Category Archives: language

by | 23 September 2010 · 10:46 am

Remnants of Early Baltic Settlers

From The Baltic: A New History of the Region and Its People, by Alan Palmer (Overlook, 2006), pp. 16-17:

Neither anthropology nor philology is an exact science and few today would follow the nationalistic scholars of the nineteenth century who equated race and language when seeking the origin of a country. But new techniques can revive familiar speculation while mellowing past prejudice. In the early 1980s the Finnish historian Matti Klinge argued that research into hereditary blood groups showed that three-quarters of the Finnish population were of western descent and only a third of eastern origin. He pointed out, however, that the linguistic structure of the Finnish language has remained more markedly eastern in character than western. Is this perhaps because the Finns and their kinsfolk south of the Gulf in Estonia are peoples with traditions of folk epic handed down orally? Their languages were shaped before the coming of written words. Finland’s Kalevala and Estonia’s Kalevipoeg survived as tales of patriot derring-do in taming both the forces of Nature and the evil spirits conjured up in a primeval wilderness of lake and forest.

By the end of the Scandinavian Bronze Age (circa 500 BC) other migrants felt drawn towards the setting sun, like the Finno-Ugrian before them. They came mainly from the south-east, to form compact units along the Baltic’s southern shores, with their communities set apart by forests, bogs and rivers. Among them were Prussian tribes astride the Vistula, the Polame on the Warta (farther inland, around modern Poznan) and a group of Lithuanian tribes around the river Niemen (Nemanus) and its tributaries. Over the following centuries tribal chiefs, seeking effective means to defend their homesteads, created what were in effect embryonic nations across these marchlands. Some tribes, like the Salic Franks and the Burgundians, provided a nucleus for historic kingdoms established after the collapse of the Roman Empire in the West. Others bore names that recur in successive periods of northern Europe’s history. Thus the Cours (or Curonians), a tribe who lived in the peninsula between the central Baltic and the Gulf of Riga, survived as a separate people until the late thirteenth century and gave their name to the Duchy of Courland (Kurzeme, or in German Kurland) which between 1561 and 1795 enjoyed semi-independence within the Polish Commonwealth. The Cours’ neighbours, the Zemgal tribe (Semigallians), also maintained a distinctive corporate existence until 1290, farming the low-lying region west of the Daugava river that later formed the eastern part of the Courland Duchy.

Both Kurzeme and Zemgale are back on the map in today’s atlases: they form administrative divisions in modern Latvia. Three of the Western Slav peoples survive as member states of the European Union: Poland; the Czech Republic; Slovakia. Other tribes, once famed and feared for their fighting qualities, have sunk without trace. Among them were most of the Wends, the Western Slavs who settled between Kiel Bay and the Vistula Spit and may themselves be subdivided into Wagrians, Abotrites, Polabians and Rugians. But two of the ‘lost’ Wendish peoples are still extant, though few in number: some 50,000 Sorbs of Lusatia now live between the Oder and the Elbe and there is an even smaller community of Kashubs, Pomerania’s original ‘dwellers by the shore’. Like the people of Wales, Cornwall, Brittany and Provence, the Sorbs and Kashubs owe their linguistic survival to academics in the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries who defied the exclusiveness of master nations to fire the embers of a dying culture. By contrast, the Setus, a Finno-Ugrian people who settled around Lake Peipsi, were too isolated to find scholarly champions in the West. No more than 7,000 Setu survive, their communities separated today by the geographically ill-defined border that provides a frontier between Estonia and Russia.

I find two of Palmer’s linguistic explanations almost laughable.

(1) Are Finns and Estonians the only “peoples with traditions of folk epic handed down orally,” the only peoples whose “languages were shaped before the coming of written words”? Does he doubt that Norse sagas were orally transmitted long before they were written down? Does he realize that legions of illiterates have done far more over the millennia to influence the structures of the languages they speak than literates have?

(2) Were academics the saviors of Welsh, Cornish, Breton, Occitan, Sorbian, and Kashubian? Are those languages only spoken in classrooms? If so, then they are not yet saved. Academics may have documented those languages and first reduced them to writing, but they haven’t saved them until people pass them on to their children in a wider variety of settings.

