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'.
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.
I've started to suspect recently that an important secret of being able to sound natural in conversational Japanese is using a LOT of onomatopoeia words. I've considered mining all of them from jmdict and studying them specifically.
That's a great idea. I love them because many of them are evocative of either an actual real sound, or play with some loan word. This makes them easier to remember, plus they don't need any kind of special conjugation.
Abbreviation, repetition, and stacking bits of words together are a big difference between natural vs formal Japanese language skills. It's very Lego-like that way.
For me, the part that is most wild is that I have never heard a Japanese onomatopoeia that sounds remotely close to what I would actually assume the sound to sound like. when I was a little kid and I was studying Japanese, it always made me think that Japanese people had different ears than I did, because if they're hearing all of these sounds the way they are and I'm hearing them all the way I am, there's no possible universe where we are describing them the same way, which would mean that we have to hear them differently. I now realize it's likely more of a societal thing, but it's still interesting nonetheless
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.
I bumped into another English guy who was teaching English in Japan and he made me laugh when he told me that the name of my favourite conveyor sushi restaurant in London - Kulu Kulu - meant "round and round". Sounds like it might be similar to these phrases.
Japanese isn't generally considered to have the equivalent of the 'l' sound from most other languages, and it rather has a sound that's perhaps somewhere between 'l' and a rolling 'r'. In romanized text it's generally written as 'r'. Transliteration isn't really unambiguous in the end, though, and there are multiple ways of romanizing Japanese, so while romanizing くるくる as 'kulukulu' doesn't sound like a very common transliteration, it may be possible.
Also, 'kuru' means 'to come', but I don't know if that's related.
I think there are different onomatopoeia for different kinds of pain. English equivalent is probably when a doctor may ask if a pain is sharp, dull, pulsating, burning, etc.
Careful... it's a little too easy to ascribe things like that to a superficial cultural trait.
English has a huge variety of terms for extreme tiredness: whacked, bushed, wiped out, worn out, drained, burned out, beat, knackered, fried, shattered, frazzled, zonked... must be the puritan work ethic or something.
We've even got a few onomatopoeia of our own: feeling kinda.. ugh.. meh... bleugh... I mean, whew, yeesh. Just... phew.
Maybe being tired is just the global human condition.
I read a lot of manga and they often have a lot of hyper specific sound effects. I don't speak Japanese but always found this interesting. I guess this explains it. Thank you.
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?
I think some of the "Japanese has a ton of grammar points" is an effect of how the Japanese-as-a-second-language teaching resources label things, where a lot of what you could classify as "sentence patterns" are described and taught as "grammar". For example, the Dictionary of Intermediate Japanese Grammar lists ~に比べると as one of its grammar points, but this (meaning "compared to ~") isn't really new grammar, it's just a specific usage of particle に, a particular verb and と for if/when (in the same way "compared to X" isn't new English grammar but is a pattern of use of a particular verb).
My experience is that Japanese grammar isn't particularly complicated, it's just that it works backwards from Indo-European languages. Vocab is a pain because there's no common root of word origins to help the way there is between say English and French, but that's true for Chinese too I suppose. The writing system is kind of silly but it is what it is (and of course it doesn't matter at all for conversational fluency).
> I think some of the "Japanese has a ton of grammar points" is an effect of how the Japanese-as-a-second-language teaching resources label things, where a lot of what you could classify as "sentence patterns" are described and taught as "grammar".
Sentence patterns are grammar. They are a major presence in English grammar, where e.g. in almost all cases you can only determine the subject of a sentence by the fact that it precedes the verb. Other languages are more explicit.
Fundamentally we use "grammar" to refer to whatever governs the meaning that appears in a well-formed sentence that isn't just part of the individual meanings of (the uninflected forms of) the words in that sentence. But this is not an entirely satisfactory definition, and grammar can show up in surprising ways.
Consider the difference between the verbs "look" and "see".
In Japanese, there is no difference. They are the same verb and they mean the same thing. Japanese learners do not understand why English speakers draw a distinction, and they struggle to use the correct word when speaking English.
In Mandarin, these verbs are also the same verb. But Mandarin speakers draw the same distinction that English speakers do - if they mean "look", they will say 看, and if they mean "see", they will say 看到, inflecting the verb with a grammatical suffix indicating successful completion. Although they do not use separate verbs, they have no trouble tracking the English distinction.
In English, obviously, the same distinction is drawn. But the mechanism is lexical; we treat these as being entirely different words.
I suggest that a Japanese learner choosing "see" when they mean "look" or "watch" is making a grammatical error, the same way that they'd be making a grammatical error if they said 看 instead of 看到 while trying to speak Mandarin.
What I mean is that, to use an English example "in comparison to X, Y" and "in contrast to X, Y" are not grammatically different -- the words are all doing the same jobs in the same structure, it's just a different verb. But they're both useful idiomatic patterns to learn. It happens that the standard in Japanese as a second language teaching is to call (the Japanese equivalents to) these different idiomatic patterns different grammar points. Personally I don't care too much about the terminology as long as everybody is on the same page, and because this is the standard in the J2L communities it's generally fine; but it does mean that looking at the size of the volumes of a "Dictionary of Japanese Grammar" is a bit misleading about how grammatically complex the language is.
I would suggest that choosing "see" when you mean "watch" is a vocabulary error, not a grammar error - you picked the wrong verb, but didn't use it in an ungrammatical way (eg wrong tense or mixing transitive and intransitive or getting subject and object the wrong way round).
> I would suggest that choosing "see" when you mean "watch" is a vocabulary error, not a grammar error - you picked the wrong verb, but didn't use it in an ungrammatical way (eg wrong tense or mixing transitive and intransitive or getting subject and object the wrong way round).
Have you tried doing this? In general you can't swap these verbs without the resulting use being ungrammatical. The problem is that "watch" is durative (it takes time) and "see" is punctual (it takes no time).
> Consider the difference between the verbs "look" and "see".
> In Japanese, there is no difference. They are the same verb and they mean the same thing. Japanese learners do not understand why English speakers draw a distinction, and they struggle to use the correct word when speaking English.
My understanding is that in many (but not all) cases they're gramatically interchangeable, but imply different levels of directness. Something like the difference between "I see you" (direct) and "I can see you" (indirect), with a general preference for the latter in polite conversation. It's not a perfect comparison because in English both usages of see are transitive, but hopefully the general idea comes across.
Circling back to the original discussion: I'd say that it's better to compare the past & non-past tenses of Japanese verbs:
- "Thank you" in the past tense ("ありがとうございました") conveys that you are thankful for acts already rendered and that you do not intend to impose further.
- "Thank you" in the non-past tense ("ありがとうございます") conveys that you are actively thankful, generally when the act in question is still in progress or otherwise not yet completely rendered.
This is a nuance that English renders trivial with a simple "Thank you", much like Japanese renders trivial the difference between a completed "look" and an incomplete "see".
見える only means “look” in the “to seem” or “to appear” sense.
Often in English, we have multiple words for sensory experiences to indicate how much focus is put into the action. “Seeing” a picture is less focused than “looking at” a picture. “Hearing” a song is less focused than “listening to” a song.
> “Seeing” a picture is less focused than “looking at” a picture.
Isn't that backwards? Like in the phrase "they look but do not see", which was what I had in mind in my first comment. Isn't that something like "見るけど見えない" ?
But as you've implicitly noted, you cannot see something without looking. That would be physically impossible.
You can also use "look" to emphasize that focus does not exist; one of the sentences I've collected for interesting use is "He stared at the page, not seeing it."
In that case, there is no possibility of a page being overlooked or otherwise missed. What the sentence is telling us is that although "he" is directing his eyes at the page, his mind is on something else, so "seeing" never occurs.
The difference between "see" and "look" has nothing to do with focus. It is what I noted in the discussion of Mandarin - success. Seeing is the goal of looking.
Note that this phenomenon where native speakers have no trouble obeying a distinction that their language requires, but come out with total nonsense when asked why they choose one form or another, is completely characteristic of grammatical rules, and not characteristic of vocabulary selection.
The Japanese grammar is pretty simple in fact, but it's very confusing coming from a European language because of how different it is. OK, once you get to the high level politeness (keigo) it can get pretty complex but you don't have to learn that until you're fluent in casual and neutral polite forms (teinei).
I don't know Chinese but I've read that it's "subject-verb-object" like in English, so maybe that's why you found it easier than Japanese.
I got to fluency in Japanese in roughly 6 months to 1 year while living there. And it makes a big difference, if you use it daily they you can catch up whole sentences and understand the grammar logic later on.
There's no tense, no verb ending, no conjugation, zero of any of that stuff in Chinese...the difference is night and day. There is barely any grammar to learn. I finished the Chinese grammar in less than a week lol
A few examples from endless notebook on Japanese grammar notes I have from lessons
- Various て forms, which have their own complexity and nuance. Spent almost a year on this
- Volitional forms
- X-なければ, conditionals, should/shouldn't
- the "te-shimau" form
- くれる / あげる
- Conjugations for past tense for the 3 different verb categories...which were so hard to remember
- しか
- ばかり
- ように
- X-ところだ
- X-ほうが-Y
- Command forms, conjugations, etc.
(background disclaimer: native English speaker; can read Japanese and French reasonably well; German somewhat less so; have also lightly studied Latin + Russian + Spanish; Chinese not at all)
Chinese sounds more like the exception than the rule.
I feel like if you're going to say "It just feels like an inefficient language for communication. Why does it have to be so complicated?" you should come for the Indo-European languages first; exoticizing Japanese as this bizarrely complex, weird language just isn't accurate.
In fact, even with the various things you listed, Japanese grammar is still relatively simple compared to most European languages, for instance. No genders, few tenses, only two irregular verbs, a word order system that's both pretty consistent (SOV) and flexible...meanwhile, a lot of what's called "grammar" in Japanese language pedagogy feels more like what European languages would call idiomatic expressions.
Even keigo, which is definitely a pain point...English, for instance, has all sorts of subtle ways of communicating tone and politeness, it's just not quite as explicit. In a way, the strict manner in which it's codified in Japanese makes those nuances somewhat easier to grasp.
I think you have it right and OP doesn't. For example: "Exotic-sounding grammar features like the subject-object-verb sentence structure"
There is nothing exotic about SOV vs any other order.
Latin (and all Romance languages French, Italian int al): SVO, German: SOV. English: SVO. All of them are complex enough that word order can be re-arranged and the meaning remains and often enhanced.
All human spoken languages are Turing complete (not enough room in this column for a wonderful proof I came across tomorrow). All humans have the same set of hardware and software (I hate the term wetware) and facilities. There are some variations in how they are used but in the end I refuse to allow for concepts that are "untranslatable".
I do allow that some people have, say, four colour vision instead of three and so they can experience a colour spectrum beyond the norm. My Mum had better than normal visual acuity - she could see much further than the rest of the family.
Regardless of sensors, we all have largely the same set of equipment to process and convey our ideas and notions.
Creative use of that equipment and deployment of the same should be applauded and encouraged. However, don't get yourself hung up on the idea that your ideas are somehow different or unique or even worse: better, due to some sort of racial alignment or language.
I'm a massive fan of vive la differance but I also like to see vive la meme.
> Latin (and all Romance languages French, Italian int al): SVO, German: SOV. English: SVO. All of them are complex enough that word order can be re-arranged and the meaning remains and often enhanced.
Latin is definitely not SVO. Those roles are marked explicitly enough that they can occur in any order without really causing any problems (and in poetry, they do), but to the extent that an order applies to Latin, it is SOV.
This is one of the features that is felt to result from simplification. As you note, Romance languages tend to be SVO. It's also true that Mandarin is SVO where other Chinese languages tend to be SOV. And that creoles tend to be SVO even when every source language uses some other order.
So the theory does float around that SVO order is in some sense more intuitive than the others, and that's the reason for its appearance in Romance, Mandarin, and creoles.
Not sure why I put Latin in as SVO, given that the second Latin lesson I received (aged 10), went into some detail about word order. The first was amo amas amat ... moneo monas monat.
However, all languages tend to be flexible, as required: "Gaul as a whole is divided into three parts" or as JC said: "Gallia est omnis divisa in partes tres".
I'll go pedantic, but ない is technically not an irregular negative form of ある. The negative form of ある is the regular あらぬ/あらない, but it has been substituted with ない, which is an entirely different word. You'll often hear あらへん in Kansai dialect, which is derived from ある.
