12. IAPANESE LANGUAGE, The. No vital affinity with any other language has been demonstrated for the Japanese, though in its structure it may be grouped with the Uralo Altaic tongues, in which are the Korean and Turkish. By the late Mr. Hirai much labor was spent in showing its close relation to the Aryan stock, while the apparent identity of many of its roots with those of the Hebrew was proved by the late David Thompson, one of the long line of American scholars who have famished keys to the treasutes, and bridges to the mastery, of the colloquial and written lan guage; in the public spoken use of which, in Japan, Americans have notably excelled. Pre vious to 'contact with China, whence writing Was borrowed, the old Japanese language, or °Yamato dialect,° was as relatively free from Chinese elements as was the Anglo-Saxon pre vious to contact with the Romans. The ancient Shinto rituals and the classic literature (ante 1200 A.D.) are expressed in this archaic tongue. The written language is much more closely allied to ancient models and idioms, differing from the modern colloquial fully as much as Latin does from Italian. while also the daily talk of the plain people is in notable contrast to that of the modern educated man. One finds also that the speech of the native women ap proaches a standard of purity unknown among the men. From the 6th to the 19th century the Japanese- borrowed wholesale from the Chinese, mostly in vocabulary, though even idioms and the structure of many sentences have thus been modified. In this way the vol ume of• the original language has more than doubled, the additions filling large dictionaries. Yet Since 1860, through the coinage of new terms transferred from the Chinese and the combinations of ideographs made in Japan, the repertoire has been immensely enlarged. A Japanese of, say, 1850, could not make much of the book and newspaper language, or even the conversation of well-bred men of to-day. The Classic style is much in vogue for books, correspondence, advertisements and legal docu ments, though a mixture of both styles is pre ferred. The softer speech of the female part of japan has little to do with sex or cultivated charm, but is to be ascribed rather to the greater use of their mellifluous native tongue in its comparative purity and extreme richness of vowels and liquids. The men make a large use of Sinioa-Japanese, or words derived from the Chinese; very much as we employ terms which, by the thousands, are borrowed from the Latin or Greek Yet no Chinese can un derstand even the- vocabulary of spoken Japa nese, for the two systems of pronunciation are both old and of course modified by long use in an alien country. The first (Go) was im ported from southern China a thousand years ago, when Nanking was the capital. The more modern (Kan-on) was brought from North China, when Peking was the chief while suffering change in japan; while also both systems were and are used. The differ ences between Pennsylvania °Dutch° and mod ern German and °Mohawk° Dutch and the Holland tongue of to-day suggest parallels. The kana, or syllabary in use, can only par tially express foreign sounds. Hence, for ex ample, the rendering in the native newspapers of the candidates (there being no 1 in Japa nese), Blaine and Cleveland (Buraine and Kure bnrando), or of the English name, Longford, as Ronguwanudo. When the Japanese bor rowed letters from the Chinese, who had no alphabet, they in time, and traditionally under Kobo Daishi (774-835 A.D.), invented a sylla bary of kana, or side letters containing 47 char acters. This, with diacritical marks, now in cludes 73 signs, of which 68 are used and is written in two forms; the square (kate) and the round ot curved (hire). Though always despised by the scholars, this writing is much, used by the common people in the popular books and newspapers to give the sound of the less known Chinese characters, fresh coinages of pen and brain and foreign names and, places; much as we, • in our dictionaries, make visible and potentially audible the pronuncia tion especially of uncommon, new or foreign words or names. The foreign student, there fore, attacking Japanese for mastery must really learn three languages in one. If to., this he would achieve power to write it fluently, and exactly, he must learn a script that foils a Chinese and means the attainment of from two to six thousand signs expressed in the books and in four or five styles of script. Nevertheless the task set before native children.. who grow up in a home and social atmosphere , created by centuries• of Buddhism, Shinto and Confucianism, with an environment of native; tradition, necessity and custom, to which the adult foreigner is as a babe, has been greatly exaggerated by outsiders. So also has the. impersonal and honorific elements, which are part of the common life of all, but which, when rendered with senseless literalism by an alien, . are caricatures. To use the words "august.