The death status lingers yet, but I have something to share with you that six feet of stale earth for some reason does not care to suppress. Maybe it has you in mind, hoping that you might learn a thing or two from what I have to contribute. I couldn't tell you for sure, I guess.
For one of my classes last quarter—JAPAN 342: The Japanese Language (an introduction to the linguistic study of Japanese)—I had to electronically submit four essays as a final assignment. If you know me, as perhaps none of you does quite well enough, then you know that I dread writing essays and long papers. A sad result of this usually is that I leave writing assignments undone until the night before they are due, and then stay up extremely late, trying to complete them so I can get some kind of a grade.
Such was the case with these four essays that I had to write, which means that they are not of the highest caliber. Yet even though this is true, I am going to post three of them here for anyone interested to read. The reason is that I know several people here are studying Japanese like I am, and they might be able to learn a few things about it from reading the first two; from the third one you have the opportunity to learn a little bit more about me and my personal interest in Japanese.
The electronic submission worked in such a way that it made sense to me not to title the essays, so I'll post them here without the titles that they don't have. Below each essay I'll provide readings (that is, pronunciations) and English definitions/explanations for the Japanese words contained within.
I apologize for having written these things so last-minute—or maybe just for being a big bum in general when it comes to essays—but I hope you can get something out of them.
The complexity of Japanese runs deeper than a nonnative speaker, even after years of study, might realize.It does not take long to learn that the language is spoken very differently to different audiences, with people who deserve special respect and others who are close friends requiring greatly varied versions of the same tongue.But the extent to which these versions differ is amazing, and it can catch the unsuspecting learner off guard.
The complex category of 若者言葉 is part of the more familiar (that is, less formal) side of Japanese and is likely to be wholly unknown to people who haven’t visited Japan.Used pretty much exclusively by young people, this group of words is most closely related to what in English is called “slang.”However, whereas slang is often looked down upon in English as being substandard and unnecessary, 若者言葉 serve specific and important functions for the people who use them.And even before that, they formed and continue to change over time by way of following certain linguistic rules, not by arbitrary happenstance.
Fashion is not the only indicator of whether a Japanese considers him- or herself to belong to a younger or older generation.Without even seeing someone it is possible to glean with which generation the individual affiliates by observing how he or she speaks.This is especially true with the Japanese language because 若者言葉, which are a red flag for people of the younger generation, specifically function to discriminate against outsiders.They work kind of like a sub-language within the mother language, similar perhaps to the many and various dialects found throughout Japan.
Dialects by their nature indicate where the speakers of them are from, but 若者言葉 communicate by design that their speakers are hip, sophisticated, and up-to-date.They are meant to, in a way, reflect the speakers’ lives, to show what they think is cool.The short words that compose this category generally have unexpected sounds, such as ガッピューン, and thus deviate from the norm just like the users of them enjoy doing.
And while giving young people another avenue through which to assert their uniqueness, 若者言葉 make life easier also by making unpleasant or awkward things more pleasant to talk about.They offer new, less direct terminology with which these socially difficult things can be encoded, making them relatively painless to discuss.An example of this is the word なんぱする, which alludes to having sex by making reference to a certain group of people considered to be particularly interested in that action.
The younger age group that makes use of 若者言葉 was originally responsible for bringing it into existence, but they did so rather unintentionally.Along the same lines as the introduction of 外来語, college students of the past brought about the young person’s speech by mincing different languages together.One of the things they studied in school was foreign languages, and they used this newfound knowledge to set themselves apart from the rest of society.Instead of using normal Japanese terms like everyone else, they decided to speak foreign words to each other that only they could understand.These words, or versions of them, were eventually adopted into the Japanese language—at least by the younger generation—and became the building blocks for 若者言葉.
Today 若者言葉 consist of more than just borrowings from foreign languages—otherwise they would be virtually indistinguishable from 外来語.At the most basic level, these words either are entirely new or are derived from other words already in existence.It is in the latter of these two courses that the application of linguistic rules is clearly apparent.Words from either Japanese or other languages are in some specific way changed when they become 若者言葉.For example, the Japanese word むずかしい is simply shortened to むずい.Or from the English proper noun “Denny’s” the verb デニる is formed by adding the verbal suffix る.Through a multitude of different word alterations and combinations, standard words of Japanese and other languages are made worthy of 若者言葉 and are added to their ranks.