As a historian, Palmer depends crucially on written records to construct his view of the world, but his imagination also seems hemmed in a bit too much by that literacy, as if nothing noteworthy exists until it exists in writing.

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Filed under Baltics, Finland, Germany, language, migration, nationalism, Poland, Scandinavia

by | 16 September 2010 · 6:54 am

The Strength of Edo-period Culture

From Edo Culture: Daily Life and Diversions in Urban Japan, 1600–1868, by Nishiyama Matsunosuke, trans. and ed. by Gerald Groemer (U. Hawai‘i Press, 1997), pp. 8-9:

The strength of Edo-period culture is not to be found in extant artifacts of the era. Rather, its strength lies chiefly in its spectacular breadth and diversity. This was a period of unprecedented cultural prosperity. Even the general public took part in leisure pursuits and played an active role in the creation of new cultural forms. The average commoner read books or visited the theater; some even wrote haiku verses and senryū (seventeen-syllable comic verse) or performed musical genres such as gidayū, kato bushi, shinnai, or nagauta. Others went on pilgrimages sponsored by religious associations (kō) and toured distant places. The Edo period saw a rise in the quality of culinary fare that commoners consumed; clothing and housing too showed marked improvement. Even the poor managed occasionally to indulge in the luxury of purchasing a “custom-made” comb or an ornamental hairpin. The demand for such cultural items fostered the development of a highly refined handicraft industry. Never before had there been such an extraordinary variety of hand-made cultural artifacts in Japan.

Even in remote areas in the countryside or on distant, isolated islands, inhabitants cultivated rare varieties of flowers and trees and marketed unusual rocks or curiosities. As Suzuki Bokushi (1770-1842) noted in his Akiyama kikō (Autumn Mountain Travelogue, 1831), people in every corner of the land were busy manufacturing local specialties. Such articles were being produced, one by one, by thirty million people. By the late Edo period this activity had stimulated an unprecedented development of the transportation network. Mountain roads, waterways, and sea routes were extended in all directions to every nook and cranny of the country. Indeed, the construction of footpaths during the late Edo period can be seen as a kind of symbol of this golden age of handicraft culture.

No doubt, Japan today boasts a high level of culture. But the price has been high as well: severe environmental pollution and the wholesale destruction of nature. Until the end of the Edo period, red-crested cranes could still be seen soaring through the skies over the city; swans and geese flocked to Shinobazu Pond in Ueno Park. Foxes and badgers were found everywhere, and cuckoos (hototogisu) flourished in such numbers that their song was considered a nuisance. Even during the late Meiji period the water of the Sumida River was clean enough to be used for brewing tea while boating. Human activity imparted only minimal damage to nature. Viewed in this way, Edo-period culture seems almost ideal.

Certain elements of the Edo-period cultural heritage were vulgar, no doubt, but a more comprehensive view of the period reveals an almost infinite number of admirable qualities. Nevertheless, after the Meiji Restoration of 1868, governmental policies of modernization and westernization dictated a wholesale rejection of the preceding feudal era. Even the best elements of Edo-period culture were deemed outdated and vulgar and were thought to require prompt and thorough extirpation. That the true value of Edo-period culture could not yet be properly assessed had much to do with the lack of any inquiry into its origins and actual conditions. Recent research, however, has shown that Edo-period culture was outstanding in its own way and not at all inferior to the culture of earlier or later periods.

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by | 6 September 2010 · 5:00 pm

Wordcatcher Tales: Birds for Trains

“So what is a shirasagi, anyway?” I asked the JR clerk in Nagoya Station who had initiated our rail passes and booked reservations on the Shirasagi Limited Express to Hida Takayama. “Could it be a white rabbit (shira- ‘white’ + usagi ‘rabbit’)?” She had no idea. But I should have known it would be a bird.

Before the advent of the Shinkansen bullet trains in 1964, the most famous limited express train along the Tokaido Main Line was the Tsubame ‘swallow’. In fact, the Japan National Railways (JNR, 国鉄) used a swallow logo on its bus system and called its professional baseball team the (Kokutetsu) Swallows. Two other notable limited express trains we rode in those days were the Hato ‘dove’ and the Kamome ‘seagull’.

