Jun 24, 2015 06:13 AM
http://www.the-tls.co.uk/tls/public/article1569460.ece
EXCERPT: [...] Even now, after some seventy post-war years of attempts to simplify and rationalize the Japanese writing system, its “appalling” mixture of Chinese characters and two supplementary phonetic scripts remains the single greatest stumbling block to foreigners who wish to become literate users of the language (to become literate in a language, you have to know its literature).
[...] Of course, it should matter not at all to the Japanese that foreigners have trouble mastering their language. Imagine trying to fix the crazy spellings in English just to help foreign students. But many Japanese themselves have espoused radical reform of the traditional writing system or even wholesale abandonment of the language [...]
As [Minae] Mizumura [author of THE FALL OF LANGUAGE IN THE AGE OF ENGLISH] sees it, however, that is exactly what is happening to Japan even now. [...] The time and effort devoted to teaching the literary heritage in schools keeps dwindling, and the drive to correct “Japanese people’s hopelessly poor English” has reached the state of a “hysterical obsession”. Mizumura discusses the problem in a broad cosmopolitan context, warning the world not only of the impending fall of Japanese but the likely fall of all national languages in the age of English and the internet. Japanese is just the canary in the coal mine. The book is fascinating for readers who have no special interest in Japan or its language.
The most lamentable sign of the decline of the Japanese language, as Mizumura sees it, is the current state of Japanese literature, which is written by “brainless writers of crap”. [...] “Representative works of today’s Japanese literature often read like rehashes of American literature . . . . [W]orks of contemporary fiction tend to resemble global cultural goods, which, like Hollywood blockbuster films, do not require language – or translation – in the truest sense of the word. No wonder Japan’s best and brightest have turned their backs on literature.”
[...] The wonder of this book is that it exists at all. The author tells us of her native language: “What a bizarre and amusing language Japanese is . . . Fast and loose in its logic . . . ” and “As unbelievable as this may sound to the users of Western languages, Japanese sentences do not require a grammatical subject”. She says that having an “orderly brain” is “a trait common among American intellectuals but rare among speakers of Japanese, a language that doesn’t even require a clear distinction between ‘and’ and ‘but’”.
[...] There is so much nonsense circulating about the ineffable mysteries of the Japanese language that it’s hard to know what to believe. That old red herring Mizumura cites about Japanese sentences not having subjects, for example, is a myth. All Japanese sentences have subjects. Otherwise, they wouldn’t be sentences. And Mizumura’s use of the long-discredited term “ideogram” to refer to Chinese characters seems calculated to drive linguists crazy by preserving another myth – that you have to see Chinese and Japanese to understand them. (The translators of this volume, it should be noted, do an excellent job of Englishing Mizumura’s lucid Japanese original.)
Although she seems to buy into the myths concerning the shortcomings of Japanese, Mizumura still asserts that Japan (and only Japan?) possesses “a magical written language”, owing to which “the idiosyncratic and inventive style of Sōseki’s texts makes them nearly impossible to translate”....
EXCERPT: [...] Even now, after some seventy post-war years of attempts to simplify and rationalize the Japanese writing system, its “appalling” mixture of Chinese characters and two supplementary phonetic scripts remains the single greatest stumbling block to foreigners who wish to become literate users of the language (to become literate in a language, you have to know its literature).
[...] Of course, it should matter not at all to the Japanese that foreigners have trouble mastering their language. Imagine trying to fix the crazy spellings in English just to help foreign students. But many Japanese themselves have espoused radical reform of the traditional writing system or even wholesale abandonment of the language [...]
As [Minae] Mizumura [author of THE FALL OF LANGUAGE IN THE AGE OF ENGLISH] sees it, however, that is exactly what is happening to Japan even now. [...] The time and effort devoted to teaching the literary heritage in schools keeps dwindling, and the drive to correct “Japanese people’s hopelessly poor English” has reached the state of a “hysterical obsession”. Mizumura discusses the problem in a broad cosmopolitan context, warning the world not only of the impending fall of Japanese but the likely fall of all national languages in the age of English and the internet. Japanese is just the canary in the coal mine. The book is fascinating for readers who have no special interest in Japan or its language.
The most lamentable sign of the decline of the Japanese language, as Mizumura sees it, is the current state of Japanese literature, which is written by “brainless writers of crap”. [...] “Representative works of today’s Japanese literature often read like rehashes of American literature . . . . [W]orks of contemporary fiction tend to resemble global cultural goods, which, like Hollywood blockbuster films, do not require language – or translation – in the truest sense of the word. No wonder Japan’s best and brightest have turned their backs on literature.”
[...] The wonder of this book is that it exists at all. The author tells us of her native language: “What a bizarre and amusing language Japanese is . . . Fast and loose in its logic . . . ” and “As unbelievable as this may sound to the users of Western languages, Japanese sentences do not require a grammatical subject”. She says that having an “orderly brain” is “a trait common among American intellectuals but rare among speakers of Japanese, a language that doesn’t even require a clear distinction between ‘and’ and ‘but’”.
[...] There is so much nonsense circulating about the ineffable mysteries of the Japanese language that it’s hard to know what to believe. That old red herring Mizumura cites about Japanese sentences not having subjects, for example, is a myth. All Japanese sentences have subjects. Otherwise, they wouldn’t be sentences. And Mizumura’s use of the long-discredited term “ideogram” to refer to Chinese characters seems calculated to drive linguists crazy by preserving another myth – that you have to see Chinese and Japanese to understand them. (The translators of this volume, it should be noted, do an excellent job of Englishing Mizumura’s lucid Japanese original.)
Although she seems to buy into the myths concerning the shortcomings of Japanese, Mizumura still asserts that Japan (and only Japan?) possesses “a magical written language”, owing to which “the idiosyncratic and inventive style of Sōseki’s texts makes them nearly impossible to translate”....