° etc., in constant repetition, as for eigners usually do in trying to reproduce Japa nese honorific speech, comes as near to reality as does °pidgin English° or the °Yokohama dia lect° to the correct standard of language as used by either a Japanese or an American gentleman., As an instrument of thought for use in the modern world, the language of Nippon has. marked limitations and defects, but for daily use at home, easy conversation, ordinary human intercourse and in some notable lines of ex pression that reflect nature's reality, the national history, tastes and temperament, it is unsurpassed. Prof. E. W. Clement, an. American, long resident in Japan, gives his verdict thus : °The Japanese language is in volved, complicated, impersonal, neutral, ob scure, but also pretty, musical, logical and. polite. Some Japanese argue stoutly for the superiority of their language in stating first. the substantive of the maw object or theme and the action concerning it afterward. For ex-. ample, we say in English, °see the moon,° but in Japan, °the moon see? The patriotic subject of the Mikado argues that the moon was first and man next, the visible object being prior to the act of seeing. So also one word for. house is ya-ne, or roof-root. This is because,, in Japanese house building, the very heavy roof, is made first of all (to secure the structure against earthquake shock, which passes before the possibly destructive motion is com municated to the structure, the top weight hold ing the whole secure) and the rest of the edi fice is made to fit the roof. So with hundreds of words, which hold and reproduce the race mentory and state the actual fact, which seem strange to us, but not to the natives. Funda mental features of this agglutinative language. are the unchangeability of the root, the cedence of the qualifying word before the thing qualified, the placing of the dependent or ex planatory clauses before the main statement and of the object before the verb, with the predicate at the end of the sentence, and the general use of post positions instead of prepo. sitions. Inflections are few or at the vanish ing point. The nouns have no gender, number, person and hardly any case, though the first foreign grammarians from southern Europe tried to learn and teach this language accord ing to the framework of Latin accidence, be cause there are particles that suggest case. The adjectives have no degrees of comparison and there are no true personal or possessive pro nouns. So much for the negative side! On the other hand, the abundance of honorifics which were developed in the feudal age of manifold gradations of society, serve admirably in lieu of pronouns. The natives experience little difficulty in addressing each other, or in dividing in their own minds between meum and tuum. One creditable feature is seen in the almost total absence of the verbal appa ratus for cursing or swearing, the language also being very deficient in terms of abuse. Indeed, the spirit of the tongue of Japan has been described as °in honor preferring one an other.* Since also the introduction of Occi
dental ideas and the literary, social and polit ical machinery of the West, with new of thought and channels of expression, Japa nese speakers have developed a power of oratory and an adroitness in debate that has proved to be as vigorous and effective as that heard in other deliberative bodies. Many of the old words have been, as it were, born again, with a larger soul. The drama, the stage and the story teller's booth have for centuries been the home of good elocution, but the method of reading audibly in public among the Japanese differs notably from our idea and practice of rendering with expression and feeling, so as to make true interpretation of text or author. With little attention paid to closing periods, or the beginning of sentences, and catching the breath in a curious way, there seems in this mannerism little feeling or attractiveness. The same irritating defect, as we deem it, smites with disgust the ears of the teacher of English, when his pupils °read* our authors. The Japanese verb, as shown by the masterly analysis of Verbeck, has complications known, perhaps, in few other languages. It possesses a negative passive voice and also potential powers and significations which in our lan guage are lacking, but which by an adroit speaker are very effective on the stage, pulpit or rostrum. Striking negative features are the absence of personification and the almost total disuse of metaphor and allegory. This makes the acquisition of Japanese the more difficult to a foreigner, and especially is this true in public discourse to one whose mother speech is so rich in figures, personification, metaphor and allegorical concept. One curious effect is the inability, in Japanese, to join a neuter noun to a transitive verb. No such terms as heat or cold, science or the emotions can be rendered in our way, such as °poverty drove him to drink,* or °the pestilence killed thousands.* The Japanese would rather say that °being poor, he was impelled to drink*: or an demic raging, thousands died.