Most express trains were named for destinations, like the Miyajima Express that I used to ride home to Hiroshima from boarding school in Kobe, but the fastest limited express trains tended to be named for birds. The first bullet trains went for even speedier names: Kodama ‘echo’ (speed of sound), Hikari ‘flash’ (speed of light), and the latest, postmodern-sounding Nozomi ‘desire’. But regional bullet trains have revived a lot of the old limited-express bird names: Hayabusa ‘peregrine falcon’, Kamome ‘seagull’, Toki ‘crested ibis’, Tsubame ‘swallow’.

On our latest trip, we were in the Hokuriku region, off the Shinkansen grid, where the fastest trains are traditional limited expresses, so we encountered several bird-named trains that were new to me. Shirasagi can be translated ‘snowy egret’ (Egretta thula), although sagi labels the whole family of herons (Ardeidae), as in aosagi (lit. ‘blue heron’) ‘gray heron’ (Ardeia cinerea).

Coming back to Kanazawa from Nanao on the Noto Peninsula, we rode the Sandābādo/Thunderbird, whose name left me a bit nonplussed until we paired it with Raichō ‘rock ptarmigan’ (Lagopus muta), a limited express that runs from Osaka through Kanazawa to Toyama. Thunderbird began operations as Super Raichō (Thunderbird), and Raichō (雷鳥) literally translates as ‘thunder bird’. The rock ptarmigan is a symbol of Toyama Prefecture’s Tateyama, one of Japan’s 三霊山 Sanreizan ‘Three Holy Mountains’, along with Fujisan and Hakusan. (Doesn’t the Rock Ptarmigan sound like a good name for a smaller version of Ford’s SVT Raptor?)

Another limited express we rode between Kanazawa and Toyama was the Hakutaka, whose name is always written in kana, not kanji, and whose train cars carry an emblem with the English words “White Wing.” The name evokes an old Tateyama legend about a white hawk (白鷹, which would normally be pronounced shirataka), but also evokes the name of a long-distance train, Hakuchō (‘white bird’ =) ‘swan’ that used to run all the way from Aomori (where the swan is the prefectural bird) via Ueno and Kanazawa to Osaka. The name Hakutaka was independently used for trains running on the leg between Ueno and Kanazawa until that leg was disrupted by the extension of the Shinkansen toward Nagano and Niigata in 1982. In 1997 it was revived for limited express trains running along the Japan Sea coast between Fukui and Niigata prefectures.

The first Japanese long-distance trains to receive names seem to have been the Fuji and Sakura, which began running between Tokyo and Shimonoseki in 1912, but were not named until 1929.

The first train named Hato ‘dove’ was an express on the South Manchuria Railway (満鉄 Mantetsu) running between Dalian and the new (in 1932) Manchukuo capital, 新京 Shinkyō (now Changchun). The limited express on that route was named あじあ Ajia ‘Asia’.

POSTSCRIPT: The first trains named Hikari and Nozomi were Mantetsu expresses running between Busan (釜山) and Shinkyō (新京). (Japanese Wikipedia offers very detailed coverage of Japanese train systems, past and present.)

And, speaking of Imperial Japan, many of the same bird names were used for Hayabusa-class torpedo boats built between 1900 and 1904 that served so well in the Battle of Tsushima in the Russo-Japanese War.

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by | 4 September 2010 · 11:40 am

Wordcatcher Tales: Two Lakes Ōmi, Near and Far

Japan’s largest freshwater lake, 琵琶湖 Biwa-ko ‘biwa lake’, got its current name from its elongated shape, which vaguely resembles that of the biwa, a Japanese lute, sharper at one end, rounder at the other. But the older name for the lake and the land around it (now Shiga Prefecture) was Ōmi 淡海 < awaumi ‘light (= freshwater) sea’. (Compare the native Japanese reading for 湖 ‘lake’ mizu-umi lit. ‘water-sea’ and the Sino-Japanese compound 淡水 tansui ‘freshwater’).