In a language that is constantly changing, 若者言葉 are perhaps the epitome of what makes Japanese difficult for outsiders to learn and use.After coming to a level of proficiency with the language, one must remain at work to fight the never-ending battle of staying up-to-date.
若者言葉（わかものことば）：Japanese slang words, basically; young people's vocabulary
ガッピューン（がっぴゅうん）：shock
なんぱする：the original meaning of なんぱ, I think, has something to do with a group of guys more interested in literature than politics
外来語（がいらいご）：loanwords
むずかしい：difficult
むずい：difficult
デニる（でにる）：to go to Denny's
English—often assailed for being an unnecessarily difficult language due to inconsistency and its tendency not to follow its own rules—would be much harder if it branched out and tried to incorporate another language into itself.It would perhaps be so difficult, in fact, that many people would just give up on it and switch to one of the world’s thousands of other languages.As such, it is unimaginable that this great undertaking would ever occur.
Yet with a language that many have argued is even harder than English this very thing has been happening for quite some time.A flood of words from various foreign languages have bombarded Japanese, many of them passing through cracks in the storm gates and emerging on the other side in a shape more usable to native Japanese speakers.These loanwords, called 外来語, are useful in Japanese, but even though they are significantly changed from the original words that they come from to better fit the rules of Japanese, many Japanese believe they pose a problem, or even a threat, to their language.
Starting with Portuguese, but now drawing mainly from English, Japanese adds words to its own vocabulary by simply taking them from the vocabularies of other languages.The reason that the cracks in the storm gates aren’t patched up, and that this mass importation is allowed to happen, is that the imported words fill an important gap in Japanese lexicon.With the rise of new technologies, concepts, and ideas, new words are needed to label them.In Japanese it is often easier to bring in foreign words for these things than to make up new, native words for them.アメフト, for example, seemed easier for the Japanese to deal with than coining an entirely new word like, perhaps, 米国技.
However, now that 外来語 have reached an alarming level of about ten percent of the language’s vocabulary, this easy solution is feeling to many more like a troublesome burden.Many loanwords do not make the essential trip from esoteric to mainstream use, and they resultantly are the cause of misunderstanding and frustration.Another result of this, though, is that the proportion of 外来語 in Japanese does not really climb any higher.New words are forgotten and pass out of use at about the same rate that even newer ones come in to give the minds of Japanese speakers a whirl.外来語 are thus sort of regulating themselves at this level, and the Japanese government has yet to step in and directly regulate their usage.
What has made it possible for the proportion of 外来語 to balloon as much as it has is how much the loanwords are changed from their original languages to fit the needs of Japanese.When a word is imported, it takes along with it just the single meaning for which it is being brought in, and not any of the other meanings it has in its original language.The word ストライク, for instance, refers only to a strike in baseball.When workers go on strike, the slightly different ストライキ must be used instead.But to tell someone to strike a match, only a native word, like 擦る, will work.
The words themselves are also changed to fit within the phonological rules of Japanese and to make them easier to pronounce.Sometimes they’re shortened and combined, like “word processor” into ワープロ, or are affixed with Japanese elements, as is the case with サボる.This way the words fit into both regular Japanese sentences and the standard Japanese-speaking mouth.
Despite the adaptations undergone by loanwords to make them flow a little more smoothly with the foreign tongue around them, language reformers and many in the Japanese government see 外来語 as enemy number one.To them the useful service they provide hardly outweighs the threat that they perceive these words bring to the beauty of native Japanese.This language that is based in foreign origin has, after many centuries, survived the incredible challenge of taking in so much Chinese and making it distinctly Japanese.Those wary of 外来語 simply don’t want to wait hundreds of years more before Japanese can once again be called a language of its own.
