Wednesday 4 July 2007

Pic of the day: "Rice cake goes whee!" may possibly have made sense in its native Japanese, but it certainly doesn't in our world.

"A translation of the world"

In the small booklet that followed my Japanese language course, there was this little gem: "A language is not a translation of another language, but a translation of the world and life."

I knew this already, but I had not said it so clearly. It is already evident in so related languages as English and my native Norwegian. Sure, you can get by pretty well by translating word for word from those, but you will definitely get some puzzled looks. For instance, Norwegian has the same word for sky and heaven, one for ceiling and roof, another for town and city. We don't have separate forms for "I do" and "I am doing". (In fact, you can probably notice in my journal that I tend to over-use that last form a bit.) Same for "has" and "have", for that matter. And some of our words look the same in plural as in singular.

Even so, with closely related languages the world usually looks much the same. "I has a cookies!" is pretty understandable. In fact, it is rather cute. When languages have grown apart since the Ice Age, things get a bit more complicated. I may not have learned much Finnish, but I sure learned something about just how alien it was. They have at least three infinitives, and many prepositions are replaced with endings instead, while some others are placed behind (postposition). Perhaps more shocking, there is no such thing as grammatical gender. English has gone pretty far in removing those itself, but they are always implicit, since the personal pronouns must be chosen according to the gender (or lack thereof, you may say, but actually neuter is also a gender). Finnish simply does not make a difference between "he" and "she", it's the same word, and there is nowhere else you find any grammatical distinction between them either. Despite this, it seems the Finns have somehow managed to figure out how to reproduce, so perhaps "a translation of the world and life" is not entirely accurate in that case... ^^

With japanese, the difference widens again. It seems likely that our languages have been separated since before mankind emigrated from Africa (the first wave supposedly followed the coast eastward, while Europe was colonized a while later). The sheer alienness of Japanese in some ways is hard to wrap our mind around. Their closest equivalent to personal pronouns are less personal than ours, as they also include references to the social situation where they are used. There is no single word for "I" or "you", for instance. A young boy may in fact pick any of at least three different words to refer to himself depending on who he talks to: "Boku" may be suitable when speaking to a parent or grandparent, as it indicates his status as a child rather than an adult. I'd probably have chosen that if asking for a favor from a relative. When speaking to a classmate or girlfriend it would be natural to use "ore" which emphasizes maleness. Speaking to a teacher he would probably use "watashi" which is a more polite and formal word for "I". Note that they don't see these different words as variations of a common word, however. (Like "go" and "went" in English, I mean.) These are basic forms. There simply is no common word for "I". That hardly means that Japanese don't have a personal identity. They sure have. But they still see the world differently.

This makes it somewhat easier for me to swallow that I make next to no progress in learning Japanese. Then again, I am studying less and less, as predicted. Doing things that make me feel stupid is not very motivating, you know. Perhaps I should instead start thinking of it as a new way of seeing the world and life?

Then again, silence is also a way of perceiving the world and life. I could do with more of that as well, although I probably hear a lot more of it than most humans you know. It can be quite beautiful.