The older name, Ōmi, still shows up in a host of local place names—Ōmi-Hachiman (近江八幡), Ōmi-Imazu (近江今津), Ōmi-Maiko (近江舞子), Ōmi-Shiotsu (近江塩津), etc.—but nowadays it’s always written as 近江 lit. ‘near-bay/inlet/river’. (江 is the e of 江戸 Edo lit. ‘bay-door’.) What’s up with that?

Well, it turns out there was another notable freshwater lake near Hamamatsu in what is now Shizuoka Prefecture. To the Kinki hegemons of the Nara and Heian periods, it was the 遠つ淡海 Tōtu-ōmi ‘far freshwater sea’, later shortened to 遠江 Tōtōmi ‘far waters’, which was also the name of the surrounding province.

The lake closer to the capital was distinguished as the 近つ淡海 Tikatu-ōmi ‘near lake’, shortened in writing to 近江 ‘near waters’, but pronounced simply Ōmi, since it was, after all, The Lake (like ‘The City’).

Nowadays, the two lakes are no longer sibling rivals. A major earthquake in 1498 breached the narrow shoreline that separated Lake Tōtōmi from the ocean, leaving its waters brackish, though still very productive. It now goes by the rather prosaic name Lake Hamana (浜名湖 Hamana-ko ‘shorename-lake’), while Lake Ōmi sports a more poetic moniker, Lake Biwa: 琵琶湖 Biwa-ko ‘lute lake’.

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by | 1 September 2010 · 5:06 am

On Rewriting While Translating

From Edo Culture: Daily Life and Diversions in Urban Japan, 1600–1868, by Nishiyama Matsunosuke, trans. and ed. by Gerald Groemer (U. Hawai‘i Press, 1997), pp. 3-4:

In translating I have striven to remain faithful to the spirit rather than the letter of Nishiyama’s prose. Some therefore may wish to label this book an adaptation rather than a translation. Nishiyama writing style is stiff and often thrives more on a general tone of enthusiasm for the subject than on logical connections between sentences or paragraphs. Such a style, informed by the conviction that a good point bears repetition and that the relevance of an example need not be clarified until the very end of a section, entirely rules out literal translation. I have thus pruned judiciously, rewritten, rethought sentence and paragraph order, but refrained from adding anything substantially new to Nishiyama’s writing. The only exceptions to this rule are a few brief definitions of terms unlikely to be known to a nonspecialist Anglophone readership and, moreover, the endings of Chapters 7, 8, and 9. In the original, these chapters simply stop when Nishiyama has run out of things to say. Such a writing style, common enough in Japanese academic prose, often irritates Western readers, who tend to prefer more synthetic conclusions. In these chapters, therefore, I have added summaries of Nishiyama’s major points, thereby bringing the chapter to a smoother close while not adding anything new.

Since the studies translated here were not conceived by Nishiyama as forming one volume, much material is repeated. In some cases I have simply excised such duplication. The largest cut occurs in Chapter 6. Here I have eliminated or moved to other chapters most of the information that is presented in the first half of the original study, which repeats much of what has already been translated as Chapters 1 through 5. All major changes have been discussed with Professor Nishiyama, who himself occasionally suggested alterations and corrections.

Documentation in the original studies is often lacking and sometimes erroneous. In an effort to complete as many references as possible, I have started from scratch. Unless otherwise indicated, therefore, all notes are by the translator. Rechecking sources has allowed me to uncover several errors and misprints, which have been silently corrected after confirmation by the author.

The selection of illustrations and maps, the transcription of musical examples, and the production of the glossary are also my responsibility. Other editorial additions include dates and footnoted biographical information on individuals, details of geographical location of small towns and villages, variant names and performance dates of kabuki plays or musical works, and dates of publication of books. Names of individuals have presented a special problem, since Nishiyama endows the use of pseudonyms (geimei) with a special significance. Edo-period writers, actors, musicians, and artists often assumed a large variety of pseudonyms, forcing the translator to select one of several names for the sake of consistency. I have generally selected the name most likely to appear in biographical dictionaries.