Edit: there are idioms that use あらず which is also a standard negative form of ある, like なきにしもあらず.
> There's no tense, no verb ending, no conjugation, zero of any of that stuff in Chinese...the difference is night and day. There is barely any grammar to learn. I finished the Chinese grammar in less than a week lol
What you're saying is that Chinese is not inflectional. It's a pretty common trope that people equate grammar with verb inflection.
But Chinese does have grammar, it's just in the things that aren't as in-your-face as verb inflection is. Chinese has numerical classifiers, which don't have a clear corresponding feature in Indo-European languages (the closest I can think is the... I forget the term, but those silly terms like "pride of lions" or "murder of crows" which are more erudite wankfests than proper English grammar). There may be other features, but I don't know Chinese well enough to highlight them.
The things is that if you're learning an Indo-European language (and you already know on), you can largely import your native language's grammar and expect things to work. Take, e.g., the superlative construction: in English, it's "most" + adjective; in French, it's "le plus" + adjective. Word-for-word translation (including tense/aspect/mood as word-for-word, when you'd use past perfect in English is pretty damn the same time you'd use it in other languages) gets you pretty close to correct, you just have to fix up some word order issues, and some agreement issues, and you're done, so grammar instruction largely focuses on teaching those elements of grammar. It can actually be somewhat jarring when you hit upon a situation where the grammar isn't in close alignment: e.g., in English, we would say "it has been several days since I've seen you" whereas in French, it would be (doing tense-for-tense translation) "it is several days since I've seen you".
The focus in grammar instruction on the elements that are different from your native language rather than the ones that are the same can lead you into a false sense of what grammar is.
A better comparison for numerical classifiers would be uncountable nouns.
In English, you don’t say “give me three waters”, you say “give me three glasses of water” or “three bottles of water”. You can think of the classifier words as being that, but for everything:
Coming from French I don't consider there is any conjugation in Japanese. The verb is the same no matter what the subject is - I, you, he/she, we, plural you, they... So in French you can multiply by 6 the number of verb ending. In Japanese you never have to care about gender and plural.
Same with German, where you have declinaisons on the articles depending on their grammatical position in the sentence (den/der/dem/etc.)
So maybe Chinese is even simpler than Japanese, but I would still rank Japanese as a language having a "simple" grammar.
In reality few people use half of these, I would think
My favorite bit is that "to be" is two different verbs entirely in Portuguese, "ser" and "estar". Both Italian and Spanish also have this distinction, but in my (admittedly limited) experience with those languages, neither really makes the distinction as clear as it is in Portuguese
I don't know about Italian but the ser/estar distinction works in pretty much exactly the same way in both Spanish and Portuguese. I can't think of any difference between how Spanish and Portuguese treat those two verbs.
Actually most if not all of those verb endings are used colloquially (the most important exception would be the second person plural, which is only used in some regions of Portugal).
2nd person singular is also never really used correctly, and even 1st person plural is sometimes replaced by 3rd person singular e.g. "a gente vai" instead of "nós vamos"
I’m extremely skeptical of your claims that you learned Chinese grammar in a week as a Chinese learner myself and I’m willing to bet you don’t realize how much you don’t know. The Chinese grammar wiki has 505 articles on grammar split across A1-C1 levels of the European Common Framework for language proficiency. This wiki is also non-exhaustive. This isn’t even including the fact that Classical Chinese, which is a basis for many 成语 used today, has a completely different grammar than modern Chinese.
It might not be technically correct that they learned the full set of Chinese grammar in a week, but I can imagine one week is sufficient for a beginner to get the basics and start reading/speaking/writing the language and absorb the other nuances or nitty-gritty details through everyday usage.
I mean, I'm pretty much a Chinese/Cantonese native user, so I can't be sure about that since I never "learned" the language in a classroom setting, but my impression is that this short period of learning grammar for Chinese language leaners is quite typical.
You feel Chinese grammar simple only because you're a native speaker, or at least have learned Chinese at a very young age.
Grab a textbook for Chinese-as-second-language learners and you'll be surprised how many rules there are. You don't deem them as rules cause you've internalized them, as a native speaker should have.
> There's no tense, no verb ending, no conjugation, zero of any of that stuff in Chinese...
This is plainly untrue. Speaking for Mandarin:
1. It's necessary to track tense in negative-polarity sentences because past-tense verbs are negated differently from present-tense ones. Technically this is accomplished by using an auxiliary verb, though in many cases that verb doesn't actually appear in the sentence where you're using it.
2. There are three aspectual verb endings, 了 (perfect), 着 (continuous), and 过 (experiential).
3. Verbs are inflected for possibility and impossibility, so that 动 is "move" and 动不了 is "cannot move".
> I finished the Chinese grammar in less than a week lol
I haven't found Japanese grammar to be particularly complex either...at least compared to English or French. It is different. The 80/20 Japanese Book was a great help, as was "English Grammar for Students of Japanese" (the title is confusing, but it really is for learning Japanese, not English).
> I got to fluency in Japanese in roughly 6 months to 1 year while living there
Your experience is not the norm, not according to research and not according to most people who've tried learning Japanese. Either you have a talent or you had a more effective method for learning, but it does undermine your judgement as something generalisable to others.
While the short time is indeed impressive compared to median learning curve, how much studies can afford a panel of people going through similar conditions of volontary complete immersion over such an extended period?
I love when watching things in Japanese you can tell they are talking in hyperpolite register because all the words are suddenly dozen-syllable tongue twisters.
I don't think Japanese is really any more grammatically complicated than any other language (the writing system is a different story but if you're comfortable with Chinese you already have an appropriate degree of Stockholm Syndrome on that front anyway). Different languages just move the complexity around to different places rather than getting rid of it. For instance, Japanese has only 3 irregular verbs in the entire language. Singular and plural need not be marked. Verb and adjective agreement aren't issues. And so on.
I don't speak either, but would posit that the status of Chinese as an East Asian Lingua Franca caused it to trend toward simplicity, whereas Japanese insularity (physical, cultural, and political, especially during the Edo period) provided far less incentive to simplify.
I don't think there's any trend of written Chinese toward simplicity. Broadly speaking it has evolved towards "complexity" over its history.
If you looked up the texts in the most ancient Chinese (oracle bones, bronze inscriptions, etc.) they were basically characters stringed into very terse sentences with minimal grammar. IIRC typical "sentences" were like ~5-7 characters at most. They typically looked something like: "King Attack Barbarian. Good Luck? Win."
Then the classical texts (which had a status similar to Latin in East Asia) had sentences that were considerably more fully formed, but often still terse. Case in point: yesterday I was trying to understand a story about a man meditating in Zhuangzi, where it describes the sitting position as "隱几而坐" (the characters mean "hide", "chair/desk", "and", "sit"). So, was the person putting away the chair, then sitting (on the floor)? Or hiding behind the chair? Or possibly even hiding the chair with his clothes by sitting on it? Or was there a typographical error and another character was intended? I don't think anyone has a conclusive answer.
Modern Chinese (Mandarin) generally does not have these vague sentence structures and is much more fully fleshed out than classical Chinese. The same idea expressed in Mandarin would typically be 2-3 times longer than it would be in classical Chinese.
The Chinese language has evolved from extreme simplicity in ancient times to I guess moderate complexity today. Generally there was no simplification.
Yes, but AFAICT there are no reliable records of what people actually said in spoken Chinese in those ancient/classical eras. And thus it's quite meaningless to speculate about the evolution of the spoken Chinese languages* over that time scale...
* note the plural -- while the written Chinese language was indeed the Lingua Franca of East Asia, the spoken language has regional differences culminating in the various regional Chinese spoken dialects/languages which are quite mutually unintelligible.
I wouldn't call it meaningless. Comparative linguistics can draw surprisingly strong conclusions about how languages sounded a long time ago, even ones that were never written down. There are hundreds of Chinese languages/dialects apparently descended from a common ancestor. That's enough for some serious comparative historical analysis.
Anyway, expressiveness is not the same as complexity. It would seem Chinese was able to evolve a lot of expressiveness without adding too much unnecessary complexity, unlike more insular languages. The simplicity is also not exactly a firm rule, but a trend.
Thanks for the interesting examples. Would love to learn more Chinese.
Does Chinese really not have that much grammar though? I think it may have fewer _formalized_ grammar, but there are a lot of rules that are difficult to pin down. And if you don't follow them, your Chinese will sound wrong to native speakers, even though _technically_ the grammar is fine.
For example, I only very recently learned (in Mandarin) characters' tones change when they form words. The number one (一) has 3 different tones in different contexts, what!?
> I feel that even after 10 years I will barely reach conversational fluency in Japanese
Interesting. I feel exact opposite with Mandarin. My progress learning Japanese was incredibly fast, I could speak decently in 6 months and read after 1 year. But I always lose motivation learning Mandarin because it's so hard. Maybe it's because my mother tongue is closely aligned with Japanese in pronounciation and grammar such as conjugation.
The fact that it is a well-documented language that has evolved over thousands of years with almost no external influence and is entrenched with thousands of years of cultural concepts that are distinctly unfamiliar to a majority of the western world. Many phrases used in Mandarin today date back millennia. Also something that many people don’t recognize is that a single character can embody many meanings depending on the context. It’s not as simple as memorizing the character because you have to know which meaning a character is representing within a particular context.
Is your mother tongue Finnish? I always found Japanese to have somewhat similar sounds. And as a bonus hint, you're missing a "the" in your first sentence ;)
Yeah, linguistic difficulty is almost always relative - I can learn French or Dutch much more effortlessly than a native Japanese speaker. A native Korean (I'm guessing?) speaker would definitely have a leg up when learning Japanese that they wouldn't have with Mandarin, and that a native English speaker doesn't have with either.
The way I think of this for some Asian languages is that Japanese and Korean are like English and Dutch, while Mandarin is like one of the Romance languages (e.g., Mandarin is to Cantonese as Spanish is to French). The three have an easier time learning any of the other two for different reasons of shared vocabulary or grammar depending on the direction.
"Complicated" is in the eye of the beholder. It looks daunting to someone who didn't grow up using a heavily inflected language, but also consider the reverse direction.
"A reading room" means a room that is for reading. "A reading person" means a person who is reading. And "Reading the room" means, well, the act of reading the room. Or it could be used as an adverbial prose to modify the following phrase: "Reading the room, I stopped right there." Or it could be part of a progressive: "He was merely reading the room." Don't confuse it with "What he did was merely reading the room," which must be parsed differently.
All from a single form of a verb. You just have to figure out which one is intended from context.
...and the point is, it's just so natural to a native English speaker that they don't even stop and think about it!
> Japanese is more difficult to learn than an English objectively.
I press “doubt” on the entire comment just due to this statement. There is no “objectively more difficult” for most of the major languages (but it exists), and especially not Japanese. It imo heavily depends on your first language.
Ask any friends of yours who speak Korean as their first language. They will likely find Japanese language to be extremely easy compared to almost any other language. Almost all of them, even those who had zero prior knowledge of Japanese language, will be able to understand bits and pieces all the time.
Russian was my first, but I can confirm that Japanese was signficantly easier than English for me in majority of the aspects, esp when it comes to basics needed to be somewhat functional in the language. Only two tenses (past and non-past), pronunciation makes perfect sense (if you know how to read a kanji character, you know how to pronounce it; cannot say anything even remotely similar about English at all), grammar overall doesn’t feel overly complicated, etc. However, from what I’ve observed, native English speakers seem to struggle with quite a few of those things, including pronunciation.
Hell, I would say Ukrainian would be just as difficult for a native English speaker to learn as Russian would be. For any native Russian speaker though? A person who speaks only Ukrainian can have a conversation with someone who speaks only Russian, and both of them will be able to understand at least half of what the other person is saying (despite speaking to each other in different languages, without having any prior knowledge of each other’s language).
All of this leads me to believe that there is no such thing as “objectively easier”, unless we know the person’s first/primary language.
Anecdotally speaking, my spouse is from China and she thinks it was easier for her to learn Japanese than English despite learning English from a young age and not having any formal Japanese education until college by which point she was already fairly conversational in Japanese from having watched variety shows and anime. We met while I was studying Japanese at college so I have a pretty good idea of where her Japanese ability stands.
