Japanese

Japanese is spoken by virtually the entire population of Japan – some 127 million people as of July 2006. In terms of the number of native speakers, it is thus comparable to German and ranks sixth among the languages of the world. Yet, despite its status as a world’s major language and its long literary history, Japanese is surrounded by numerous myths, some of which are perpetuated by Japanese and non-Japanese alike. There are a number of factors which contribute to these myths, e.g. the uncertainty of the genetic relationship of Japanese to other languages, its complex writing system and the relatively small number of non-Japanese (especially Westerners) who speak it. One of the persistent myths held by the Japanese concerning their language is that it

is somehow unique. This myth derives mainly from the superficial comparison between Japanese and closely related Indo-European languages such as English, German and French and the obvious disparities which such work reveals. Another persistent myth is that Japanese, compared to Western languages, notably French, is illogical and/or vague. This belief, remarkable as it may be, is most conspicuously professed by certain Japanese intellectuals well versed in European languages and philosophy. Their conviction is undoubtedly a reflection of the inferiority complex on the part of Japanese intellectuals toward Western civilisation. After all, Japan’s modernisation effort started only after the Meiji Restoration (1867). Prior to this, Japan had maintained a feudalistic society and a closed-door policy to the rest of the world for nearly 250 years. However understandable the historical or cultural causes may be, widespread char-

acterisation of Japanese as a unique and illogical language grossly misrepresents the true nature of the language. In fact, in terms of grammatical structure, Japanese is a rather ‘ordinary’ human language. Its basic word order – subject-object-verb – is widespread among the world’s languages. Also other characteristics associated with an SOV language

realm of is a commonplace language, with five hardly exotic vowels, a rather simple set of consonants and the basic CV syllable structure (see Section 4). As for the claim that Japanese is illogical or vague, one can argue that Japanese is in

fact structurally superior to Western languages in that the language makes a clear structural distinction between two types of judgement known as thetic judgement and categorical judgement. The English expression The sky is blue, for example, would be rendered either as Sora-ga aoi (sky-NOM blue) or Sora-wa aoi (sky-TOP blue) depending on the type of judgement one is making (see Section 6). While the notion of uniqueness as applied to the entire domain of a given language is dubious, especially in the case of Japanese as pointed out above, each language does possess certain features that are unique or salient in comparison to other languages. For Japanese, these include honorifics, certain grammatical particles, some of which are distinct for male and female speakers, and the writing system. In this chapter, I shall attempt to include in the discussion those aspects of Japanese that constitute a notable feature of this language which I believe is not shared by many other languages and which makes learning Japanese difficult for many foreigners.