Translating the titles of books or kabuki plays presents yet other obstacles. Titles of novels, plays, or collections of poetry are often the source of cryptic puns—and in cases where a work no longer exists, the exact reading and meaning of the title are anybody’s guess. For extant books I have usually followed the reading of titles found in the Kokusho sōmokuroku. Kabuki titles are given in the version most likely to appear in kabuki dictionaries; alternative titles are given in the notes. A rough translation of a title’s most obvious meaning follows the original in parentheses; when such a translation appears in italics, this indicates that the book has been published under this title in English. The reader should note that the names of Buddhist temples end with the syllables ji, in, tera, or dera; Shinto shrines often end with sha, gu, or miya.

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by | 10 July 2010 · 1:15 pm

Wordcatcher Tales: Akasuri

At the end of a long day’s excursion last summer that included being caught in a downpour in Kyoto’s Arashiyama district, my friend and host suggested we visit her favorite local bathhouse back in Osaka. I hadn’t been to a Japanese public bathhouse in many years, and this was the fanciest one I have ever been to.

It had a noisy game room below but a large expanse of many different indoor and outdoor pools on the top floor. I sampled most of them during the hour I had until my appointment for a massage: the hot tub, the cold tub, the large outdoor pool under the dark sky, and the line of individual tubs, quickly retreating from the first one I tried, which greeted my entering leg with a mild but unexpected electrical charge. There weren’t many of us in the men’s side; I often had the tubs to myself. Finally, worried about missing my appointment, I sat marinating in the rosemary herbal pool, which had a clock on the wall big enough for me to read without my glasses.

垢擦り akasuri ‘cloth/pumice/loofah for rubbing body’ (lit. ‘scurf-chafing’) – My friend, who went in the women’s side, had chosen the basic akasuri exfoliating rubdown, rather than the Swedish or shiatsu or other massage. I had never tried that one, so I chose the same. She had told me that the masseuses on the women’s side were middle-aged ethnic Koreans. In fact, I would guess the bathhouse complex itself was owned by members of Osaka’s huge ethnic Korean population.

The masseuses on the men’s side were also sturdy middle-aged ladies. I didn’t ask their age or ethnicity. In fact, I was far too relaxed to be as inquisitive as I often am in Japanese restaurants. There was only one other man on a massage table when I showed up, and a different one on another table by the time I finished. In the meantime, the masseuse abraded every inch of my skin—apart from face and genitals (always carefully covered by a washcloth)—first with an astringent, then with a light oil.

By the end my skin felt as smooth as it ever has in my adult life. Although I was a little bit too raw in a few places, I felt ‘grime-free’, that is, 垢抜け akanuke ‘elegant, urbane’. A proper chafing leaves one more refined, as in 人擦れ hitozure ‘(person-abrasion =) sophistication’, even too refined, as in 悪擦れ waruzure ‘(bad-abrasion =) oversophistication’. But improper chafing can leave a 擦り傷 surikizu ‘(scrape-wound =) abrasion, scratch’ or a 床擦れ tokozure ‘bedsore’.

The more generic term for traditional ‘massage’ or ‘masseuse, masseur’ in Japanese is 按摩 anma lit. ‘press-rub’. The two kanji for ‘rub’ and ‘scrape’ combine in the Sino-Japanese compound 摩擦 masatsu ‘friction’, as in 摩擦音 masatsuon ‘fricative sound’.

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by | 8 July 2010 · 9:49 am

Wordcatcher Tales: Noukanshi, Encoffiner

納棺師 noukanshi ‘encoffiner’ (lit. ‘closing-coffin-master’) – I learned both a new Japanese word and a new English gloss from watching the Japanese movie, Departures (おくりびと Okuribito lit. ‘sender, dispatcher’, 2008), about a cellist who became an encoffiner. I initially scoffed at its premise and was not overly impressed by its Academy Award for Best Foreign Language Film in 2009, but decided to give it a try, as much for its potential musicality as its morbidity.