Another anecdote, a Chinese friend of mine from college just passed the N1 with a perfect score. His Japanese education consists of a few classes in college, anime, and video games. He says although he thinks his English is more fluent due to him living in the States, Japanese was easier for him to learn.
> Another anecdote, a Chinese friend of mine from college just passed the N1 with a perfect score.
The Japanese Language Proficiency Test does not include a speaking portion, which is the part of Japanese that Chinese people usually struggle with most - being kanji masters, the rest looks a breeze, lucky them! That tempers the point somewhat (somewhat).
What you're proposing is not an objective measure, it's a popularity contest.
And yes, in a lot of such surveys you'll find Chinese/Japanese/Korean sitting at the top of the list. Sometimes with Arabic.
Maybe Japanese is a really hard language objectively, but these surveys aren't actually showing that. What they are showing is that the majority of organizations that are doing these kind of surveys are populated by speakers of western European languages, who find Japanese "objectively" much harder than Spanish.
That list is the CIA/State Department evaluating the average time to fluency for English natives going through one of the foreign language training programs they run.
Chinese, Korean, Japanese and Arabic sit on top of the list because they are the most isolated away from English.
Koreans find Japanese extremely easy to learn. Vice versa.
I'm not too far into learning to speak/read Japanese, but have gotten pretty good at understanding it when spoken from years of only really watching/listening to Japanese media (human pattern matching ability is crazy!). My feeling has been that similar to what others have said, that the popular learning resources seem to make the early grammar seem broader than it is by teaching each sentence 'type' as a separate rule.
Although I haven't put enough thought into the exact differences (and thus might be entirely wrong), I've felt the grammar is fairly intuitive (I presume due in part to my background of also speaking fluent Hindi).
Started with friends introducing me to anime in highschool (with english subtitles), which I got hooked on, then got into the music as well, and later into vtubers (so no subtitles when watching live). I haven't ever really been into other entertainment, so for a little over a decade I've been listening to japanese on a near daily basis.
I know it's a meme for people to claim to know japanese from watching anime, which is why I don't claim to be able to speak it, but over time I did pick up enough that I don't need subtitles anymore. I'm slowly working on reading with practice books, wanikani etc, will eventually figure out some way to practice speaking too.
(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.
Exactly. Japanese _mostly_ doesn't have plurals in the English sense (it actually does have a few plural words), but you do use counters to specify quantities, which is just another way to express plurality.
I understand some folks might find the Japanese exotic ways gripping, but I find the realities of the language much more interesting. I find the thought "there are many ways to express plurality" much more fascinating than "wow, these people can build very reliable cars without expressing if a car has a wheel or many wheels."
Car has 4 wheels. You can say many, few, a number, etc so the lack of plurality is overstated I suspect. You can use context to derive the plurality when none is given.
Maybe you prefer the "languages are like Turing complete" argument?
You've heard of Russell's paradox and Godel's incompleteness, I am
sure. Wouldn't a concept that escaped our capacity, be by definition
unthinkable? Someone literally can't think of an example.
So maybe we should approach it a different way - is there any
possibility for the "existence" of a concept that could not be
successfully communicated at all, say between a human adult and a 5
year old child, or the the adult and an advanced alien being?
If concepts exist only in the mind, that are more than literal
depictions of physical reality, surely here must be conceits
thinkable in some systems but not in others. (I am probably just
replaying Douglas Hofstadter here)
The alternative is that every language is kinda "complete" and I could
spend three hours trying to explain what a Alpha-Centurion has one
word for.
Edit: sorry our discussion is getting down-voted for bizarre reasons.
Is there a kind of racist/anti-pluralist thing here on HN?
Russell's paradox speaks of logical contradictions. Language is full of logical contradictions, but it's fine to us (not to logicians though).
Similarly Gödel speaks of consistent proofs in logical systems. His incompleteness theorem talks about either a system has statements it cannot prove (but they can expressed!), or is inconsistent. Since natural language is probably not that consistent, the whole issue is moot.
It should be possible to show under some loose conditions that all natural languages are "Turing complete". Even the halting problem does not impose a problem -- we're really not interested in telling whether long-running computation halts in natural language. The expressivity is guaranteed by not insisting on strict consistency in language.
(PS: the situation changes where there is a mandate to only speak things that are "correct", for example, censorship. Now you get into the realm where something might be technically "correct" but the decision algorithm is imperfect and does not allow you to speak that truth)
> is there any possibility for the "existence" of a concept that could not be successfully communicated at all, say between a human adult and a 5 year old child, or the the adult and an advanced alien being?
I don't think so as long as the concept is constructed from physical objects or shared emotions/feelings.
There is a problem with something that can only be subjectively felt though. Let's say some alien can see the X-ray spectrum. How does the alien communicate to humans what the colors look and feel like?
> There is a problem with something that can only be subjectively felt
though. Let's say some alien can see the X-ray spectrum. How does
the alien communicate to humans what the colors look and feel like?
This is the kind of thing I'm thinking of, it's an old philosophical
chestnut in epistemology.
Godel and Russell are relevant because we can always look for
meaningful statements that can be well formed under wone system but
not under another.
> But this is kinda off-topic.
I had theory about that. It's so _on topic_ to be discussing the
nature of language itself in a time when the biggest festival in town
is "Large Language Models". Nobody so violently attacks a comment
unless it hits a nerve, And I don't want to believe that my fellow HN
commenters are simple racists. I think some people worry about basing
the computing work on something as precarious and pluralistic as
language. And they'd be right to.
I think you're focusing too much on language. If two humans (who experience similar things) can communicate, they'll figure out how to express themselves. Hell, they don't even necessarily need language.
The problem with a human and an alien trying to communicate is not that they speak different languages. The problem is that may experience different things (xrays, slitheryness, whatever).
I don't think a Japanese human is so different from a (say) English human.
> If two humans (who experience similar things) can communicate,
they'll figure out how to express themselves.
An important point of agreement. Human experience absolutely
transcends language (late Wittgenstein language games). Ninety
percent of interaction being non-verbal has been a pet issue of mine
throughout the post-pandemic descent into remote work, and a videoconf
culture.
> I don't think a Japanese human is so different from a (say) English
human.
Of course not. It's not the tangible differences that are of interest
so much as why geographically separated groupings that are ostensibly
the same beings, select and amplify certain features of human
experience, and downplay others. That cultural development is complex
and intricate. It encodes bits of history like old power relations,
common achivements or sufferings. That information gets handed down by
language as much as epigenetics.
The reason I am focusing a lot on language is that we're in an "age of
language models". The dominant ones are English. But English is a
particular way of structuring ideas about the world. This is
something we should be paying close attention to, and almost any time
people mention "AI" these days the topic is really about language.
BTW I am neither Japanese nor overly interested in their culture,
except in a mildly curious and positive geeky way. It's probably
coincidental that the last two topics I commented on here, which were
"disappeared", involved Japanese culture. Probably. I'm sorry if what
I said came across wrong, but it really gave me pause for thought
about latent racist undertones here on HN. Probably best to forget
about it now, but I'll be keeping an eye on that.
The issue I see with the "can't express at all" view, is that, if it can't be expressed, then how do newborns learn to speak the language?
If from some sequence of sense perceptions, a child can learn to associate some word(s) with some concept, why couldn't one describe that sequence of sense perceptions in another language, and have the listener, by imagining those sense perceptions, grasp the concept?
Now, I don't want to be absolutist about that. Maybe some concepts get attached to some words through ways other than what sense perceptions pick out, somehow? Like, maybe when discussing theology or whatever, God intervenes and influences what meanings people learn for different words? (like, in a way that can't exactly be formalized and expressed in terms of math, sense perceptions, and any ideas that might be built-in to the human mind which one might intuitively associated with some combination of the previous two?)
But, outside of things like that, I would expect that meanings for words that are shared among an identifiable collection of people, can be explained in any of the most common natural languages.
(Though, maybe not so much for the meanings or aspects of meanings that are specific to one person.)
Unless there is some mechanism by which a meaning could be communicated from one person to another child-person, which can't be replicated with another language.
Now, that's all just for concepts between humans. For the Alpha-Centurion, perhaps they could have some innate ideas which they could learn words for, but which we would not learn to associate the idea with the word if we were given analogous sense perceptions, because we don't have those ideas built in to us? This also doesn't seem likely to me, but I seem to have less argument against it than I do for the same thing for the analogous thing between different human languages.
We should still be able to describe the statistics of how they use certain words together though, and how this correlates to the world, or at least, the world as described through those concepts that we can comprehend. And, perhaps we could also describe the statistics of what words they would use to describe the ways in which our description of how they use the words (including correlation with aspects of the world that we comprehend), falls short of the true meaning of the words.
There's an idea of "semantic primes", supposedly semantically irreducible concepts, that can't be defined except in terms of words that would be defined in terms of these (though, one might ask, "couldn't one pick some other collection of concepts as the base case instead?" and idk what the counterargument is), and which supposedly every natural human language has a word for each of these (though the word might not only mean one of these semantic primes/primitives, possibly having other meanings as well).
The idea goes that every word in any natural human language can ultimately be expressed in terms of these primitive concepts (of which there are supposedly like 65).
If this is true, then no idea in any natural human language would be entirely untranslatable to any other human natural language.
But, it does raise of course raise the question, "what if there was something else beyond these 65 or so, that we (humans) lack the concept of?" (which is I think similar to the question you were raising)
I like the idea of semantic primes and was pondering it these last
couple of days.
If there are irreducible "experiences" with corresponding symbols then
it sorta makes sense to follow a mathematical analogy that other ideas
can be 'factored' into them. But we don't know that for sure about
neural computers or brains.
On the other hand the problem may be constructive rather than
reductive. If ideas are like chemical compounds we may know that some
exist but have no known path to create them. Using your analogy, that
would be like trying to guess prime factors or some special sequence
of operators to get from A to B.
I'm still left with the strong intuition that some groups build a
repetoire of ideas ineffable in another tongue.
My favorite simple example of this is exclusive "we". It's not a thing in most languages, but it allows a level of passive aggressiveness that you can't achieve without it.
Saying "we're going without you" isn't nearly as impactful as "_we_ are going", using a hypothetical exclusive we.
As another example, Romanian has a relatively unique "presumptive" verb mood, which has a certain connotation that's hard to achieve without it. It can show curiosity and resignment at the same time (besides other things.)
The conciseness is the whole point. Using words to explicitly describe things can ruin the effect.
I'd push back on that, because you do get that passive-voice exclusive "we" in English, just as concisely - except it's expressed through stress pattern (as you indicate with your underlines), not vocabulary / grammar. I think that's exciting, because it gives English (as written) a lot of poetic ambiguity and (as spoken) a lot of performative - if you will - flexibility.
I've studied translation and what was fascinating to me was all the terminology that a language uses that's totally linked to the culture in which it's used.
For example, in Brazilian Portuguese, someone may say something like "show de bola" (literal translation: "ball show" using the borrow English word "show" for something like "great performance") even in seemingly completely unrelated context, like when you do well on your math homework :D. Because football parlance is ingrained so deep into the collective mind of the population that you can "transfer" what would normally describe a fantastic play by a football team to pretty much any other context you like.
I know Americans have a similar relationship with baseball-specific words, right (not a native speaker so I won't try to give examples)?
That's one of the biggest difficulties when trying to translate... how would you translate that to English? You may need to use a similarly local "slang", which requires you to know where the target audience is from exactly (USA - East / West coast?? -, UK - London, Manchester? -, Australia??) to do it justice... and even the ideal translation may need to even consider recent (and not so recent) events and local customs/sensitivities (an obvious example is words to describe races in the USA) and pop references.
>I know Americans have a similar relationship with baseball-specific words, right
It's true, there are a bunch of American idioms related to baseball. What's funny about this, however, is that baseball isn't very popular in America these days (American football and basketball are much more popular, and I think even hockey is now more popular), but baseball is actually quite popular in Japan.
In British English you can be "knocked for six", meaning you're stunned or shocked. It originates from cricket, where you score six points by knocking the ball out of the park.
My point is that it doesn't need to be. Chinese is concise, simple, single pronunciation per character, very little grammar. It has no need for verb conjugations, tense markers, 3 different writing systems super-imposed into one like Japanese does, and can still express highly sophisticated thoughts and meaning that English cannot
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.
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.
> 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?
