by mercedo (822671) * on 2006.03.19 18:49 (#14951356) (http://mercedo-comments.blogspot.com/ Last Journal: 2006.03.18 4:09)
I think the vocabulary and the orthography is changing, -Interrobang
Before the end of World War II we were using exactly the same number and kinds of Chinese character as Chinese people had done, I mean we didn't have limitation to use Chinese character. Chinese people use 5000 Chinese characters, and we were using the same number, only after the World War II, the number of Chinese character we use in our daily life was limited to 1850. We called them the list of Chinese characters in our daily use (toh'yoh' kanji). I just feel amazed to see how our culture was so derived from Chinese culture. And also the shape of kanji was altered to simpler ones, and hiragana started being used to write phonetic connection between kanjis, and katakana was exclusively started being used to write loan words. Besides the way to use hiragana, katakana also altered to more colloquial ones( this was similar to the cases like you start spelling thru instead of through, anyway when it comes to orthography, the way to write and spell changed greatly. So orthography changed one time very greatly soon after the World War II, but since then orthography has remained the same.
I think your contention that Japanese contains Chinese words is somewhat inaccurate.
You see English words contain tens of thousands of Greek and Latin words, yet their meaning is somewhat different from Greek (especially in the case of Greek, since Latin only exists in classics). So it depends how to see current languages, we can say Japanese contains many Chinese words in a way we say as English contains many Greek words, but apparently their meanings greatly differs from what Chinese people today use them. So when you say,
It's true that some kanji retain the original Chinese meanings, but a lot of even the basic words aren't the same anymore;
Sure, and when it comes to pronunciations, we can hardly tell two words are correlated. (For example, Japan-English, Ilbon-Korean, Rieben-Chinese, Nippon/Nihon-Japanese are all from a Chinese word that referred to old Japan. This is similar to the cases like episcopal-bishop, both are from Greek, but it's hard to tell just guessing from pronunciation and spelling.)
and you seem to be reacting out of a sense of cultural pride. I'm not impugning your language,
No, no, I'm not a kind of person who takes prides in our own culture. Our native language -both English and Japanese only show temporal appearnces affected from our historical backgrounds. Our native tongue had been formed from exteremely strong influence of Chinese culture since China had been played an exteremely important role in the history of East Asia, but now since USA has been playing a very decisive role upon our culture in general, our native tongue will have more and more English words and will be affected by it much more than ever. Changes seem to be slow, incremental though.
That, again, is not meant to imply that Japanese is disappearing,
But I meant it. I think Japanese as a language is disappearing. The number of Japanese speakers and English speakers were almost the same when Admiral Perry arrived at the offshore of Uraga, Yokosuka, late 19 century. But now the speaker of English is five or six times more than Japanese speakers. Japanese is as a way to communicate with the people of the rest of the world, it is obsolete. We Japanese even among same nationals will start using English as is the case with pilots in aeroplane. At least I believe we ought to adopt more convenient way of communication. The way for us to use language ought not to be absolute ones.
I tend to think of it in terms of the language becoming more user-friendly. ;)
I observe since in the fields of anime, manga, or other fields where Japanese culture is dominant, many Japanese words started being used directly -it's more friendly for us to use origami instead of saying 'the way to fold paper artistically',sashimi, instead of saying 'slice of raw fish that can be eaten in handy'.
and that reshaped your culture probably more than you're aware
I guess so, since I was born after the war.
ask me about W. Edwards Deming sometime
I ask you now.
The actual mechanics of speaking or writing are actually irrelevant to the processes going on behind the scenes.
The Internet or other many media allow us to get closer more and more. We will start using the same language soon. Probably English vocabulary will adopt more loan words than now from now and English will be used more and more in many occasions here in Japan. Language only indicates our superficial difference that we had in our historical background, but honestly speaking we feel pain when we got injured, we feel happy when we could communicate. We share the nature underlying our verbal expressions. That's more important than any other things.
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