Silla kingdom period. Please original writer, either don't say anything about history if you don't know actual history or do better research.

_cs2017_ 2y ago
Ah yes, katakana was invented by The Dear Leader Kim Jong Il. On behalf of the author, please accept the apology.

ThinkingGuy 2y ago

For an alternative viewpoint on the supposed “vagueness” of Japanese, I would recommend “Gone Fishin: New Angles on Perennial Problems,” by Jay Rubin, from the Power Japanese series. https://openlibrary.org/works/OL5609329W/Gone_Fishin%27 https://openlibrary.org/works/OL5609329W/Gone_Fishin%27

emodendroket 2y ago
Quick, amusing read and well worth the time.
tkgally 2y ago
I recommend that book, too. (I translated and wrote several books in the same series and knew the editor.) Claims that Japanese is inherently vague are often made by people who either don't understand the language fully yet, are frustrated at trying to translate expressions that have precise meanings in Japanese but no equivalents in another language, or are focusing on literary or creative language, which, yes, can be ambiguous and allusive. When necessary, Japanese can be as clear and precise as any other language. The design, manufacture, and operation of the Shinkansen, for example, have been implemented through millions of documents and conversations that were nearly all in Japanese. In sixty years of operation, the train system has never had a major accident. That would not be possible if the language were inherently vague.

bitcurious 2y ago

Interesting article. The history of the various scripts actually does have at least a limited parallel in the world - Ancient Egypt. >Although many people think of Egyptian hieroglyphs as logographic or pictographic, it actually combines symbols for entire words with symbols for individual sounds. That is, it is a system that is partly logographic and partly alphabetic. It can be called logophonetic. [0] This evolution continued for a while yet! The monumental hieroglyphs into a more easy to write cursive called "hieratic". The hieratic script further evolved into "demotic" - this was closer to a real alphabet, with directionality and ease of writing driving this change. The hieroglyphic roots are essentially lost at this point. Demotic then mixed with the greek alphabet by the Coptic community into the Coptic script! > Generally, Hieroglyphics were used for monumental inscriptions and decorative texts, and Hieratic was used for administrative texts which placed more importance in content than appearance, which were written by hand, and which needed to be written quickly. Demotic writing developed around 600 BC. It was derived from Hieratic writing, but developed into a highly cursive form so that the pictographic element of some symbols was lost. Although many single symbols were still used to write whole words or concepts, the symbol did not necessarily visually resemble the concept it represented. [1] Script comparison (see page 5): https://www.egyptologyforum.org/bbs/Stableford/Roberson,%20A_Very_Brief_Introduction_to_Hieratic.pdf https://www.egyptologyforum.org/bbs/Stableford/Roberson,%20A... Hieratic: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hieratic https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hieratic Demotic: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Demotic_(Egyptian) https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Demotic_(Egyptian) Coptic: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Coptic_script https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Coptic_script [0] https://web.mnstate.edu/houtsli/tesl551/Writing/page4.htm#:~:text=Although%20many%20people%20think%20of,It%20can%20be%20called%20logophonetic https://web.mnstate.edu/houtsli/tesl551/Writing/page4.htm#:~.... [1] https://scriptsource.org/cms/scripts/page.php?item_id=entry_detail&uid=yhvayd2uk7 https://scriptsource.org/cms/scripts/page.php?item_id=entry_...

zilti 2y ago
>Demotic then mixed with the greek alphabet by the Coptic community into the Coptic script! At that point, it already was a looong time since the greek alphabet evolved - via a few other cultures in between - from hieroglyphs, so it went back to egypt the long way around

jwrallie 2y ago

One interesting thing I observed is that many talk shows will have something akin to subtitles to things being said in order to bring the power of quickly getting the meaning from Kanji to the spoken language. Once you understand the meaning of some Kanji, turning on subtitles feels like a superpower on understanding what is going on even for people still learning the language.

SuperNinKenDo 2y ago

Wonderful article. The author really nailed it. Reminded me why this stuff is so interesting, and reminded me to not be so frustrated with the difficulty it can pose sometimes. It really is one of the reasons I fell in love with written Japanese in the first place, and I should remember that.