Lexis One

1.    Mairzy Doats

There are essentially three alphabets in Japanese – except they’re not really alphabets, but anyway: hiragana, which is your basic phonic syllabary and of which there are about fifty; katakana, which is the same but used broadly as italics are used in English and of which there are also about fifty; and kanji, which are the famous ideograms (not really ideograms) people get tattooed on their shoulders in the mistaken belief that they say ‘brave warrior’ when they actually say ‘discombobulated chicken’. School students are expected to remember about 2000 ‘daily use kanji’ but estimates of their total number usually hover around 6000.

There are no word breaks in standard written Japanese. As someone whose ability with the language hovers between ‘functional’ and ‘conversational’ depending upon alcohol consumption, this can cause me problems. Although frankly everything about the language causes problems but that’s for another time, perhaps.

For all the (possibly wasted) effort of learning the kanji, they do serve as useful signposts in the absence of word boundaries. This is a picture of a page from one of my 2-year-old son’s books. You might recognize it. The Japanese is written entirely in hiragana and has word breaks.

Transliterated into an alphabet we can all read, preserving the original word breaks –

“Oya, happano ueni chichyana tamago.” Otsukisamaga, sorakara mite iimashita.

In grown-up Japanese it would look like this –

「おや、葉っぱの上にちっちゃな卵。」おつきさまが、空から見ていいました。

Note the absence of wordbreaks, but note also how the kanji (leaf 葉, up 上, egg 卵, sky 空, see見) serve a not dissimilar end.

A blow-by-blow translation of the kiddy version, again preserving the word breaks, might be something like this –

“Oh,  leaf/of  up/at  tiny  egg.”  Mr.moon/[ga]*  sky/from  see  said.

Which would basically translate as: “Oh! There’s a tiny egg on that leaf,” said Mr. Moon when he saw it from the sky.

*The asterisk on [ga] is because I have no idea how to translate this directly. ‘Of’ and ‘at’ are fudges, but for this I don’t think it’s even possible to do that. [ga] (が) is a post-positional particle indicating the subject of the sentence. Particles serve broadly the same purpose in Japanese as do prepositions in English, and that brings me to the point of this observation. When imposing orthographic word boundaries in contradiction to usual Japanese writing conventions, the writers/translators/editors have chosen to present as single ‘words’ units with both lexical and grammatical meaning -

              はっぱの              happano            Where はっぱ = leaf, and の = of

              そらから              sorakara              Where そら = sky, and から = from

うえに (ueni) is interesting in that it breaks down as うえ = up, and に = at, but in combination is now used in Japanese as we would use ‘above.’

So word boundaries are non-trivial in Japanese. As with ‘above,’ see also the evolution of English words such as ‘to morrow,’ ‘well come,’ and more recently ‘e-mail.’ That last allows a nice segue to a couple of video links addressing word boundary issues in more contemporary settings.

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              “[Are words] best defined in terms of meaning, or of form or by a combination between the two[?]”

Much like the old saw that whenever a newspaper headline asks a question (“Do mealworms hold the cure to Cancer?”) the answer is always ‘No’, whenever I read a sentence like the one above I rather suspect the answer is C: A Bit Of Both.

2.    Tele-gram

“[A] word is any sequence of letters (and a limited number of other characteristics such as hyphen and apostrophe) bounded on either side by a space or punctuation mark.”

(Carter, 1998. P4)

English has recently become compulsory in Japanese elementary schools, but is not supposed to cover the written form apart from a couple of introductory lessons on the alphabet. This means that the first time most Japanese students will study written English words is in the first few weeks of junior high school. One of the most popular textbooks starts with introductory conversation and has all the characters introducing themselves:

              “Hi! I’m Tanaka Yuki.”

This drives me up the fucking wall. Leaving aside the knotty name-order issue, I am highly suspicious of the pedagogic value of introducing contractions in (literally) book one, lesson one. It’s not like the verb ‘to be’ isn’t irregular enough as it is.

That’s apostrophes. As for hyphens, Carter give us ‘tele-gram’ (p4), ‘lec-ture’ (p7), and ‘cap-tures’ (p8). It took me a bit to realize these were probably formatting issues with the electronic copy I was reading and not any kind of metatextual attempt to prove a point. It seems relevant, but I’m not quite sure how, that when writing in English many of my lower level students will often just keep going until they run out of space on a line before leaving off mid-word on whatever letter they got to and starting the next line. Very few have been taught to end and start lines with whole words, and none the convention that if you do have to split a word, you should do it between syllables. I doubt many even know what a syllable is, and then we’re into counting syllables and katakana pronunciation and I need to sit down in a darkened room for a while.

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              “The existence of idioms seems to upset any attempts to define words in any neat formal way.” (p7)

Would idioms be more specifically cultural constructs than linguistic ones? Watch and quake as I lever open the can of worms labelled ‘Sapir-Whorf’, dump it flaming on your doorstep, ring the bell and run away laughing.

3.    Dense

Good Lord, I sucked at making the lexical/grammatical distinction. A bit of a brush up on auxiliary and modal verbs is in order, I feel. So while I’m doing that I’ll just give you links to the Pareto Principle and Up-Goer Five and let you have your fun.