It definitely feels more "straight to the point" to me than English, but I'm not the best person to ask. It definitely has some degrees of gradual politeness, not nearly as much as Japanese though.
> 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?
A little? There's definitely class consciousness, plus a whole slew of fun LARP words from the communist revolution, not that anybody uses that in Taiwan. Unsure about the PRC. But in any case people definitely talk to me differently when they find out I own a restaurant, which makes me a "boss," which makes me apparently worthy of some new form of address, usually more serious and having less of what I call "taiwan noises" (there's a proper linguistic term, I don't know it) aka the "aahs" and "oh's" that end a sentence, and the tendency to leave one's mouth open after speaking.
> 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.
This could just be ESL stuff. I probably sound like this in Mandarin. In fact I'm sure I do, I don't make Taiwan noises and I don't hedge so I probably sound quite abrupt and possibly even rude. I've asked and nobody's complained but I suspect it.
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.
>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.
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!)
> 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.
According to this paper 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.
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.
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)
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.
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.
There's an interesting piece of trivia regarding the title "War and Peace". The title in Russian is "Война и Мир", where "Мир" can mean both "peace" and "world", depending on context. However, there's some debate regarding which meaning was intended by Tolstoy.
I couldn't find anything about this on English wikipedia, but here's a rough translation from the Russian page:
Before the 1917-1918 language reform, "peace" was written as "миръ", and "world" as "мiръ". There's a legend which claims that Tolstoy initially intended to use the "world" meaning. Indeed, the second part of the epilogue has some thoughts about why the wars happen and how they affect the world as a whole.
Despite this, every edition of the novel published during Tolstoy's life was titled as "Война и миръ" (= peace), and the French version of the title as written by Tolstoy was "La guerre et la paix". There are different explanations of this legend. (explanations follow, can't be bothered to translate)
>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
> 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.
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.
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.
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.
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?
Everything is translatable, but some concepts are difficult to convey in a compact way in other languages, and Japanese has a ton of set phrases for situations that don't really have obvious counterparts in other languages.
As an example, the author mentions otsukaresama, which is the set phrase to use if you've been driving for a long time with guests and have reached your destination (and many, many other situations). But having the driver thank their guests for their patience is basically not a thing in English, so how do you translate that? The literal translation, "honorable tired lord" (~ thank you for your effort/patience), is completely incomprehensible.
I think that explanation proves perfectly that it can be translated.
Depending on the context, you'd want either explanation. If you're learning Japanese you'd probably want the explanation of how and when it's used, and the literal words that compose it.
But if you were translating a manga book and it used that phrase, you would probably just put "Ahh, we're finally here!"
I think there's just something of a bastardized use of the word "untranslatable". As long as a language can convey abstract concepts, you should be able to translate anything into it.
I think when people say "untranslatable", there's an implied "without breaking the flow or losing nuance" there. Of course you can in principle translate anything into any language, it's sometimes impossible to translate something without either a lengthy digression, or giving up on translating the full nuance. Poetry is notoriously hard to translate because of stuff like that.
I don't know that I would say this is a bastardization of the word, but I see where you're coming from.
I think we actually agree here: it's not "untranslatable", it just does not translate easily or well.
But regarding translating it as "we're finally here", that's not what it means: it's not an expression of satisfaction, it's acknowledging that to others that it's been a long trip for them.
I think in cases like this, “untranslatable” is really shorthand for, “cannot be translated without loss of information and/precision”. Of course words can be massaged to produce a similar meaning, but conveyance of the entirety of the original meaning can be somewhere between difficult and impossible, particularly when one must be succinct and cannot use sprawling sentences to dial in the message.
This is also why at its best, translation is a skill and an art. The same text can have significantly differing impacts readers depending on who’s translating.
Writers use “untranslatable” as a device to evoke a vague mysticism surrounding a language. IMHO it lends a flavor of superiority over the reader which I find gauche.
Phrases have properties other than their literal meaning. These can be both important to an author's intent, and hard to get across; in the same way that when someone fails to get a joke, you can likely explain it to their satisfaction but it's much harder to get them to actually find it funny - the punchiness and associations are part of what makes one laugh, and these become lost during extended explanation.
You can explain the meaning of a text, sure, and for technical texts that may be all you need, but if the goal is not simply the transfer of dry information and the result fails to trigger the intended associations and emotions, your job as a translator is not yet done.
> Phrases have properties other than their literal meaning. These can be both important to an author's intent, and hard to get across;
Personally I prefer footnotes in those situations. I'd rather have a few sentences that explain the nuance an author was trying to convey with their word choice that a native speaker would have picked up on rather than have a phrase thrown out entirely and replaced with some alternative localization that might be familiar in an effort to try to capture the same "feel" but barely comes close to what was actually said (if you're lucky).
Hundred percent. Language is nothing more than a "conveyance vehicle" to encode the physical phenomenon around us and our experiences of it. Unless you're a believer in some kind of parallel to the largely outmoded Waldorf hypothesis, nature is nature regardless of who is experiencing it.
To declare something "untranslatable" is essentially to imply that a non-native speaker is incapable of understanding it no matter how much they study the language. It deals in "touchy feely unquantifiable nonsense".
Noticed that everyone in here who proclaims that some things are untranslatable have yet to provide actual concrete examples of them (SRC LANG, TGT LANG, SRC SENTENCE)
The fact that you can have legal documents translated from one language to another is all the proof you need that if you're a good enough translator, all languages are interchangeable. You might need a whole lot more words or a whole lot less words depending on the source and target language though.
Here's an easy one: nearly any pun is literally impossible to translate while still being a pun. You can explain the pun by talking about the original language, but it can't be adequately translated.
A pun's "pun-ness" is like an "insider joke" for native speakers of the language, but the "pun-ness" of a pun doesn't transmit additional information about the ideas pointed at by the pun. Which is more important to the listener, the idea or the joke?
I get your irritation but I think it's also a way of signaling to the reader that the difficult word is heavily freighted with meaning that would be blindingly obvious to a native/fluent speaker but require a small essay to convey in English (and still wouldn't have the emotional impact) - linguistic operator overloading, if you will.
"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.
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
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.
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".
A text in the original language would evoke a certain combination of feeling and understanding in the reader.
A paragraph footnote might accurately convey the intended meaning but it won't evoke the same feelings. A good author or translator cares about both these things.
I don't speak Spanish so can't judge your translation, but I know that "you're great" and "you're the shit" feel different. The simplification drops a lot of implicit information and social signaling.
It's that emotional and cultural baggage layered on top of words that's hard to translate.
So for example in USA you can call someone "a benedict arnold". As an immigrant this means nothing to me. People tell me it means "bad". I understand the words, but there's no impact behind them because I lack the cultural background.
That's not a lack of cultural background, that's merely a lack of knowledge around who Benedict Arnold was, and apparently somebody doing you a disservice by explaining that it's a synonym for bad.
If somebody had first explained to you that Benedict Arnold was a well known traitor during the revolutionary war you'd have nearly the same context as your average American.
It's hardly what I would call untranslatable. I'm sure you could find some poor sod who the public education system failed so terribly that Benedict Arnold is as equally opaque in America.
I think what the writer means to say is there is a cultural aspect to language for words that don’t have direct equivalents in other languages.
Interestingly, Chinese colloquially refers to languages as the same as culture. For example, Chinese is 中文, literally Chinese culture; English 英文, English culture; Japanese 日文, Japanese culture. The suffix 文 signifies culture.
There is also the word 語 and 語言 to signify language; this is more formal but without the connotation of culture. But my point is culture is indelibly tied to language.
I hesitate to nitpick on you given your surname, but I haven't seen 中文 (or any other _文) referring to culture specifically, as opposed to language.
My understanding is that 文 (in this context) refers to the written language, whereas 語 and 語言 refers to the spoken language. Which is why we say 寫中文 instead of 寫中語. 語 and 文 often gets mixed up, but the nitty-picky-correct way should be what I described.
FWIW here in Hong Kong we have a term "兩文三語" which means two written (Chinese and English) and three spoken languages (Cantonese, Mandarin and English).
I was reading the making of at the end of Roadside Picnic and the authors wrote there was no word stalker in the Russian language until they wrote their book and introduced the concept and word to Russian language. Maybe more properly a neologism.
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.
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*
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.
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).
Que aproveche/aprovéchalo from Spanish. (May you take advantage/do benefit from something).
Aprovechar it's the literal opposite of desperdiciar, to waste.
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.
> [...] 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.
> 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.
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”?
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).
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.
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.
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).
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.
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
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.
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.
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]
>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
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.
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). 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). 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).
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.
> they mention furigana, characters that aid in reading Kanji characters ... There are many examples of similar use
TFA's main point about uniqueness with furigana was how it's occasionally used for out-of-band communication, like an author having a character say one thing while conveying to the reader that they mean something else. Do other languages have similar features?
Tones in non tonal languages do this, which can make tonal languages very difficult because instinctively you aren't used to tones being used for in-band communication.
Every language has various out-of-band features (gestures, etc). I was asking if any of them are similar to the (written) furigana usage described in TFA.
As others have said, this is common in Chinese writing. The unique thing about furigana is that it's typeset above/beside the kanji for the second meaning.
Perhaps the more interesting thing is how even songs will often use kanji for a concept but the sung lyrics are expressed in furigana, but IIRC Chinese culture has this too.
How is that common in Chinese writing? I haven't seen anything similar to gikun in Chinese. Outside of graded readers, I've not seen the pronunciation written above a character and in the case of graded readers, it would always be the expected pronunciation not a different pronunciation that carries a different sense. That's something I agree with the writer as being unique.
It is not common at all, but in Taiwan there is bopomofo, which is used the same way as furigana in Japanese – to indicate the pronunciation of Chinese characters. In fact, children in Taiwanese schools learn bopomofo first and only later proceed with learning the traditional Chinese characters.
Yeah, most of my son's children books are from Taiwan (we're in Hong Kong so use traditional characters too) and I do see bopomofo sometimes. But it's mostly the normal use of furigana, doesn't seem to be used to give another alternate meaning/pronunciation to the word.
Writing the pronunciation above a character is normal when the character is rare or has an unexpected pronunciation. For example recently 龘 was often written with the pinyin above.
Writing a different pronunciation with a different sense is also often seen on WeChat or in adverts. Often with a positive meaning in characters and a negative meaning in pinyin.
That felt to me to play the same role as "local footnotes" (those footnotes that sometimes appear not at the end of the page, but at the end of a short section or paragraph)?!
The nuance is a bit different. With what TFA is talking about with furigana, the implication is that whoever is speaking has said one word but pronounced it like another. That doesn't really make sense in English but with JP and kanji having lots of readings it's kind of a normal way to think.
So in some cases it's really no different from a footnote - e.g. in the JP version of Neuromancer there are bits where dialogue has the word for "immerse" with the furigana "jack in", and the effect is that the character has said the in-universe slang, and the base word is giving the reader a sense for what the slang means.
But if a character says "She's my friend" and "friend" has the furigana for "lover", or vice-versa, the effect becomes very different. You can think of it as one word being in the speaker's mind and another coming out of their mouth, or maybe as the character saying one thing and the author telling us another.
I'm not a native speaker, just fluent, but anyway that's how it works in my mind.
I think the way the author calls it "reading in stereo" is a very good picture. It's not a footnote or a liner note that explains the meaning of a word. Those live outside the text. It _is_ the word and it lives within the text. It's the inherent meaning of the characters painted on to another word.
No, that isn't a language feature. Japanese doesn't have that feature either. Note that a written text displaying this feature has no spoken equivalent.
Other writing systems do have similar features; it's common in Chinese internet culture.
Yeah the Chinese language simply uses parentheses for that purpose. The convention is that each Chinese character is placed into its own parenthesis unlike a regular parenthetical remark. For example, if the one thing being said is ABCD but the other meaning, most likely an ironic one, is WXYZ, the author simply writes A(W)B(X)C(Y)D(Z). Of course this requires the two to have the same number of characters, which is reasonably easy to do.
> "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.
My understanding of Korean (Hangul) is that the alphabet design is based on the shape of mouth in articulation, sonics, category, etc. of the letters themselves: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hangul#Letter_design
Hangul is an exception to many similar "historically true" patterns mostly because it was created so late. Hangul is more a single person's well-educated effort, not something that emerged over time from various local customs. The castle I grew up near is easily 150+ years older than Hangul.