It far exceeded my expectations on both counts. Although quintessentially Japanese in so many ways, it could be adapted to every other human culture on earth—even Neanderthals, who buried their dead with some indications of ritual. The original cello score by “Joe Hisaishi” (久石 譲 = Kuishi Joe < “Quincy Jones”) was an added bonus, as was the interview with the director, so full of surprises. Highly recommended, despite being recent and award-winning!

In Japan, the 納棺師 noukanshi ‘encoffiner’ is hired by the 葬儀屋 sougiya ‘funeral director’. Not so long ago (perhaps even nowadays), anyone who was hired to handle dead bodies, or even leather, would have been of outcast status, although until recently the family of the deceased would more likely have been responsible for preparing the body.

In fact, a more traditional, less exalted, and more sexist term for the same role appears in the 1996 novel by Aoki Shinmon that inspired the film, 納棺夫日記 Noukanfu nikki (‘encoffiner diary’). The 夫 fu on the end of 納棺夫 noukanfu literally means ‘man, husband’ (in the latter meaning usually pronounced otto or fuu) but implies a manual laborer, as in 田夫 denpu ‘peasant (field hand)’, 農夫 noufu ‘farmer (farm hand)’, 牧夫 bokufu ‘herder (ranch hand)’, 漁夫 gyofu ‘fisherman’, 工夫 koufu ‘coolie, workman’, or 車夫 shafu ‘rickshaw man’. As one might expect, the role of encoffiner is often performed by women.

In the film, the encoffiner—in full view of the assembled family—carefully exchanges the deceased’s bedclothes for a typical sleeping yukata without ever showing more than the corpse’s head, feet, and forearms; then reaches under the yukata to wipe down the body and plug its orifices; then carefully dresses the body in funeral garb, applies cosmetics, arranges the hair, crosses the feet, and clasps the hands to make it ready for placement and viewing in the coffin. After the wake and religious funeral, the body is cremated inside its wooden coffin.

The job title of the noukanshi is not easy to translate into English. Although he prepares the body for public viewing, he doesn’t embalm it (out of public view in a morgue), so ’embalmer’ is not a good gloss. Although he performs a comforting ritual in the family’s presence, he handles only one phase of the death ritual, unlike today’s multitasking morticians, undertakers, or funeral directors. Nor does he add any religious message, as would an imam, pastor, priest, or rabbi. So encoffiner seems as good a gloss as any. Even though most of its attestations in cyberspace seem to postdate this film—as does 納棺師 in Japanese Wikipedia—the related term encoffinment (especially premature encoffinment!) has a longer pedigree.

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by | 30 June 2010 · 9:21 pm

McWhorter on McCrum’s “Globish” English

In The New Republic, John McWhorter reviews Robert McCrum’s bass ackwards book, Globish: How the English Language Became the World’s Language.

But the central problem is that McCrum’s sense that English is somehow uniquely “direct” and “universal” and therefore well-suited to bestride the world is false. In two ways.

First of all, to the extent that McCrum is taking this from English being light on conjugation suffixes (in the present, just little third-person singular -s) and not having gender (no el sombrero for hat but la luna for moon as in Spanish), you can’t claim that this makes it easier for a language to be universal without looking at the fate of other languages. Russian started as a homely, unwritten Slavic dialect, but is currently spoken by 280 million people, speaking a vast array of indigenous languages natively. Yet Russian is murderously complex – three genders, verbs of pitiless complexity, assorted sounds that are tough to produce, squishy word order, unpredictable accent on words, and on and on. (Of those who have reviewed the book in big venues, I am aware of only TNR’s own Isaac Chotiner as touching on a comparison like the Russian one in his New Yorker review.)

Russians, too, are given to chauvinistic claims about their “great and mighty Russian language,” in which case one could posit that the complexity of the language makes it “mighty” as well as maximally clear. This would make, in the end, about as much sense as claiming that English has gotten around because it’s relatively easy to learn. Both English and Russian have spread the way they have because they were the languages that happened to be spoken by powers that happened to acquire vast amounts of territory.