外来語（がいらいご）：words (語) that come (来) from foreign (外) origins; loanwords (words normally written in katakana)
アメフト（あめふと）：American football
米国技（べいこくぎ）：America's national sport. Note that this is not a real word; I made it up by combining 米国（べいこく）, the native Japanese word for America, and 国技（こくぎ）, which means "national sport."
ストライク（すとらいく）：strike in baseball
ストライキ（すとらいき）：strike posed by disgruntled workers
擦る（する）：to strike (a match)
ワープロ（わあぷろ）：word processor
サボる（さぼる）：to skip class (from the word "sabotage")
My favorite element of JAPAN 342 was learning why things are the way that they are in the Japanese language.There is an endless list of things about Japanese that mystify me, but in this class I was able to check off a few more items on that list.Whether it was learning a little bit about 連濁, seeing why there are so many different readings for 漢字, or for the first time learning the names of things that I’d been using all along, like 送り仮名, I am grateful for each little confusion of my that has been cleared away.In my study of Japanese I come across countless things that I must just accept as the way things are, but in JAPAN 342 I got some greater insight into a few of those things.
What I hope to do in life is probably impossible, but I’m going to try to do it, anyway:I desire to become as proficient with Japanese at some point as I am with English right now.My study of Japanese started typically late for an American, and those precious early years when picking up language is easy were long gone before then.So what’s ahead of me is one very difficult task, one at which I’m not sure how many people have been successful.What I know is that most people who study a foreign language get to a certain level of proficiency that is certainly good, but they can never rival a native, educated speaker.
Since this is my goal, crazy though it may be, most everything that helps me to get there interests me greatly.Some of the more scientific things in linguistics will not really help me because I didn’t learn any of those things about English, either.My level of proficiency with English, however good it actually is, exists primarily from extensive practice with the language.And so practice with Japanese is something that I love.When I learn practical things about it and about how it works, I can feel myself getting just a tiny bit closer to where I’m trying to go.
Ultimately what my quest will require is living in Japan—for a long time, maybe even the remainder of my life.Even this will not guarantee me achievement, though.What it really, truly comes down to is whether I have been blessed with a mind than can handle this task.I will probably discover the answer to that sometime while I’m in Japan.But right now I cannot go there, so I’d like to learn as much as I can about the workings of Japanese here in the U.S., and that’s where the content of interest in JAPAN 342 comes in.Every time it brought me from understanding that something about Japanese is true to understanding why it is, it did just exactly what I wanted it to.
I don’t think that this class brought me any closer to being able to think in Japanese, but an intuitive understanding of or feeling for the language is less than I need, anyway.With English I was way beyond that stage a long time ago, but I have been learning important things ever since, and there is still a lot that I do not know.So JAPAN 342, although not a regular language course, contained a lot of information that I need to know if I’m going to someday come to a real understanding of this complex and most interesting entity.
連濁（れんだく）：euphonic change of unvoiced to voiced sound1
漢字（かんじ）：kanji (lit. Chinese characters)
送り仮名（おくりがな）：the kana in a word that contains both kanji and kana. For example, in the word 食べる, meaning "to eat," べる is the 送り仮名.
If you are interested enough in Japan-related things to read this far, then you would most certainly enjoy reading the following excerpt from Learning to Bow, a fascinating book about Japan.
Beethoven’s Ninth is to Japan what “Auld Lang Syne” is to the West. This soaring, romantic opus was played in Japan by triumphant American soldiers at the end of the Second World War and has remained ever since as the symbolic music of closings. It is such a perennial best-seller that the Japanese inventors of the compact disc system designed the CD to be seventy-two minutes long so it could hold the symphony in its entirety (120).
Note to Chupperson: Progress continues with the 13,881 words you asked me to read. Once they have all passed at least once through my eyes, I will send more of my spontaneous, digital literature to your modem.
Except for quotations, all of the stuff in this post is © Errol Cleary, now and forever. I of course don't care if you use or quote this information, but please be a reasonable person by not taking any of my work and submitting it to others as your own.
Edited by - Watoad on 12/19/2004 12:33:53 AM