I definitely found Chinese was much easier to learn to read at a minimal level.
Since the sounds per character are 1-1 and the semantics are very clean you can get a lot out of a text by looking characters up in the Unihan database. Words are usually composed out of the semantics of the characters and the grammar is pretty regular, more than some artificial languages.
> Since the sounds per character are 1-1 and the semantics are very clean you can get a lot out of a text by looking characters up in the Unihan database.
You probably got a lot of wrong meanings this way. The characters aren't 1-1 mapped to sounds and their semantics are profoundly context-dependent.
The characters are mostly 1-1. There are a few exceptions, but usually one is a lot more typical than the other, so reading it with the typical reading won't usually get you in trouble
While not as egregious as Japanese where characters can have 15+ readings, the number of exceptions certainly are not few. Below is a link to the official table of words with multiple pronunciations in standard Mandarin.
While I couldn't find any characters with more than three or four readings in this list, the Taiwan list (https://language.moe.gov.tw/files/people_files/%e5%88%9d%e7%...) has one character with five readings (著) and one with six (和). Still a long way from 15, though.
It's worth noting that the aforementioned list is the unified pronunciation list that was published in 1985 by the Ministry of Education. The reason why you see some words only having a single (unified) reading in that list is due to the necessity of having to unify them in the first place, although there are still quite a few words with multiple readings. Keep in mind that there was no official language of China until 1932. Without going into detail about how pronunciations evolved with the change of dynasties and how China actually has 300+ spoken languages, the need for a unified pronunciation stems from the fact that many people in China, historically and even today, do not speak standard Mandarin as their first language. In other words, prior to 1985 it was much more chaotic. If you want a more up-to-date comprehensive list of words with multiple readings (多音字) you can find it below (although this is not an official government list). I've linked directly to the common words of which there are 106 (although the page does not define what is considered "common").
The multi-sound characters are common in usage. For example 长 can be cháng meaning "long" or zhǎng meaning "to grow". 行 is xíng "to walk" or háng with no real single coherent meaning, appearing in compounds like 银行 yínháng "bank" and 行业 hángyè "profession". All of these are very common usages. In context they are essentially never ambiguous, but if you are going through character-by-character it's not going to make sense.
I think GP's assessment that Chinese is semantically clean and regular might not be completely correct, rather it's quite close to his primary that friction is much reduced compared to Japanese, or many others for that matter. It's very well known that Chinese grammar is super close to English for whatever reasons.
> It's very well known that Chinese grammar is super close to English for whatever reasons.
They are both felt to have gone through a lot of simplification. It isn't well known that they have similar grammars, for the fairly straightforward reason that they don't have similar grammars.
As an English speaker I find it frustrating that languages like German and French have so many irregular verbs and that you also need to keep track of grammatical gender which seems pretty arbitrary.
In Chinese though you find structures which are pretty regular such as "measure words" where you might write
yi zhang zhi
which means
one (piece) of paper
where the word "zhang" is used because paper is thin, but you might use "ke" for something round like a pebble or "tiao" for something long and flexible like a snake. This and a lot of of what I read in the grammar book comes across as rational to me.
Note that Latin is generally considered to have about four irregular verbs, possibly a few more than that depending on how you're counting.
A verb in Ancient Greek has six principal parts, which means that to correctly inflect it you need to memorize six more-or-less independent forms.† (They're often "less" independent, but sometimes they'll surprise you!)
By contrast, an English verb, except for the single verb be, has a maximum of five forms. (Not five principal parts - five fully-inflected forms!) So by the Greek standard, English has just the one irregular verb. That's not a correct application of the concept, but it is worth observing.
> I don't think French has examples as crazy as go -> went. I mean, there aren't even letters in common!
This is a suppletive verb. (That is, a verb in which some forms descend from one ancestral verb and other forms descend from a different ancestral verb.‡) Went was originally the past tense of the still-existent verb wend, in the same way that bent is still today the past tense of bend; wend has had to shift over to wended.
Not only does French have suppletive verbs, it has the same suppletive verb, aller [to go]:
1sg pres. je vais [< Lat. vadere]
1sg impf. j'allais [< Lat. alare]
1sg fut. j'irai [< Lat. ire]
The Latin verb is ire; it is minorly irregular but not suppletive in Latin. Suppletion is present in Latin anyway; the best-known example would be fero, whose third principle part tuli is taken from tollo. In turn, tollo uses sustuli [= sub- + tuli] as its third principal part, and then sustuli is left ambiguous between being the perfect form of tollo or of suffero [= sub- + fero].
Circling back around, we can note that while fero is one of the rare Latin verbs that comes with a warning that its conjugation is irregular, that's not because its perfect forms are taken from an unrelated verb. By itself, that would barely be worth remarking on.
† And this is a convenience for modern students. Actual speakers of the language would have thought about their verbs a bit differently - in a number of common cases, one of the principal parts is a form that doesn't otherwise exist in the language, which native speakers would never have considered.
‡ Suppletion as a linguistic phenomenon is not restricted to verbs; compare person -> people.
> 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.
There's an case that can be made that "written language" is somewhat of a misnomer and that spoken language is to "written language" somewhat as music is to sheet music (or as chess is to chess notation), and so spoken language alone belongs to the proper subject matter of lingusitics. E.g. Saussure:
> A language and its written form constitute two separate systems of signs. The sole reason for the existence of the latter is to represent the former. The object of study in linguistics is not a combination of the written word and the spoken word. The spoken word alone constitutes that object. But the written word is so intimately connected with the spoken word it represents that it manages to usurp the principal role. As much or even more importance is given to this representation of the vocal sign as to the vocal sign itself.
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".
Chinese also has furigana-like characters that can be written next to characters, bopomofo or zhuyin fuhao https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bopomofo, although only taught and used in Taiwan as far as I know.
As a tourist, maybe. Bopomofo (aka. zhuyin) is universal in all children's books until 3rd-4th grade, and is the most common keyboard input system used in Taiwan.
> Their use is similar to radicals in Mandarin, which is to provide additional semantic clarification.
Radicals are used in the same way for Hanzi (Chinese/"Mandarin") and Kanji (Japanese). Most of the Japanese characters are the same as the unsimplified Chinese characters. Furigana is used in a fairly different way, though. You occasionally see phonetic writing similar to furigana underneath characters in books that are used to teach children how to read. But it’s not nearly as common as in Japan, and it’s only (from what I’ve seen) used as a study aid for kids, not in the more creative ways the author discusses here.
The big difference as well is that the phonetic writing in Chinese isn’t part of the language itself. It’s like IPA (the dictionary pronunciation symbols) - they’re used to tell you how to write something, not to actually communicate. Kana (which furigana is written in), is actually part of the Japanese language.
Furigana are frequent in many technical and scientific texts, not only in children books, because such texts may include many words that would not be used in normal conversations.
This was already true for the books published before WWII, i.e. before the writing reform, even if those books contained much less hiragana than the modern texts (after the writing reform a lot of hiragana word terminations began to be written in order to disambiguate the readings of kanji for which native Japanese readings are chosen, even when the complete furigana are not provided; this post-WWII writing style may reduce the need for furigana).
While, as you say, there have been and there still are other writing systems that mix semantic elements with phonetic elements, or in which what is written does not determine completely the intended pronunciation (like in the systems that write only the consonants), there has been no other dead or alive writing system where these features are so extreme, causing a complexity and ambiguity even remotely comparable with the Japanese writing system. There is nothing romantic about this.
Apart from its writing system, the language itself would not be unusual at all, except for being a mixed language, especially in the technical and scientific styles, with a huge amount of words of Chinese origin that behave very differently from the native words, which is also a consequence of the writing system, through which these words had been imported.
Yes, author of the article obviously never tried to learn Sumerian, because the Japanese written system is quite regular and easy to deal with in comparison.
While the Sumerian writing system presents some of the same difficulties of the Japanese writing system, like many signs that have multiple possible readings and a combination of semantic signs and phonetic signs, the total number of signs and the number of possible readings for them are far greater in Japanese, so the Sumerian writing system is easier and more regular than the Japanese writing system.
The main difficulties of the Sumerian writing system are due to the fact that many of its rules had to be guessed, e.g. about where to use certain readings for some signs, depending on their context, because the last people who knew the complete system have died millennia ago, and such guesses are seldom completely certain.
In the comparison with Sumerian, Japanese is aided by the existence of native speakers who can always show the correct reading and meaning of a text (though many young Japanese can have great difficulties in reading any book published before WWII, because the writing reform has made drastic changes, replacing both many kanji signs and the furigana used for many kanji signs, so even where furigana are written they may not help enough a modern reader).
However, while the availability of native speakers eliminates the problems caused by not knowing the correct rules, that still does not make the Japanese writing system simpler than the Sumerian writing system.
I could easily write a wall of text about Polish honorifics, that can easily be used to express all the honorifics mentioned in the Wikipedia article, and much much more.
But probably nobody's really interested.
I mean, there are even ways how a bum refers to you, when they ask you for spare change.
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.
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
It has great illustrations that quickly get the idea across for Japanese onomatopoeia.
To give an idea of what it is like, here are a couple of example pages: <https://livedoor.blogimg.jp/akky_san/imgs/b/2/b21ad72f.jpg> <https://livedoor.blogimg.jp/akky_san/imgs/3/4/34cf6c82.jpg>
Quite fun to read!
Abbreviation, repetition, and stacking bits of words together are a big difference between natural vs formal Japanese language skills. It's very Lego-like that way.
I find it very similar to english though. Cows don't actually make a sound anything like "moo", and birds don't "chirp".
I think you're right on when you say it's cultural.
Another important thing that shapes these things in Japanese is just how old the culture is. So much is inherited from ancient times...
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.
Japanese isn't generally considered to have the equivalent of the 'l' sound from most other languages, and it rather has a sound that's perhaps somewhere between 'l' and a rolling 'r'. In romanized text it's generally written as 'r'. Transliteration isn't really unambiguous in the end, though, and there are multiple ways of romanizing Japanese, so while romanizing くるくる as 'kulukulu' doesn't sound like a very common transliteration, it may be possible.
Also, 'kuru' means 'to come', but I don't know if that's related.
English has a huge variety of terms for extreme tiredness: whacked, bushed, wiped out, worn out, drained, burned out, beat, knackered, fried, shattered, frazzled, zonked... must be the puritan work ethic or something.
We've even got a few onomatopoeia of our own: feeling kinda.. ugh.. meh... bleugh... I mean, whew, yeesh. Just... phew.
Maybe being tired is just the global human condition.
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?
My experience is that Japanese grammar isn't particularly complicated, it's just that it works backwards from Indo-European languages. Vocab is a pain because there's no common root of word origins to help the way there is between say English and French, but that's true for Chinese too I suppose. The writing system is kind of silly but it is what it is (and of course it doesn't matter at all for conversational fluency).
Sentence patterns are grammar. They are a major presence in English grammar, where e.g. in almost all cases you can only determine the subject of a sentence by the fact that it precedes the verb. Other languages are more explicit.
Fundamentally we use "grammar" to refer to whatever governs the meaning that appears in a well-formed sentence that isn't just part of the individual meanings of (the uninflected forms of) the words in that sentence. But this is not an entirely satisfactory definition, and grammar can show up in surprising ways.
Consider the difference between the verbs "look" and "see".
In Japanese, there is no difference. They are the same verb and they mean the same thing. Japanese learners do not understand why English speakers draw a distinction, and they struggle to use the correct word when speaking English.
In Mandarin, these verbs are also the same verb. But Mandarin speakers draw the same distinction that English speakers do - if they mean "look", they will say 看, and if they mean "see", they will say 看到, inflecting the verb with a grammatical suffix indicating successful completion. Although they do not use separate verbs, they have no trouble tracking the English distinction.
In English, obviously, the same distinction is drawn. But the mechanism is lexical; we treat these as being entirely different words.
I suggest that a Japanese learner choosing "see" when they mean "look" or "watch" is making a grammatical error, the same way that they'd be making a grammatical error if they said 看 instead of 看到 while trying to speak Mandarin.
I would suggest that choosing "see" when you mean "watch" is a vocabulary error, not a grammar error - you picked the wrong verb, but didn't use it in an ungrammatical way (eg wrong tense or mixing transitive and intransitive or getting subject and object the wrong way round).