There is a discussion to be had as to why England (plus America) and Russia have had such lasting influence – but the reasons are about sociohistory and geography, not conjugation. We know this because if there were any meaningful linguistic argument, England and Russia would neatly cancel one another out. Arabs, too, might be perplexed to hear that a language has to be easy – “direct,” as McCrum often has it – to be a vehicle of empire. As anyone who has tried to master it will attest, Arabic is a tough one for foreigners. Yet the region is unrecorded that scoffed “We shall not use this Arabic tongue, as it be too difficult on the tongue to serve as a language of conquest!”

Then McCrum errs in a second way. He misses that to the extent that geopolitical dominance and linguistic structure can be correlated, it’s in that the dominance causes the grammatical simplification, not the other way around. This was even part of English’s history – when Scandinavian Vikings occupied England starting in the eighth century, they produced Old English in a stripped-down fashion just as many of us have produced French and Spanish in classrooms. There were so many of the Vikings that kids heard as much English of this kind as “real” Old English, and in a culture with little schooling or media, this “funny” English became the only English.

McCrum knows this – but misses that it upends his paradigm. The Vikings didn’t pick up English because it was enticingly “universal” – they made it easier by picking it up. To the extent that McCrum may suppose that it was this that kicked off English’s “accessible” phase, we return to Arabic and Russian – universal in their ways despite being un-Vikinged. Sanskrit, Cree, Tagalog and other complex languages also seem to have gotten around – the whole construct McCrum builds just doesn’t work.

Meanwhile, the world over, languages are on the easy side because they happen to have been imposed on a lot of adult foreigners. The lingua franca in Papua New Guinea, for example, is Indonesian, which delights the learner in having no gender, no conjugation, and no Chinese-type tones.

Unfortunately, McWhorter confuses Papua New Guinea, where Tok Pisin is the lingua franca, with West Papua (formerly West Irian), where Indonesian is the lingua franca. Otherwise, he’s right on target.

via Rainy Day

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by | 25 June 2010 · 3:30 pm

Wordcatcher Tales: Ittouhei, Haiboku

I learned my first two Japanese terms for military ranks from watching The Adventures of Rin Tin Tin on Japanese TV during the 1950s. In the dubbed Japanese dialogue, the lieutenant was addressed as 中尉 chuui and the sergeant as 軍曹 gunsou. But I never learned the terms for the lowest ranks until I recently watched an epic film trilogy from the same era, The Human Condition (人間の條件, Ningen no jouken) via Netflix. It is very long and often slow-paced, but fascinating for both historical and linguistic reasons. It starkly depicts both the brutality of Japan’s occupation of Manchuria and the deadly and chaotic aftermath of Japan’s defeat there. Based on a novel, it also reflects the personal experience of the director, Kobayashi Masaaki (小林 正樹), a university-educated pacifist who refused to become an officer when drafted to serve in Manchuria.

The film chronicles the gradual erosion of socialist ideals in the face of insurmountable realities. The lead character first fails to transform a Japanese mine employing Chinese slave labor into a more humane and efficient enterprise. After being drafted for insubordination and joining a labor battalion, where he takes many a beating without fighting back, he is eventually forced to fire his weapon and kill an enemy soldier when Soviet tanks overrun his hapless platoon. As a prisoner of war, he finds that life under communism falls far short of the egalitarian paradise that he had imagined when he had earlier considered defecting. The Soviets treat him just as brutally as the Japanese imperialists treated their slave laborers. After he escapes, he ends up becoming a leader despite his low rank, forced to make life or death decisions about the fate of starving Japanese soldiers and colonists straggling back toward their homeland.

一等兵 ittouhei ‘Private, PV2‘ – (Japanese Wikipedia offers the most thorough compilation of terms for military ranks in multiple languages that I have found so far.) The rank just below 一等兵 ittouhei (lit. ‘1st-level solider’) ‘PV2’ is 二等兵 nitouhei (lit. ‘2nd-level soldier’) ‘Private, PV1’ and the rank just above it is 上等兵 joutouhei (lit. ‘upper-level soldier’) ‘Private First Class, PFC’.

