SAY ‘YES’, MEAN ‘NO’

Nelson Evening Mail, Volume 80, 14 April 1945, Page 6

SAY ‘YES’, MEAN ‘NO’

“HONOURABLE JAPS” LANGUAGE PECULIARITIES Japanese diplomats had one advantage over the rest of the world at a time when there was Japanese diplomacy with the rest of the world. They could answer “yes” to a question and really mean “no,” writes L. V. Kepcrt, in the “Sydney Morning Herald.” That is one of the oddities with which western students have had to grapple since the Western world started furiously studying the Japanese language, both as a means of winning the war against Japan and of re-establishing relations afterwards. We started off under a handicap. English is an irregular and difficult enough language. Japanese tops even English in difficulty. So it has been much simpler in the past to let the Japanese learn English. That was why the outbreak of the Pacific war found the United Nations desperately short of Japanese interpreters. The “yes-no” answer is just a minor oddity among the many strangeriesses of this language. It is simply the Japanese mind demanding a logical answer to a negative question. To the question, “Aren’t you feeling well?” the answer is “Yes—l am not feeling well”; or “No,” meaning “the suggestion in your mind is not correct; I am feeling well.” The old refrain of “Yes, we have no bananas” is a perfect guide. BORROWED FROM CHINESE The student finds a measure of warmth as he stumbles on an odd English word or two that the Japanese have assimilated. In Japan a “mobo” (“modern boy”) can wear a “waishatsu (“white shirt”—except that the “white” has lost its meaning and can be blue or pink), and take his “moga” (modern girl”) to eat “aisukurimu” (“ice cream”) or drink “biru” (“beer”). But the bulk of Japanese vocabulary has been borrowed from the Chinese. Words poured in from China in thousands, both to make up for the inadequate native vocabulary and to replace the native words through a common form of linguistic snobbery. 'Ehe ordinary Japanese syllable is a vowel alone, or consonant plus vowel. Only one consonant, “n” can be used to close a syllable, and certain Western consonants, like English “1” and “v” do not exist at all. So that, faced with the need of importing names for modern inventions, like the railway and electricity, the Japanese would have had to grapple with something like “reiruei” and “erekkuchirishichi.” Instead they took the more poetic Chinese forms of “tetsudo” (“iron road”) and “denki” ("lightning spirit”). Unlike the simple Chinese structure, the Japanese language is full of grammatical inflexions. Most of the grammatical forms are regular, but there are plenty of those forms to befog the beginner. He finds adjectives and adverbs widely inflected for different uses. Then after he has learned four different forms of the present tense of the verb and six of the imperative mood, he has to tackle new sorts of tenses like the desiderative, and the probable past, to express those indefinite feelings in which the Japanese revel. (Stephen Leacock says we come close to it in English with the form that future philologists will decorate with the name of the “past dubitative” and conjugate, “I sorta-thought, you sorta-thought, I sorta-didn’t-think,” and so on.) BUGBEAR FOR FOREIGNERS A sentence thus becomes strung out of a few base words plus a multitude of inflectional syllables and particles. The foreigner finds as a rule that when he gets one word wrong or out of place the whole sentence shuffles itself around. The American author, St. Clair McKelway, says from his experience in learning Japanese that he could get a word in the wrong place and find the sentence just gone to pieces and taking on new life. All the words revise themselves—nouns turn into adjectives and so on, and other words disappear altogether. He claims that by one wrong affix his beautifully-fra-med thought. “What an ancient temple bell you are ringing there beside the pond” bpcame “Dogs, keep barking until you have put our mother under water”—but then, as a humorous writer, he is allowed some exaggeration. One bugbear for the foreigner is the affix used for different classes of objects when they are being enumerated. Ther# are three different sets of numerals—more than enough. But there are also 78 auxiliaries to be added to the numeral, depending on the type of object listed. The Chinese use these “classifiers.” That is whv pid-

gin-English says “one piece boy” instead of “one boy.” We use them in English occasionally, as “two head of cattle,” “five sail of ships.” In Japanese, however, not only are there many more of them, but they are obligatory. “Five ships” without the classifier would not only be incorrect. It would be just unintelligible. SOME PITFALLS So there is a classifier for plays and songs, and another for acts and scenes of a play, one for doses of medicine, one for cylindrical objects, one for birds and hares, and one to cover “baskets, candles, forks, guns knives, razors, scissors, and sticks of Indian ink.” Occasionally they become delightfully irregular. The classifier for newspaper is “bu” and for letters “fu,” but in speaking of one of each the numeral becomes “ichibu” and “ippu” respectively. Verbs in Japanese do not change in the ordinary grammatical sense for number or person—one form covers our “I am, he is, we are” and so on —but some of them have various forms for “honorific uses.” “I am” would usually be different from “you are” because one should politely be used in its humble form, the other in its exalted form — the exalted form, “gozaru,” derives from the Chinese words for “august seat,” and thus suggests be augustly seated.” In many verbs various contractions that can be used to inferiors and perhaps to equals can be changed into rolling polysyllables in being courteous to superiors. To say “I saw,” the straight-forward “mimashita” conveys just that and no more. To be polite, you use “goran nasaimashita” —“you made an honourable glance.” That is the most widely-recognis-able feature of Japanese, the “humble and unworthy me speaking to honourable and lofty you” sort of expression. One of the common honorific prefixes is the syllable “o.” A word like “o-ka-sama,” used in speaking of another’s mother, uses two honorifics, the “o” and the “sama”; one’s own mother is simply spoken of as “ha-ha,” just as one’s own son is “gusoku,” meaning “stupid offspring.” Sometimes the “o” gets tacked on to the drollest of nouns and loses all meaning, in expressions like “o-cha” —“honourable tea”—and “o-naka”— “honourable stomach.” WRITTEN LANGUAGE The written language doubles the foreigner’s difficulties. It is so difficult that the Japanese themselves spend a far greater proportion of their time at school in learning to read and write than we have to do in English. The written language shares the problem of Chinese in having a picture for each word. Japanese borrowed some 25,000 of these from Chinese, and then got itself in a tangle because it sometimes gave them both a particular Japanese pronunciation and meaning and at the same time let them retain their Chinese pronunciation and used them as syllables to help spell out longer words. The Japanese as well have two forms of script of their own, called “kana,” which make a much nearer approach of the Western alphabets. In these the five vowels have a symbol each and the rest of the alphabet is made up of symbols for the different syllables of consonant plus vowel —wa, wi, wu, etc: These kana are used normally for inflections and particles, while the ideograph is used for the stem of the word. But in printed matter that has to be widely read—newspapers and popular magazines—the sentence has in effect to be written twice over, because alongside the Chinese ideograph the careful printer sets down the Japanese kana to make sure it is intelligible. Otherwise even the most every word, because he could not be skilful reader could not be sure of sure whether it is meant to have its Chinese or Japanese value. All that difficulty may one day be removed if the Japanese can be persuaded to adopt the Western alphabet. But in a sense the Japanese are proud of the obscurities of their tongue, which sets them off as a race apart, and probably Westernisation of their spelling will have to wait every bit as long as the conservative English-speaking nations will have to wait for a reformed phonetic spelling.