Have you tried doing this? In general you can't swap these verbs without the resulting use being ungrammatical. The problem is that "watch" is durative (it takes time) and "see" is punctual (it takes no time).
"I see birds." / "I watch birds." (very different)
"I'm seeing birds." ~ "I'm watching birds." (semantic'ly identical, but the first one is unusual)
"I'll see you home." / "I'll watch you home." (second on is word choice error)
Try "I was watching the hawk as it landed in the tree."
> In Japanese, there is no difference. They are the same verb and they mean the same thing. Japanese learners do not understand why English speakers draw a distinction, and they struggle to use the correct word when speaking English.
Isn't that like 見る and 見える?
Circling back to the original discussion: I'd say that it's better to compare the past & non-past tenses of Japanese verbs:
- "Thank you" in the past tense ("ありがとうございました") conveys that you are thankful for acts already rendered and that you do not intend to impose further.
- "Thank you" in the non-past tense ("ありがとうございます") conveys that you are actively thankful, generally when the act in question is still in progress or otherwise not yet completely rendered.
This is a nuance that English renders trivial with a simple "Thank you", much like Japanese renders trivial the difference between a completed "look" and an incomplete "see".
Often in English, we have multiple words for sensory experiences to indicate how much focus is put into the action. “Seeing” a picture is less focused than “looking at” a picture. “Hearing” a song is less focused than “listening to” a song.
Got to be good-lookin', 'cause he's so hard to see
According to Wikipedia, "The lyrics were inspired by his relationship with Ono,"
Isn't that backwards? Like in the phrase "they look but do not see", which was what I had in mind in my first comment. Isn't that something like "見るけど見えない" ?
So one can look without seeing, and one can also see something without intentionally looking.
You can also use "look" to emphasize that focus does not exist; one of the sentences I've collected for interesting use is "He stared at the page, not seeing it."
In that case, there is no possibility of a page being overlooked or otherwise missed. What the sentence is telling us is that although "he" is directing his eyes at the page, his mind is on something else, so "seeing" never occurs.
The difference between "see" and "look" has nothing to do with focus. It is what I noted in the discussion of Mandarin - success. Seeing is the goal of looking.
Note that this phenomenon where native speakers have no trouble obeying a distinction that their language requires, but come out with total nonsense when asked why they choose one form or another, is completely characteristic of grammatical rules, and not characteristic of vocabulary selection.
I don't know Chinese but I've read that it's "subject-verb-object" like in English, so maybe that's why you found it easier than Japanese.
I got to fluency in Japanese in roughly 6 months to 1 year while living there. And it makes a big difference, if you use it daily they you can catch up whole sentences and understand the grammar logic later on.
A few examples from endless notebook on Japanese grammar notes I have from lessons - Various て forms, which have their own complexity and nuance. Spent almost a year on this - Volitional forms - X-なければ, conditionals, should/shouldn't - the "te-shimau" form - くれる / あげる - Conjugations for past tense for the 3 different verb categories...which were so hard to remember - しか - ばかり - ように - X-ところだ - X-ほうが-Y - Command forms, conjugations, etc.
Chinese sounds more like the exception than the rule.
I feel like if you're going to say "It just feels like an inefficient language for communication. Why does it have to be so complicated?" you should come for the Indo-European languages first; exoticizing Japanese as this bizarrely complex, weird language just isn't accurate.
In fact, even with the various things you listed, Japanese grammar is still relatively simple compared to most European languages, for instance. No genders, few tenses, only two irregular verbs, a word order system that's both pretty consistent (SOV) and flexible...meanwhile, a lot of what's called "grammar" in Japanese language pedagogy feels more like what European languages would call idiomatic expressions.
Even keigo, which is definitely a pain point...English, for instance, has all sorts of subtle ways of communicating tone and politeness, it's just not quite as explicit. In a way, the strict manner in which it's codified in Japanese makes those nuances somewhat easier to grasp.
There is nothing exotic about SOV vs any other order.
Latin (and all Romance languages French, Italian int al): SVO, German: SOV. English: SVO. All of them are complex enough that word order can be re-arranged and the meaning remains and often enhanced.
All human spoken languages are Turing complete (not enough room in this column for a wonderful proof I came across tomorrow). All humans have the same set of hardware and software (I hate the term wetware) and facilities. There are some variations in how they are used but in the end I refuse to allow for concepts that are "untranslatable".
I do allow that some people have, say, four colour vision instead of three and so they can experience a colour spectrum beyond the norm. My Mum had better than normal visual acuity - she could see much further than the rest of the family.
Regardless of sensors, we all have largely the same set of equipment to process and convey our ideas and notions.
Creative use of that equipment and deployment of the same should be applauded and encouraged. However, don't get yourself hung up on the idea that your ideas are somehow different or unique or even worse: better, due to some sort of racial alignment or language.
I'm a massive fan of vive la differance but I also like to see vive la meme.
Latin is definitely not SVO. Those roles are marked explicitly enough that they can occur in any order without really causing any problems (and in poetry, they do), but to the extent that an order applies to Latin, it is SOV.
This is one of the features that is felt to result from simplification. As you note, Romance languages tend to be SVO. It's also true that Mandarin is SVO where other Chinese languages tend to be SOV. And that creoles tend to be SVO even when every source language uses some other order.
So the theory does float around that SVO order is in some sense more intuitive than the others, and that's the reason for its appearance in Romance, Mandarin, and creoles.
However, all languages tend to be flexible, as required: "Gaul as a whole is divided into three parts" or as JC said: "Gallia est omnis divisa in partes tres".
This is what textbooks often say, but it's kind of a soft lie. Besides the typical する and 来る (which are strongly irregular), there's:
ある → ない (negative form)
行く → 行って instead of expected 行いて
くれる → くれ (imperative form) instead of expected くれろ
And a number of others.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Japanese_irregular_verbs
Edit: there are idioms that use あらず which is also a standard negative form of ある, like なきにしもあらず.
English is like a runtime typed language, and Japanese sounds like a statically typed language.
What you're saying is that Chinese is not inflectional. It's a pretty common trope that people equate grammar with verb inflection.
But Chinese does have grammar, it's just in the things that aren't as in-your-face as verb inflection is. Chinese has numerical classifiers, which don't have a clear corresponding feature in Indo-European languages (the closest I can think is the... I forget the term, but those silly terms like "pride of lions" or "murder of crows" which are more erudite wankfests than proper English grammar). There may be other features, but I don't know Chinese well enough to highlight them.
The things is that if you're learning an Indo-European language (and you already know on), you can largely import your native language's grammar and expect things to work. Take, e.g., the superlative construction: in English, it's "most" + adjective; in French, it's "le plus" + adjective. Word-for-word translation (including tense/aspect/mood as word-for-word, when you'd use past perfect in English is pretty damn the same time you'd use it in other languages) gets you pretty close to correct, you just have to fix up some word order issues, and some agreement issues, and you're done, so grammar instruction largely focuses on teaching those elements of grammar. It can actually be somewhat jarring when you hit upon a situation where the grammar isn't in close alignment: e.g., in English, we would say "it has been several days since I've seen you" whereas in French, it would be (doing tense-for-tense translation) "it is several days since I've seen you".
The focus in grammar instruction on the elements that are different from your native language rather than the ones that are the same can lead you into a false sense of what grammar is.
In English, you don’t say “give me three waters”, you say “give me three glasses of water” or “three bottles of water”. You can think of the classifier words as being that, but for everything:
三杯水 three glasses of water
十头牛 ten heads of cattle
两支铅笔 two rods of pencil
一条路 a strip of road
六只猫 six animal-units of cat
五个人 five “gè” (generic units) of people
Collective nouns.
Same with German, where you have declinaisons on the articles depending on their grammatical position in the sentence (den/der/dem/etc.)
So maybe Chinese is even simpler than Japanese, but I would still rank Japanese as a language having a "simple" grammar.
One unusual feature is that Japanese verbs conjugate on politeness/formality.
There's also te- forms, past forms, imperative, "I can verb" form, "I want verb" form, "I must verb" form, causative, etc, etc.
The low number of irregular verbs is a blessing though.
In reality few people use half of these, I would think
My favorite bit is that "to be" is two different verbs entirely in Portuguese, "ser" and "estar". Both Italian and Spanish also have this distinction, but in my (admittedly limited) experience with those languages, neither really makes the distinction as clear as it is in Portuguese
I mean, I'm pretty much a Chinese/Cantonese native user, so I can't be sure about that since I never "learned" the language in a classroom setting, but my impression is that this short period of learning grammar for Chinese language leaners is quite typical.
Grab a textbook for Chinese-as-second-language learners and you'll be surprised how many rules there are. You don't deem them as rules cause you've internalized them, as a native speaker should have.
This is plainly untrue. Speaking for Mandarin:
1. It's necessary to track tense in negative-polarity sentences because past-tense verbs are negated differently from present-tense ones. Technically this is accomplished by using an auxiliary verb, though in many cases that verb doesn't actually appear in the sentence where you're using it.
2. There are three aspectual verb endings, 了 (perfect), 着 (continuous), and 过 (experiential).
3. Verbs are inflected for possibility and impossibility, so that 动 is "move" and 动不了 is "cannot move".
> I finished the Chinese grammar in less than a week lol
Right.
You can get a sample of 80/20 here:
https://8020japanese.com/japanese-sentence-structure/
Pronunciation also isn't that hard (Kanto dialect, at least) compared to, say, French. The writing system is definitely the hardest part for me.
Your experience is not the norm, not according to research and not according to most people who've tried learning Japanese. Either you have a talent or you had a more effective method for learning, but it does undermine your judgement as something generalisable to others.
Let's hope it's the method and you share it.
I'm sure that's an over-simplified explanation.
If you looked up the texts in the most ancient Chinese (oracle bones, bronze inscriptions, etc.) they were basically characters stringed into very terse sentences with minimal grammar. IIRC typical "sentences" were like ~5-7 characters at most. They typically looked something like: "King Attack Barbarian. Good Luck? Win."
Then the classical texts (which had a status similar to Latin in East Asia) had sentences that were considerably more fully formed, but often still terse. Case in point: yesterday I was trying to understand a story about a man meditating in Zhuangzi, where it describes the sitting position as "隱几而坐" (the characters mean "hide", "chair/desk", "and", "sit"). So, was the person putting away the chair, then sitting (on the floor)? Or hiding behind the chair? Or possibly even hiding the chair with his clothes by sitting on it? Or was there a typographical error and another character was intended? I don't think anyone has a conclusive answer.
Modern Chinese (Mandarin) generally does not have these vague sentence structures and is much more fully fleshed out than classical Chinese. The same idea expressed in Mandarin would typically be 2-3 times longer than it would be in classical Chinese.
The Chinese language has evolved from extreme simplicity in ancient times to I guess moderate complexity today. Generally there was no simplification.
* note the plural -- while the written Chinese language was indeed the Lingua Franca of East Asia, the spoken language has regional differences culminating in the various regional Chinese spoken dialects/languages which are quite mutually unintelligible.
Anyway, expressiveness is not the same as complexity. It would seem Chinese was able to evolve a lot of expressiveness without adding too much unnecessary complexity, unlike more insular languages. The simplicity is also not exactly a firm rule, but a trend.
Thanks for the interesting examples. Would love to learn more Chinese.
For example, I only very recently learned (in Mandarin) characters' tones change when they form words. The number one (一) has 3 different tones in different contexts, what!?
Interesting. I feel exact opposite with Mandarin. My progress learning Japanese was incredibly fast, I could speak decently in 6 months and read after 1 year. But I always lose motivation learning Mandarin because it's so hard. Maybe it's because my mother tongue is closely aligned with Japanese in pronounciation and grammar such as conjugation.
"A reading room" means a room that is for reading. "A reading person" means a person who is reading. And "Reading the room" means, well, the act of reading the room. Or it could be used as an adverbial prose to modify the following phrase: "Reading the room, I stopped right there." Or it could be part of a progressive: "He was merely reading the room." Don't confuse it with "What he did was merely reading the room," which must be parsed differently.
All from a single form of a verb. You just have to figure out which one is intended from context.
...and the point is, it's just so natural to a native English speaker that they don't even stop and think about it!
Japanese is more difficult to learn than an English objectively.
One way to ask this objectively is to ask, for every non-native speaker, which languages are easiest and which are hardest to learn?
You can set this as a questionnaire and ask people to rank.
