_Language._--Since the year 1820, when Klaproth concluded that the
Japanese language had sprung from the Ural-Altaic stock, philologists
have busied themselves in tracing its affinities. If the theories
hitherto held with regard to the origin of the Japanese people be
correct, close relationship should exist between the Japanese and the
Korean tongues, and possibly between the Japanese and the Chinese. Aston
devoted much study to the former question, but although he proved that
in construction the two have a striking similarity, he could not find
any corresponding likeness in their vocabularies. As far back as the
beginning of the Christian era the Japanese and the Koreans could not
hold intercourse without the aid of interpreters. If then the languages
of Korea and Japan had a common stock, they must have branched off from
it at a date exceedingly remote. As for the languages of Japan and
China, they have remained essentially different throughout some twenty
centuries in spite of the fact that Japan adopted Chinese calligraphy
and assimilated Chinese literature. Mr K. Hirai has done much to
establish his theory that Japanese and Aryan had a common parent. But
nothing has yet been substantiated. Meanwhile an inquirer is confronted
by the strange fact that of three neighbouring countries between which
frequent communication existed, one (China) never deviated from an
ideographic script; another (Korea) invented an alphabet, and the third
(Japan) devised a syllabary. Antiquaries have sought to show that Japan
possessed some form of script before her first contact with either Korea
or China. But such traces of prehistoric letters as are supposed to have
been found seem to be corruptions of the Korean alphabet rather than
independent symbols. It is commonly believed that the two Japanese
syllabaries--which, though distinct in form, have identical sounds--were
invented by Kukai (790) and Kibi Daijin (760) respectively. But the
evidence of old documents seems to show that these syllabaries had a
gradual evolution and that neither was the outcome of a single scholar's
inventive genius.
The sequence of events appears to have been this:--Japan's earliest
contact with an over-sea people was with the Koreans, and she made
some tentative efforts to adapt their alphabet to the expression of
her own language. Traces of these efforts survived, and inspired the
idea that the art of writing was practised by the Japanese before the
opening of intercourse with their continental neighbours. Korea,
however, had neither a literary nor an ethical message to deliver, and
thus her script failed to attract much attention. Very different was
the case when China presented her noble code of Confucian philosophy
and the literature embodying it. The Japanese then recognized a lofty
civilization and placed themselves as pupils at its feet, learning its
script and deciphering its books. Their veneration extended to
ideographs. At first they adapted them frankly to their own tongue.
For example, the ideographs signifying _rice_ or _metal_ or _water_ in
Chinese were used to convey the same ideas in Japanese. Each ideograph
thus came to have two sounds, one Japanese, the other Chinese--e.g.
the ideograph for _rice_ had for Japanese sound _kome_ and for Chinese
sound _bei_. Nor was this the whole story. There were two epochs in
Japan's study of the Chinese language: first, the epoch when she
received Confucianism through Korea; and, secondly, the epoch when she
began to study Buddhism direct from China. Whether the sounds that
came by Korea were corrupt, or whether the interval separating these
epochs had sufficed to produce a sensible difference of pronunciation
in China itself, it would seem that the students of Buddhism who
flocked from Japan to the Middle Kingdom during the Sui era (A.D.
589-619) insisted on the accuracy of the pronunciation acquired there,
although it diverged perceptibly from the pronunciation already
recognized in Japan. Thus, in fine, each word came to have three
sounds--two Chinese, known as the _kan_ and the _go_, and one
Japanese, known as the _kun_. For example:--
"KAN" "GO" JAPANESE
SOUND. SOUND. SOUND. MEANING.
_Sei_ _Jo_ _Koe_ Voice
_Nen_ _Zen_ _Toshi_ Year
_Jinkan_ _Ningen_ _Hito no aida_ Human being.
As to which of the first two methods of pronunciation had
chronological precedence, the weight of opinion is that the kan came
later than the _go_. Evidently this triplication of sounds had many
disadvantages, but, on the other hand, the whole Chinese language may
be said to have been grafted on the Japanese. Chinese has the widest
capacity of any tongue ever invented. It consists of thousands of
monosyllabic roots, each having a definite meaning. These
monosyllables may be used singly or combined, two, three or four at a
time, so that the resulting combinations convey almost any conceivable
shades of meaning. Take, for example, the word "electricity." The very
idea conveyed was wholly novel in Japan. But scholars were immediately
able to construct the following:--
Lightning. _Den._
Exhalation. _Ki._
Electricity. _Denki._
Telegram. _Dempo._ _Ho_ = tidings.
Electric light. _Dento._ _To_ = lamp.
Negative electricity. _Indenki._ _In_ = the negative principle.
Positive electricity. _Yodenki._ _Yo_ = the positive principle.
Thermo-electricity. _Netsudenki._ _Netsu_ = heat.
Dynamic-electricity. _Ryudo-denki._ _Ryudo_ = fluid.
Telephone. _Denwa._ _Wa_= conversation.
Every branch of learning can thus be equipped with a vocabulary.
Potent, however, as such a vehicle is for expressing thought, its
ideographic script constitutes a great obstacle to general
acquisition, and the Japanese soon applied themselves to minimizing
the difficulty by substituting a phonetic system. Analysis showed that
all the required sounds could be conveyed with 47 syllables, and
having selected the ideographs that corresponded to those sounds, they
reduced them, first, to forms called _hiragana_, and, secondly, to
still more simplified forms called _katakana_.
Such, in brief, is the story of the Japanese language. When we come to
dissect it, we find several striking characteristics. First, the
construction is unlike that of any European tongue: all qualifiers
precede the words they qualify, except prepositions which become
postpositions. Thus instead of saying "the house of Mr Smith is in
that street," a Japanese says "Smith Mr of house that street in is."
Then there is no relative pronoun, and the resulting complication
seems great to an English-speaking person, as the following
illustration will show:--