Show > 4 JAPANS LANGUAGE Obstacles to its Acquirement by European Travelers The Japanese alphabet or more pro perly sillabanes consists of about forty eight characters and these by certain side marks may have the consonant sound of the syllable changed as ra becomes ta or da Thus within certain limits the characters may be made to represent quite a variety of sounds the base or vowel always remaining remain-ing the same This inevitably leads to the repetition of words having different significations so long as the svllabaries are of such limited number In short the pure Japanese is midway between the phonic method more or less perfectly developed in the alphabet of western nations and the ideographic system prevalent in China The word wa represents five or six different nouns in itself and many more in its compounds The word It hi represents a dozen or more objects and the word ku nearly as many Thus difficulty sometimes arises in trying to represent ones ideas especially if he has a limited vocabulary On the morning of my arrival at Yok < > hama I heard a man speak to a Chinese servant in English German Japanese and Chinese all in the same breath Thus arIses a mongrel language which defies all rules of grammar rhetoric or logIC There are several causes at work to prevent the foreigner acquiring the language of the land anguage First there are many styles of speech depending for their application upon the rank or condi tion of the person speaking or the one ad dressed To start with there is a chil drens language This is not the mere ootseytootsey of the fond American mother but is a real variation of the vernacular Second there is a house hold language as distinguished from that of the street or the rostrum There is a form of expression appropriate in addressing ad-dressing superiors and another in speaking speak-ing to inferiors The changes in the forms of address are not always accomplished accom-plished by prefixes and suffixes but by he use of an entirely different expression expres-sion This is particularly exasperating to the learner for when he by patient labor imagines himself the master of a thought in the proper language he may insult a high rank personage by using coolie language lan-guage In speaking to a highrank person per-son it becomes necessary to use many honorfic particles sometimes almost hiding the main word which in itself is very familiar Thus one always feels a degree of uncertainty in attacking a purely vernacular expression The stan dard test is probably the language of upper classes in the capital I am told that in some of the provinces the spoken language differs considerably from this standard Hence travelers in remote country districts find a little difficulty in making their wants known This difference differ-ence seems almost entirely one of articu lation the written words being the same When I first arrived in the country I stopped at an English hotel where I supposed sup-posed we would have servants who could speak English Early in the morning ass as-s the custom of the country the servant comes gently to the room bringing toast and tea The partner of my joys and sor rows who was en deshabille plunged beneath be-neath the bed clothes with a smothered scream I turned to my saffron friend and asked him the time of day He looked puzzled and seizing my shoes carried them below for polishing When he returned I repeated question when he dodged out and soon returned with some glasses of water I was about to interrogate terrogate further concerning the flight of time when a large clock in the vicinity struck the hour of 7 thus relieving both parties Yes the Japanese spoken colloquially is difficult but the written language is stupefying There are some several hands varying from the rigid mathematical mathe-matical square hand all the way to the grass hand which looks like a tangled skein of yarn done in ink The strokes follow a certain order but it is very difficult diffi-cult to detect it The writing is done with a very small brush instead of a pen and the syllables are connected in perfectly fectly bewildering continuous strokes The ordinary character on a tea box are very clear and intelligible compared with this There are very few foreigners who ever thoroughly master this written language guage even though they become good students in the colloquial With all its disadvantages the pure Japanese may be fairly mastered but there are brought into the account a large number of Chinese ideographs It is said that the Chinese characters have been used here to a greater or less extent for 1500 years Certain it is that these characters are the very bane of a foreigners eigners existence They are as arbitrary as anything can well be Some distinguished distin-guished scholars have tried to discover some basis of analysis some key to un lock the mysterybut after arduous study it has turned out that the key is bout as intricate as the lock itself Every page of the daily newspaper contains these stumbling blocks to civilization It requires the mastery of from G000 to 5000 characters in order to read current affairs and to delve in the hidden mines of ancient history philosophy and myth logy requires about 25000 to 30000 characters Bear in mind that each ones one-s arbitrary and has no relation in sight sound or sense with the idea for which it stands and you have before you some notion of the task set before the thorough Oriental scholar The Japanese and Chinese have been obliged to learn those senseless characters for the past 2500 years Is it any wonder that Japanese boys should be found deficient in reasoning reason-ing powers |