You will find that Japanese is among the hardest to learn amongst nearly all cultures.
I press “doubt” on the entire comment just due to this statement. There is no “objectively more difficult” for most of the major languages (but it exists), and especially not Japanese. It imo heavily depends on your first language.
Ask any friends of yours who speak Korean as their first language. They will likely find Japanese language to be extremely easy compared to almost any other language. Almost all of them, even those who had zero prior knowledge of Japanese language, will be able to understand bits and pieces all the time.
Russian was my first, but I can confirm that Japanese was signficantly easier than English for me in majority of the aspects, esp when it comes to basics needed to be somewhat functional in the language. Only two tenses (past and non-past), pronunciation makes perfect sense (if you know how to read a kanji character, you know how to pronounce it; cannot say anything even remotely similar about English at all), grammar overall doesn’t feel overly complicated, etc. However, from what I’ve observed, native English speakers seem to struggle with quite a few of those things, including pronunciation.
Hell, I would say Ukrainian would be just as difficult for a native English speaker to learn as Russian would be. For any native Russian speaker though? A person who speaks only Ukrainian can have a conversation with someone who speaks only Russian, and both of them will be able to understand at least half of what the other person is saying (despite speaking to each other in different languages, without having any prior knowledge of each other’s language).
All of this leads me to believe that there is no such thing as “objectively easier”, unless we know the person’s first/primary language.
Another anecdote, a Chinese friend of mine from college just passed the N1 with a perfect score. His Japanese education consists of a few classes in college, anime, and video games. He says although he thinks his English is more fluent due to him living in the States, Japanese was easier for him to learn.
Point being? I think it’s subjective.
The Japanese Language Proficiency Test does not include a speaking portion, which is the part of Japanese that Chinese people usually struggle with most - being kanji masters, the rest looks a breeze, lucky them! That tempers the point somewhat (somewhat).
And yes, in a lot of such surveys you'll find Chinese/Japanese/Korean sitting at the top of the list. Sometimes with Arabic.
Maybe Japanese is a really hard language objectively, but these surveys aren't actually showing that. What they are showing is that the majority of organizations that are doing these kind of surveys are populated by speakers of western European languages, who find Japanese "objectively" much harder than Spanish.
Chinese, Korean, Japanese and Arabic sit on top of the list because they are the most isolated away from English.
Koreans find Japanese extremely easy to learn. Vice versa.
Although I haven't put enough thought into the exact differences (and thus might be entirely wrong), I've felt the grammar is fairly intuitive (I presume due in part to my background of also speaking fluent Hindi).
I know it's a meme for people to claim to know japanese from watching anime, which is why I don't claim to be able to speak it, but over time I did pick up enough that I don't need subtitles anymore. I'm slowly working on reading with practice books, wanikani etc, will eventually figure out some way to practice speaking too.
And there's a pattern to them too in the end.
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
I understand some folks might find the Japanese exotic ways gripping, but I find the realities of the language much more interesting. I find the thought "there are many ways to express plurality" much more fascinating than "wow, these people can build very reliable cars without expressing if a car has a wheel or many wheels."
Car has 4 wheels. You can say many, few, a number, etc so the lack of plurality is overstated I suspect. You can use context to derive the plurality when none is given.
Maybe you prefer the "languages are like Turing complete" argument? You've heard of Russell's paradox and Godel's incompleteness, I am sure. Wouldn't a concept that escaped our capacity, be by definition unthinkable? Someone literally can't think of an example.
So maybe we should approach it a different way - is there any possibility for the "existence" of a concept that could not be successfully communicated at all, say between a human adult and a 5 year old child, or the the adult and an advanced alien being?
If concepts exist only in the mind, that are more than literal depictions of physical reality, surely here must be conceits thinkable in some systems but not in others. (I am probably just replaying Douglas Hofstadter here)
The alternative is that every language is kinda "complete" and I could spend three hours trying to explain what a Alpha-Centurion has one word for.
Edit: sorry our discussion is getting down-voted for bizarre reasons. Is there a kind of racist/anti-pluralist thing here on HN?
Similarly Gödel speaks of consistent proofs in logical systems. His incompleteness theorem talks about either a system has statements it cannot prove (but they can expressed!), or is inconsistent. Since natural language is probably not that consistent, the whole issue is moot.
It should be possible to show under some loose conditions that all natural languages are "Turing complete". Even the halting problem does not impose a problem -- we're really not interested in telling whether long-running computation halts in natural language. The expressivity is guaranteed by not insisting on strict consistency in language.
(PS: the situation changes where there is a mandate to only speak things that are "correct", for example, censorship. Now you get into the realm where something might be technically "correct" but the decision algorithm is imperfect and does not allow you to speak that truth)
> is there any possibility for the "existence" of a concept that could not be successfully communicated at all, say between a human adult and a 5 year old child, or the the adult and an advanced alien being?
I don't think so as long as the concept is constructed from physical objects or shared emotions/feelings.
There is a problem with something that can only be subjectively felt though. Let's say some alien can see the X-ray spectrum. How does the alien communicate to humans what the colors look and feel like?
But this is kinda off-topic.
This is the kind of thing I'm thinking of, it's an old philosophical chestnut in epistemology.
Godel and Russell are relevant because we can always look for meaningful statements that can be well formed under wone system but not under another.
> But this is kinda off-topic.
I had theory about that. It's so _on topic_ to be discussing the nature of language itself in a time when the biggest festival in town is "Large Language Models". Nobody so violently attacks a comment unless it hits a nerve, And I don't want to believe that my fellow HN commenters are simple racists. I think some people worry about basing the computing work on something as precarious and pluralistic as language. And they'd be right to.
I think you're focusing too much on language. If two humans (who experience similar things) can communicate, they'll figure out how to express themselves. Hell, they don't even necessarily need language.
The problem with a human and an alien trying to communicate is not that they speak different languages. The problem is that may experience different things (xrays, slitheryness, whatever).
I don't think a Japanese human is so different from a (say) English human.
An important point of agreement. Human experience absolutely transcends language (late Wittgenstein language games). Ninety percent of interaction being non-verbal has been a pet issue of mine throughout the post-pandemic descent into remote work, and a videoconf culture.
> I don't think a Japanese human is so different from a (say) English human.
Of course not. It's not the tangible differences that are of interest so much as why geographically separated groupings that are ostensibly the same beings, select and amplify certain features of human experience, and downplay others. That cultural development is complex and intricate. It encodes bits of history like old power relations, common achivements or sufferings. That information gets handed down by language as much as epigenetics.
The reason I am focusing a lot on language is that we're in an "age of language models". The dominant ones are English. But English is a particular way of structuring ideas about the world. This is something we should be paying close attention to, and almost any time people mention "AI" these days the topic is really about language.
BTW I am neither Japanese nor overly interested in their culture, except in a mildly curious and positive geeky way. It's probably coincidental that the last two topics I commented on here, which were "disappeared", involved Japanese culture. Probably. I'm sorry if what I said came across wrong, but it really gave me pause for thought about latent racist undertones here on HN. Probably best to forget about it now, but I'll be keeping an eye on that.
If from some sequence of sense perceptions, a child can learn to associate some word(s) with some concept, why couldn't one describe that sequence of sense perceptions in another language, and have the listener, by imagining those sense perceptions, grasp the concept?
Now, I don't want to be absolutist about that. Maybe some concepts get attached to some words through ways other than what sense perceptions pick out, somehow? Like, maybe when discussing theology or whatever, God intervenes and influences what meanings people learn for different words? (like, in a way that can't exactly be formalized and expressed in terms of math, sense perceptions, and any ideas that might be built-in to the human mind which one might intuitively associated with some combination of the previous two?)
But, outside of things like that, I would expect that meanings for words that are shared among an identifiable collection of people, can be explained in any of the most common natural languages.
(Though, maybe not so much for the meanings or aspects of meanings that are specific to one person.)
Unless there is some mechanism by which a meaning could be communicated from one person to another child-person, which can't be replicated with another language.
Now, that's all just for concepts between humans. For the Alpha-Centurion, perhaps they could have some innate ideas which they could learn words for, but which we would not learn to associate the idea with the word if we were given analogous sense perceptions, because we don't have those ideas built in to us? This also doesn't seem likely to me, but I seem to have less argument against it than I do for the same thing for the analogous thing between different human languages.
We should still be able to describe the statistics of how they use certain words together though, and how this correlates to the world, or at least, the world as described through those concepts that we can comprehend. And, perhaps we could also describe the statistics of what words they would use to describe the ways in which our description of how they use the words (including correlation with aspects of the world that we comprehend), falls short of the true meaning of the words.
There's an idea of "semantic primes", supposedly semantically irreducible concepts, that can't be defined except in terms of words that would be defined in terms of these (though, one might ask, "couldn't one pick some other collection of concepts as the base case instead?" and idk what the counterargument is), and which supposedly every natural human language has a word for each of these (though the word might not only mean one of these semantic primes/primitives, possibly having other meanings as well).
The idea goes that every word in any natural human language can ultimately be expressed in terms of these primitive concepts (of which there are supposedly like 65).
If this is true, then no idea in any natural human language would be entirely untranslatable to any other human natural language.
But, it does raise of course raise the question, "what if there was something else beyond these 65 or so, that we (humans) lack the concept of?" (which is I think similar to the question you were raising)
If there are irreducible "experiences" with corresponding symbols then it sorta makes sense to follow a mathematical analogy that other ideas can be 'factored' into them. But we don't know that for sure about neural computers or brains.
On the other hand the problem may be constructive rather than reductive. If ideas are like chemical compounds we may know that some exist but have no known path to create them. Using your analogy, that would be like trying to guess prime factors or some special sequence of operators to get from A to B.
I'm still left with the strong intuition that some groups build a repetoire of ideas ineffable in another tongue.
Saying "we're going without you" isn't nearly as impactful as "_we_ are going", using a hypothetical exclusive we.
As another example, Romanian has a relatively unique "presumptive" verb mood, which has a certain connotation that's hard to achieve without it. It can show curiosity and resignment at the same time (besides other things.)
The conciseness is the whole point. Using words to explicitly describe things can ruin the effect.
I know Americans have a similar relationship with baseball-specific words, right (not a native speaker so I won't try to give examples)?
That's one of the biggest difficulties when trying to translate... how would you translate that to English? You may need to use a similarly local "slang", which requires you to know where the target audience is from exactly (USA - East / West coast?? -, UK - London, Manchester? -, Australia??) to do it justice... and even the ideal translation may need to even consider recent (and not so recent) events and local customs/sensitivities (an obvious example is words to describe races in the USA) and pop references.
It's true, there are a bunch of American idioms related to baseball. What's funny about this, however, is that baseball isn't very popular in America these days (American football and basketball are much more popular, and I think even hockey is now more popular), but baseball is actually quite popular in Japan.
I'm not American either but a fairly obvious example is to "knock it out of the park".
> 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.
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.
It definitely feels more "straight to the point" to me than English, but I'm not the best person to ask. It definitely has some degrees of gradual politeness, not nearly as much as Japanese though.
> 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?
A little? There's definitely class consciousness, plus a whole slew of fun LARP words from the communist revolution, not that anybody uses that in Taiwan. Unsure about the PRC. But in any case people definitely talk to me differently when they find out I own a restaurant, which makes me a "boss," which makes me apparently worthy of some new form of address, usually more serious and having less of what I call "taiwan noises" (there's a proper linguistic term, I don't know it) aka the "aahs" and "oh's" that end a sentence, and the tendency to leave one's mouth open after speaking.
> 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.
This could just be ESL stuff. I probably sound like this in Mandarin. In fact I'm sure I do, I don't make Taiwan noises and I don't hedge so I probably sound quite abrupt and possibly even rude. I've asked and nobody's complained but I suspect it.
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.
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.
When I saw things like ㄱ for k/g or ㅏ for i I was in awe, like that's is so damn clever.
- 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!)
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.
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.
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.
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.
I couldn't find anything about this on English wikipedia, but here's a rough translation from the Russian page:
Before the 1917-1918 language reform, "peace" was written as "миръ", and "world" as "мiръ". There's a legend which claims that Tolstoy initially intended to use the "world" meaning. Indeed, the second part of the epilogue has some thoughts about why the wars happen and how they affect the world as a whole.