* It is true that they can render such expressions effectively in their own tongue, by circumlocution, or pecu liar idioms, aided by particles; but, as we think, at the expense of power and picturesqueness. Hence, the real difficulty if not impossibility of the explanation of our metaphors to the aver age Japanese. Nevertheless there are in the native language books closely're.sembling More's Gulliver's 'Travels' and Bunyan's Progress.' The pronunciation of Japanese is easy and there is little trouble from the dialects. The most notable of these are found in the Riu Kin (Loo Choo) islands and in the northern prOvinces, where a hodgepodge, or patois, made up of words brought by im from all the lower provinces is in vogue. Archaic forms are much more numer ous in the south and west, which are the older seats of civilization. In a word, in the new north or latest settled portion and in the south, the oldest part of the empire, there are the greater variations. The Auiu tongue, spoken by the aborigines, in Yezo or the Hokkaido, is Aryan. Japanese writing is in its beauty of form vastly superior to our script and callig raphy is with this people one of the oldest of the fine arts and forms of culture. The use of the brush-pen, directed, not from the wrist but from the shoulder, has helped pow erfully to educate a race of artists. Yet, strange to say, the sign manual, or signature, does not hold the same place in Japan as with us. Only a man's seal is accepted as legal. As compared with the inexhaustibility and po tentiality of the written characters the Japa nese is noted for its poverty of sounds. Its homophony— so many vocables having the same sound in the colloquial —is great; but, while endless punning is possible, it is not wel come in conversation in which elegant ex pressions are rather sought for, the speaker's meaning being made plain by the context, peri phrasis, or the use of many `bundle words,* of which we in English have comparatively few, such as °head* of cattle, flock) of birds, etc. Herein lies another reason why the written and the colloquial forms in both' vocabulary and structure differ so' markedly. In the written language, no fear of misunderstanding troubles a penman, for with a separate symbol for each word — the eye, being quicker in apprehension than the ear, he can, at will, use or create new expressions or 'compounds. Hence also the wonderful ailuence of Western technical terms and conceptions now in use, which only slowly pass from book to tongue and from learned text to common speech. Few or no professors in the universities can without the written symbol, make their lectures intelligible even to trained listeners, while discourse in the bald vernacular, to a general ,audience, on an erudite theme, is impossible. Clearness is purchased only by the combined use of voice and symbol, making appeal to both ear and eye. It is possi ble for a Japanese, who can draw from the in exhaustible treasure of the Chinese ideographs, to render all abstract words and technical terms and every shade of meaning represented in the columns of an American newspaper or learned periodical. These borrowings fill large dic tionaries while Gubbins' work in three volumes shows in part the transfers and coinages since 1860. These new modern terms inserted by the alert Japanese, though once despised by the Chinese, are now liberally appropriated by them, for use in the 20th century China of newspatier days and are gladly made use of also in textbooks and for both timely and abstruse publications. For this reason it is quite Certain that, for a long time to come, in Chinese Asia, the ideographic will hold its own and triumph over' phonetic speech or writing, About 1885 a strong movement was launched in Tokio to supplant the native script, by Roman ization. The Romaji Kai, or Roman Letter Society, spent much toil, time and money in pushing the hoped-for reformation; but the writer of this sketch, at that time, told the chief promoter, then young, that ,he would count many gray hairs in his head before this desirable object was even measurably achieved. To-day, all idea of supplanting the Chinese characters is abandoned. While the colloquial is involved and prolix, the ideographic writing cannot be surpassed for terseness. As 85 per cent of our knowledge comes to us through the eye, one can see how, relatively, the Occidental is relatively handicapped and the Oriental is equipped. Even among us, she arbitrary signs, $ s. d. and the numerals 1 2 3, the mathematical and astronomical signs, etc,— a universal system— hold their own because of brevity, time-saving and easy apprehension. American scholars have borne an honorable part in creating an apparatus for the study and translation. of Japanese. The pioneer labors of Van Reed, Liggins, Brown, Verbeck, Imhrie were followed by the grammar and dictionaries of James Curtis Hepburn, M.D., of whose lexicographical labors — the last edition of this great dictionary being in 1903—one Japanese said, call others are but a second edition of Hepburn,* while the complete version of the Bible into Japanese is acknowledged to be one of the most successful of modern achievements of this sort.
Consult Aston's Grammars of the Language) (1881)- of the 'Written Langoag0 (1904); Chamberlain, 'The Japanese Lan guage> (1887); Satow and Masakata, Japanese Dictionary of the Spoken (1879)1 Imbrie, 'English-Japanese (1889) - Prentys and Sasamoto, 'Japanese for DMly Use) (1905); Brinkley's cJapanese-Eng lish Dictionary) (1896); Shimada, Y., 'Eng lish-Japanese Dictionary) (1897),.and.the valu able papers in the 'Transactions of 'the Asiatic Society of Japan) (1872, 1919).
WIt.stAst Bunn Geier's, Author of 'Japan—In History, Folk-lore and Art); The Mikado-Instituttox and Person)