When I faced the draft after dropping out of college in 1969, I had rather pacifist tendencies, which were fortunately never tested in real conflict. I opted for language school rather than Officer Candidate School, and never even had to fire a weapon after basic training. As company clerk, I would just qualify myself on paper. By the time I got out in 1972, I had reached the rank of SP5, a rank abolished in 1985 that corresponds the lowest level of SGT.

敗北 haiboku (lit. ‘lose-north’) ‘defeat, rout’ – The Human Condition (人間の條件, Ningen no jouken) set of DVDs from Netflix contains 3 interviews: one not very remarkable one with the director, Kobayashi; a much more recent and interesting one with the star, Nakadai Tetsuya (仲代 達矢), who many years later starred in Kurosawa’s classic Ran; and a truly excellent retrospective with Shinoda Masahiro (篠田 正浩), who puts the trilogy in much broader context.

Shinoda uses a lot of contemporary gairai-go, but the word he uses for Japan’s defeat is 敗北 haiboku (lit. ‘lose-north’), a word that goes back to the Heike Monogatari, about the epic struggle for supremacy in 12th-century Japan between two clans, the Taira (or Heike) and Minamoto (Genji). One of its synonyms is 敗走 haisou (‘lose-run’).

So what does 北 ‘north’ have to do with fleeing a lost battlefield? Does it suggest retreating to the northern frontier of Heian Japan, that is, northern Honshu? Or does it suggest losing the north at your back, as the imperial palaces were oriented in Kyoto, Seoul, Beijing, Xian, and other capitals within the Sinosphere? In modern Mandarin, the term 败北 bàiběi (‘lose-north’) is literary, implying it goes back a long way and was not adopted from Japanese (as many modern coinages were). The more common way to write ‘defeat’ in Chinese is 打败 dǎbài (‘hit-lose’).

UPDATE: Matt of No-sword has a few observations about the Japanese association of 北 ‘north’ with flight from battle and with death.

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by | 27 May 2010 · 6:47 am

Wordcatcher Tales: Kamaboko heisha

While poking around looking for something else in my Spahn & Hadamitzky Japanese Character Dictionary: With Compound Lookup via Any Kanji (Nichigai Associates, 1989), I came across a wonderful, but sadly obsolescent compound, 蒲鉾兵舎 kamaboko heisha, which seems to be yielding to a katakanago loan from English: クォンセット kuonsetto ‘Quonset hut’. A Quonset hut is a Kamaboko(-shaped) barracks. Nice image.

The 舎 sha of 兵舎 heisha ‘barracks (lit. soldier-lodge)’ also occurs in 牛舎gyuusha ‘cowshed’, 鶏舎 keisha ‘chicken coop’, 犬舎 kensha ‘dog kennel’, 豚舎 tonsha ‘pigpen’, and 田舎 inaka ‘countryside (lit. paddy-lodge)’. It indicates a fairly rustic or rudimentary sort of accommodation.

The kanji components of 蒲鉾 kamaboko ‘boiled fish paste, fish cake’ are less straightforward. The 鉾 hoko is a kind of heavy pole weapon more commonly written 矛, which Spahn and Hadamitzky gloss rather loosely as ‘halberd‘, which has a much more complicated head on it. I suppose the fish paste is (or was) extruded into long spears before being cut and packaged into standard blocks.

The character 蒲 is usually pronounced gama and means ‘cattail, bulrush‘ (although many people seem to confuse it with 蝦蟇 gama ‘bullfrog’). A couple of summers ago in Japan, we met two of my wife’s former students who hailed from 蒲郡 Gamagōri on the coast below Nagoya. One tutored English and the other tutored Italian, and they both admitted to being mildly embarrassed to tell people they were from an outlying district whose name can be translated as ‘Cattail County’.

The principal Sino-Japanese reading of 蒲 is FU, as in 蒲団 (usu. 布団) futon, but it can also occur in a crazy kanji representation of tampopo ‘dandelion’, 蒲公英, which is usually written in kana.

Even though its use may be fading with regard to Quonset huts, the modifier かまぼこ型 or カマボコ型 kamaboko-gata ‘kamaboko-shape’ still thrives as a descriptor of all manner of semicylindrical objects, like some kamaboko-gata pataa ‘mallet putters’ in golf.

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