Despite this, every edition of the novel published during Tolstoy's life was titled as "Война и миръ" (= peace), and the French version of the title as written by Tolstoy was "La guerre et la paix". There are different explanations of this legend. (explanations follow, can't be bothered to translate)
https://ru.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/%D0%92%D0%BE%D0%B9%D0%BD%D0%...
So, in other words, adding in foreign words can add some je ne sais quoi
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.
https://openlibrary.org/works/OL5609329W/Gone_Fishin%27
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.
As an example, the author mentions otsukaresama, which is the set phrase to use if you've been driving for a long time with guests and have reached your destination (and many, many other situations). But having the driver thank their guests for their patience is basically not a thing in English, so how do you translate that? The literal translation, "honorable tired lord" (~ thank you for your effort/patience), is completely incomprehensible.
Depending on the context, you'd want either explanation. If you're learning Japanese you'd probably want the explanation of how and when it's used, and the literal words that compose it.
But if you were translating a manga book and it used that phrase, you would probably just put "Ahh, we're finally here!"
I think there's just something of a bastardized use of the word "untranslatable". As long as a language can convey abstract concepts, you should be able to translate anything into it.
I don't know that I would say this is a bastardization of the word, but I see where you're coming from.
But regarding translating it as "we're finally here", that's not what it means: it's not an expression of satisfaction, it's acknowledging that to others that it's been a long trip for them.
This is also why at its best, translation is a skill and an art. The same text can have significantly differing impacts readers depending on who’s translating.
You can explain the meaning of a text, sure, and for technical texts that may be all you need, but if the goal is not simply the transfer of dry information and the result fails to trigger the intended associations and emotions, your job as a translator is not yet done.
Personally I prefer footnotes in those situations. I'd rather have a few sentences that explain the nuance an author was trying to convey with their word choice that a native speaker would have picked up on rather than have a phrase thrown out entirely and replaced with some alternative localization that might be familiar in an effort to try to capture the same "feel" but barely comes close to what was actually said (if you're lucky).
To declare something "untranslatable" is essentially to imply that a non-native speaker is incapable of understanding it no matter how much they study the language. It deals in "touchy feely unquantifiable nonsense".
Noticed that everyone in here who proclaims that some things are untranslatable have yet to provide actual concrete examples of them (SRC LANG, TGT LANG, SRC SENTENCE)
The fact that you can have legal documents translated from one language to another is all the proof you need that if you're a good enough translator, all languages are interchangeable. You might need a whole lot more words or a whole lot less words depending on the source and target language though.
Here's an easy one: nearly any pun is literally impossible to translate while still being a pun. You can explain the pun by talking about the original language, but it can't be adequately translated.
I get your irritation but I think it's also a way of signaling to the reader that the difficult word is heavily freighted with meaning that would be blindingly obvious to a native/fluent speaker but require a small essay to convey in English (and still wouldn't have the emotional impact) - linguistic operator overloading, if you will.
"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.
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
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".
A paragraph footnote might accurately convey the intended meaning but it won't evoke the same feelings. A good author or translator cares about both these things.
It's that emotional and cultural baggage layered on top of words that's hard to translate.
So for example in USA you can call someone "a benedict arnold". As an immigrant this means nothing to me. People tell me it means "bad". I understand the words, but there's no impact behind them because I lack the cultural background.
If somebody had first explained to you that Benedict Arnold was a well known traitor during the revolutionary war you'd have nearly the same context as your average American.
It's hardly what I would call untranslatable. I'm sure you could find some poor sod who the public education system failed so terribly that Benedict Arnold is as equally opaque in America.
Interestingly, Chinese colloquially refers to languages as the same as culture. For example, Chinese is 中文, literally Chinese culture; English 英文, English culture; Japanese 日文, Japanese culture. The suffix 文 signifies culture.
There is also the word 語 and 語言 to signify language; this is more formal but without the connotation of culture. But my point is culture is indelibly tied to language.
My understanding is that 文 (in this context) refers to the written language, whereas 語 and 語言 refers to the spoken language. Which is why we say 寫中文 instead of 寫中語. 語 and 文 often gets mixed up, but the nitty-picky-correct way should be what I described.
FWIW here in Hong Kong we have a term "兩文三語" which means two written (Chinese and English) and three spoken languages (Cantonese, Mandarin and English).
文 has a broad meaning. Here it would be
https://en.wiktionary.org/wiki/%E6%96%87#Pronunciation_1 8. (written) language.
(as opposed to spoken language, which is what 語 is)
https://www.japanesewithanime.com
[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
[3] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mora_(linguistics)#Japanese
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).
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.
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 (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.
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.
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
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.
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.
糾す (tadasu) ascertain; confirm; verify; make sure of
糾う (azanau) twist (something)
>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...
Hieratic: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hieratic
Demotic: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Demotic_(Egyptian)
Coptic: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Coptic_script
[0] https://web.mnstate.edu/houtsli/tesl551/Writing/page4.htm#:~....
[1] https://scriptsource.org/cms/scripts/page.php?item_id=entry_...
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
For example, they mention furigana, characters that aid in reading Kanji characters (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). 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).
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).
TFA's main point about uniqueness with furigana was how it's occasionally used for out-of-band communication, like an author having a character say one thing while conveying to the reader that they mean something else. Do other languages have similar features?
Perhaps the more interesting thing is how even songs will often use kanji for a concept but the sung lyrics are expressed in furigana, but IIRC Chinese culture has this too.
Bopomofo is not used outside Taiwan, though.
Writing a different pronunciation with a different sense is also often seen on WeChat or in adverts. Often with a positive meaning in characters and a negative meaning in pinyin.
So in some cases it's really no different from a footnote - e.g. in the JP version of Neuromancer there are bits where dialogue has the word for "immerse" with the furigana "jack in", and the effect is that the character has said the in-universe slang, and the base word is giving the reader a sense for what the slang means.
But if a character says "She's my friend" and "friend" has the furigana for "lover", or vice-versa, the effect becomes very different. You can think of it as one word being in the speaker's mind and another coming out of their mouth, or maybe as the character saying one thing and the author telling us another.
I'm not a native speaker, just fluent, but anyway that's how it works in my mind.
I think the way the author calls it "reading in stereo" is a very good picture. It's not a footnote or a liner note that explains the meaning of a word. Those live outside the text. It _is_ the word and it lives within the text. It's the inherent meaning of the characters painted on to another word.
No, that isn't a language feature. Japanese doesn't have that feature either. Note that a written text displaying this feature has no spoken equivalent.
Other writing systems do have similar features; it's common in Chinese internet culture.
My understanding of Korean (Hangul) is that the alphabet design is based on the shape of mouth in articulation, sonics, category, etc. of the letters themselves: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hangul#Letter_design
This is known generally as "featural writing system": https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Featural_writing_system
Since the sounds per character are 1-1 and the semantics are very clean you can get a lot out of a text by looking characters up in the Unihan database. Words are usually composed out of the semantics of the characters and the grammar is pretty regular, more than some artificial languages.
You probably got a lot of wrong meanings this way. The characters aren't 1-1 mapped to sounds and their semantics are profoundly context-dependent.
https://zh.m.wikisource.org/wiki/%E6%99%AE%E9%80%9A%E8%AF%9D...
But yeah, even taking that into account, Japanese is a trainwreck compared to Chinese.
https://baike.baidu.com/item/%E5%A4%9A%E9%9F%B3%E5%AD%97/108...
They are both felt to have gone through a lot of simplification. It isn't well known that they have similar grammars, for the fairly straightforward reason that they don't have similar grammars.
[0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Analytic_language
In Chinese though you find structures which are pretty regular such as "measure words" where you might write
which means where the word "zhang" is used because paper is thin, but you might use "ke" for something round like a pebble or "tiao" for something long and flexible like a snake. This and a lot of of what I read in the grammar book comes across as rational to me.https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/English_irregular_verbs
The English language has many irregular verbs, approaching 200 in normal use—and significantly more if prefixed forms are counted.
https://en.wiktionary.org/wiki/Appendix:French_irregular_ver...
There are approximately 350 irregular verbs that do not conjugate in either the first or second conjugation
I don't think French has examples as crazy as go -> went. I mean, there aren't even letters in common!
Note that Latin is generally considered to have about four irregular verbs, possibly a few more than that depending on how you're counting.
A verb in Ancient Greek has six principal parts, which means that to correctly inflect it you need to memorize six more-or-less independent forms.† (They're often "less" independent, but sometimes they'll surprise you!)
By contrast, an English verb, except for the single verb be, has a maximum of five forms. (Not five principal parts - five fully-inflected forms!) So by the Greek standard, English has just the one irregular verb. That's not a correct application of the concept, but it is worth observing.
> I don't think French has examples as crazy as go -> went. I mean, there aren't even letters in common!
This is a suppletive verb. (That is, a verb in which some forms descend from one ancestral verb and other forms descend from a different ancestral verb.‡) Went was originally the past tense of the still-existent verb wend, in the same way that bent is still today the past tense of bend; wend has had to shift over to wended.
Not only does French have suppletive verbs, it has the same suppletive verb, aller [to go]:
The Latin verb is ire; it is minorly irregular but not suppletive in Latin. Suppletion is present in Latin anyway; the best-known example would be fero, whose third principle part tuli is taken from tollo. In turn, tollo uses sustuli [= sub- + tuli] as its third principal part, and then sustuli is left ambiguous between being the perfect form of tollo or of suffero [= sub- + fero].Circling back around, we can note that while fero is one of the rare Latin verbs that comes with a warning that its conjugation is irregular, that's not because its perfect forms are taken from an unrelated verb. By itself, that would barely be worth remarking on.
† And this is a convenience for modern students. Actual speakers of the language would have thought about their verbs a bit differently - in a number of common cases, one of the principal parts is a form that doesn't otherwise exist in the language, which native speakers would never have considered.
‡ Suppletion as a linguistic phenomenon is not restricted to verbs; compare person -> people.
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.
> A language and its written form constitute two separate systems of signs. The sole reason for the existence of the latter is to represent the former. The object of study in linguistics is not a combination of the written word and the spoken word. The spoken word alone constitutes that object. But the written word is so intimately connected with the spoken word it represents that it manages to usurp the principal role. As much or even more importance is given to this representation of the vocal sign as to the vocal sign itself.
Edit: Apparently there's a term for this view: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Phonocentrism
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".
Radicals are used in the same way for Hanzi (Chinese/"Mandarin") and Kanji (Japanese). Most of the Japanese characters are the same as the unsimplified Chinese characters. Furigana is used in a fairly different way, though. You occasionally see phonetic writing similar to furigana underneath characters in books that are used to teach children how to read. But it’s not nearly as common as in Japan, and it’s only (from what I’ve seen) used as a study aid for kids, not in the more creative ways the author discusses here.
The big difference as well is that the phonetic writing in Chinese isn’t part of the language itself. It’s like IPA (the dictionary pronunciation symbols) - they’re used to tell you how to write something, not to actually communicate. Kana (which furigana is written in), is actually part of the Japanese language.
This was already true for the books published before WWII, i.e. before the writing reform, even if those books contained much less hiragana than the modern texts (after the writing reform a lot of hiragana word terminations began to be written in order to disambiguate the readings of kanji for which native Japanese readings are chosen, even when the complete furigana are not provided; this post-WWII writing style may reduce the need for furigana).
Apart from its writing system, the language itself would not be unusual at all, except for being a mixed language, especially in the technical and scientific styles, with a huge amount of words of Chinese origin that behave very differently from the native words, which is also a consequence of the writing system, through which these words had been imported.
The main difficulties of the Sumerian writing system are due to the fact that many of its rules had to be guessed, e.g. about where to use certain readings for some signs, depending on their context, because the last people who knew the complete system have died millennia ago, and such guesses are seldom completely certain.
In the comparison with Sumerian, Japanese is aided by the existence of native speakers who can always show the correct reading and meaning of a text (though many young Japanese can have great difficulties in reading any book published before WWII, because the writing reform has made drastic changes, replacing both many kanji signs and the furigana used for many kanji signs, so even where furigana are written they may not help enough a modern reader).
However, while the availability of native speakers eliminates the problems caused by not knowing the correct rules, that still does not make the Japanese writing system simpler than the Sumerian writing system.
I mean, there are even ways how a bum refers to you, when they ask you for spare change.
Please original writer, either don't say anything about history if you don't know actual history or do better research.