Why Japanese is my Waterloo

Esparanto por favor

The COVID horror show in India continues. On the personal front, my mother has been stable for the last few days and while we are not out of woods, I do feel like I can breathe again. I cannot thank everyone enough for the good wishes, shows of support, offers of help and general encouragement.

I hope that the Global Jigsaw gives you something to take your mind off the spiralling numbers and tragic stories of loss. This week’s post is written with advance apologies to the nation of Japan. As I state in the article, the real failure is mine.

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I hate learning languages. And although occasionally intrigued by etymological connections, my dalliance with dialects has been thrust upon me by circumstances, rather than inclination.

I grew up bilingual in English and Hindi. I learned Chinese in my 20s. I acquired a smattering of French in my early 30s and made my acquaintance with Indonesian as I approached 40.

While I am a fan of the accompaniments of language-learning: developing empathy and fighting Alzheimer’s being the top two, facing up to a new language always leaves me somewhat depleted.

 But it was only when I came nose-to-nose with Japanese that I was truly felled. In Japanese, I found my Waterloo, my lexical bête noir, my syntactical antagonist, my lingua franca(nstein).

Photo credit” Conor Luddy

At this point my East Asian languages-innocent friends always wonder why I make so much fuss about Japanese, given that I’d managed to speak Chinese. Doesn’t that help with Japanese, they ask.

Do you hear that sound, bereft of mirth, hollow and cough-like? It’s the laugh that I emit whenever asked that question.

Japanese does use Chinese characters, called kanji, as the basis for one of its scripts. However I speak, rather than read Chinese. I know a few characters, but infinitely less than the ones I don’t. And even the ones I’m familiar with are of scant help given that they are pronounced completely differently in the two languages.  Take the characters for ‘character’ itself as an example.  These are pronounced hanzi in Mandarin Chinese and kanji in Japanese.

Chinese

Japanese

It gets a lot worse. Japanese kanji almost always has two completely different readings. Some have as many as ten. The kanji for ‘mountain,’ for instance, is written the same way as the hanzi: 山.  But, while in Chinese the character is always pronounced shan, in Japanese it could be said as either yama or san.

  One reason for all this variability in readings has to do with Japan’s enduring identity crisis; a crisis that springs from its simultaneous indebtedness to China and its desire to distance itself from that debt.

 Hence the dual readings: one that borrows elements of the original Chinese pronunciation, called onyomi (for example san for shan) and the other that derives from “original’ Japanese, called kunyomi (for example, yama).

But my beef with Japanese goes well beyond this.

The Chinese language needs characters because it does not have an alphabet. This poses challenges when dealing with non-Chinese words with a phonetic universe that is broader than Mandarin’s limited one.

For example, it is impossible to write Pallavi in Chinese characters because there is no character that corresponds to the compound of sounds entailed. As a result, almost all foreign-origin proper nouns have to be rechristened in Chinese, so that they can be expressed by characters. America is Mei Guo, McDonalds Mai Dang Lao, the Olympics Ao Yun Hui.

But Japanese not only has an alphabet, it has two with 46 letters each: hiragana and katakana. I realized in my very first Japanese class that the language did not need kanji at all. You could write down any sentence in Japanese using just hiragana. Or katakana.

Katakana is an alphabet whose existence is even more egregious than kanji’s. It  merely repeats all the sounds of hiragana. Its only purpose is to indicate words of foreign origin, as opposed to “original” pristinely Japanese words. Arguably, katakana inscribes an ontology of race, Japanese and foreign, into the language itself.

As a foreigner, my name in Japanese is written in katakana as バ ラビ (Parabi), instead of in hirgana, which would have made it, ばらび. Consequently, my foreignness is folded into the fabric of the language.

You don’t even have to read all the letters in my name to know it is foreign. The slightest of glances would register the fact that it is written in katakana and therefore not Japanese. Katakana signals the foreignness of what is being said even before anything is said.

The useful thing about it is that unlike in Chinese, you can transliterate most sounds (‘l’ and ‘v’ excepted) from other languages. This accounts for all the ‘katakana’ vocabulary in Japanese. These are essentially Japanified English words. Japanese for baby chair, for example, is babychea, spaghetti is supagetti, pet shop is petto shoppu and gasoline stand is gasoriin sutando.

I soon realized that the kind of pidgin that English-speaking people think Chinese people speak, is actually katakana talk. It works by changing English word endings into vowels.

You could go to a restaurant in Japan, raise a finger and ask for caki. And you would have just intelligibly ordered a piece of cake. If you wanted your soup hot, you needed to ask for it to be hotto, and so on.

It was a bit disconcerting talking like this. Initially, I’d felt I was being insulting, as if poking fun at the Japanese accent. But in Japan, katakana talk is perfectly legitimate.

My earlier point remains valid, however. Foreign sounds including babychea, hotto and the whole shebang could be imported with the hiragana script too. Other then highlighting the ‘otherness’ of certain words, katakana is redundant.

 Which takes me back to my original polemic on kanji. Are Chinese characters necessary at all when you have a perfectly good alphabet (or two)?

I realize that even having these thoughts, forget articulating them in writing, risks bringing down the wrath of the Japanese nation upon my head. Reams have been written in Japan about the indescribable loss of richness in meaning that dispensing with kanji (Chinese characters would entail.

More reams yet exist on how the present combination of the three scripts, along with the convoluted rules governing when which one is used, allows the reader to absorb meaning in a uniquely directly manner.

Lest I start getting death threats from an assortment of Tanabes and Suzukis, let me clarify that my comments on dispensing with kanji, and even katakana, are with tongue firmly in cheek. Characters do have a beauty and meaning that is impossible to fully capture in an alphabet-based language.

 But, I have come to believe, tongue back in its place, that the Japanese language throws into relief another major contradiction that is characteristic of Japan: the desire for simplicity with the tendency to complicate.

In linguistic matters, the latter trumped the former, incontestably. There is seemingly nothing that the Japanese language doesn’t make more convoluted than necessary.

Chinese had been a superbly direct language: conjugation, gender, tenses were as fuss-free as a Marie Kondo-ed closet. For example, past tense was achieved by adding a le to the verb. ‘I go’ in past tense would be “I go le.”

Even with all the characters to learn, there was room in studying Chinese to move beyond the language and begin engaging with ideas. With Japanese, I felt like I’d been condemned to the end of thought. All there was space for in my brain were the different forms of verbs, and learning how to negate them.

Of course, I am aware that blaming the language for being difficult is probably only an excuse for my own fallibilities. But surely I am not alone in being thus fallible.

There are, for example, a million ways of counting things in Japanese. OK, maybe not a million, but it sure feels like that. Dear reader, I kid you not, in Japanese the “one” in one person, one-year-old, one umbrella, one coffee, one ticket, one month etc is different in every case.

You might well imagine that switching to learning Spanish has been somewhat of a relief. Funnily enough, Spanish has its own version of katakana talk, where you add vowel endings to English words. Person is persona, frequent is frequente, adult is adulto, much is mucho and so on.

Also, while the number “one” might remain constant in Spanish, the language has its own exasperating idiosyncrasies. The English equivalent of “to become,” for example, requires weeks of study, because depending on what the person/object is becoming determines which verb needs to be used.

Hacerse if you are becoming Buddhist or Communist, but volverse if you become scared or crazy; ponerse if you become furious or ill, and quedarse if you become blind or deaf. And on and on.

I think the conclusion of this post has to be that Esperanto needs to make a come back.

Ĝis la venonta semajno,

Pallavi

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