This weekend, I had the unpleasant experience of getting into an extremely ugly argument with three of my closest Chinese friends regarding the origins of Japanese in relation to Chinese and other languages.
Now, maybe this is the 鬼佬 in me talking, but every time Derek brings up China, Chinese politics or Chinese culture, it sounds like he says that, by virtue of being an eternal, noble victim of Western oppression and hegemony (Japan often sounding like a proxy oppressor on America's behalf, in these cases) China deserves special treatment and respect.
Before I go any further here, I do not mean to deny that the complex interactions between the East and the West over the last three hundred years have certainly put China at an extreme disadvantage. The problem I have with this line of argumentation is that very often this "underdog" argument extends very far, to encompass all inventions, technological advances and cultural products, to the point that it sometimes sounds that the Chinese were everywhere first.
Thus, a number of unsubstantiated claims were thrown my way, and I threw a number of unsubstantiated arguments back in return. To wit, Amelia argued that, because Japanese borrowed Chinese 漢字 characters (and subsequently developed the ひらがな and カタカナ from them), Japanese owed its structure to Chinese; Derek argued that linguistic research (and historical linguistics, in specific) are motivated politically and even economically and are thus de facto biased and inadmissible; I argued that the correlation between systems of writing does not imply parallel linguistic or lexical development, that there may have been a land bridge between the Korean peninsula and Japan, explaining migration and separate linguistic development, and that there may even be links between languages such as Russian and Chinese (due to the similar sibilant sounds in Russian and Chinese and the flexible word order in the former language) or even English and Chinese (both being SVO). Dave sat and listened to us politely.
In the end, my argument seems to have been understood as a blatant attack on Chinese language and culture (to the extent that Derek classified my views as taken from "Japanese textbooks" and "Japanese teachers" that "rewrite history" and ignorant or politically-motivated Western scholars). I had then somehow understood that I have expressed my arguments regarding Japanese in an ostensibly anti-Chinese way (however, some of the nuances that have caused such offense are still unclear to me). With a great feeling of guilt, I have apologised profusely and, the next day, I sat down to do some research.
At first blush, I have immediately found out some facts which explain both my own and my friends' misconceptions. However, things turned out to be much more complicated than I had initially thought. According to our good friend Wikipedia, Chinese is a Sinitic language from the Sino-Tibetan language family, and Japanese is a Japonic language from the Japonic-Ryukyuan language family. Interestingly, "The identification of the varieties of Chinese as 'dialects' instead of 'languages' is considered inappropriate by some linguists and Sinologists." In addition (in keeping with a separate argument, in which Derek had argued that Cantonese and Mandarin are dialects, not languages)
From a purely descriptive point of view, "languages" and "dialects" are simply arbitrary groups of similar idiolects, and the distinction is irrelevant to linguists who are only concerned with describing regional speeches technically. However, the idea of a single language has major overtones in politics and cultural self-identity, and explains the amount of emotion over this issue.With regard to loanwords, Wikipedia states that
Chinese vocabulary has exerted an enormous influence on the Japanese language. At the time of their first contact, the Japanese language had no writing system, while the Chinese had a written language and a great deal of academic information, providing new concepts along with Chinese words to express them.In truth, I have never debated this issue, and, anyway, I needed more evidence regarding structure. While I kept looking, I found out that loanword movement seems to work both ways, since "like any other language, Chinese has absorbed a sizeable amount of loanwords from other cultures."
Since the 20th century [...] using existing kanji,, the Japanese re-moulded European concepts and inventions into wasei-kango (和製漢語, literally Japanese-made Chinese), and re-loaned many of these into modern Chinese. Examples include diànhuà (电话/電話, denwa, "telephone"), shèhuì (社会, shakai, "society"), kēxué (科学/科學, kagaku, "science") and chōuxiàng (抽象, chūshō, "abstract") [...] jīngjì (经济/經濟, keizai), which in the original Chinese meant "the workings of the state", was narrowed to "economy" in Japanese; this narrowed definition was then reimported into Chinese. As a result, [...] there is some dispute over [...which words] the Japanese or Chinese coined [...] first.Further research on Wikipedia has been difficult because of its obviously-unreliable and general nature. However, even here there was a lot of disagreement, vagueness and uncertainty: on the one hand, I came across such statements as "[the] relationships [of Japanese] with other languages remain undemonstrated" and "more distant connections remain contentious among historical linguists," and, on the other hand, I read:
The possibility of a genetic relationship to the Goguryeo [...] language has the most currency; a relationship to Korean is widely considered but is problematic; an Altaic hypothesis is less widely accepted. A few linguists support the hypothesis that Japanese is genealogically related to the Austronesian languages.Thus, although I have determined with certainty that I was completely wrong with regard to my Russian-Chinese and English-Chinese hypotheses (since both Russian and English are classified as Indo-European languages and Chinese is classified as a Sino-Tibetan language, and physical contact from the Middle East seems to have never reached Asia during the initial stages of linguistic development), I was still in the dark with regard to the rest of my questions. After a whole lot of Googling, I decided to contact Dr. Alexander Vovin, a U.S.S.R.-born professor at the East Asian Languages and Literatures department at the University of Hawai’i at Mānoa.
Dr. Vovin replied to me yesterday, being very concise and specific in his answers.
Mike: Can it be said that the Japanese language has developed independently from the Chinese language?What have I learned here? 1. I should definitely avoid talking to my Chinese (and Korean) friends about Asian linguistics in general and anything Japanese in specific; there is just too much conflict and various flavours of nationalism and exceptionalism to go around. The field is highly volatile and I have yet much to learn about both Japanese and Chinese. 2. Just because two languages share a writing system does not mean that they have not developed independently from each other (dynasties, World War II and textbooks notwithstanding). 3. Just because two features in different languages seem the same, does not mean that they have common origins.
Dr. Vovin: J and C are unrelated, but C did influence J phonology and lexicon, not to mention that J writing system is derived from C (for kana it is through a Korean intermediary). This influence becomes especially apparent from Kamakura on [a period in Japanese history between 1185 and 1333]. There is no ostensible influence in syntax, J stayed SOV [Subject Object Verb, whereas English and Chinese are both SVO].
M: "How correct is the hypothesis regarding the development of Japanese from older Korean?
V: I think it is wrong, but some believe it is right. My main [...] argument[s] are: 1) there is no common paradigmatic morphology, 2) the lexical parallels are sadly lacking among such basic vocabulary as [...] body parts, and when they are present we ran into lack of regularity of correspondences, unaccounted segments, etc. 3) the best possible etymologies for Korean show up only in Central J.
M: How correct is the hypothesis regarding the land bridge between Korea and Japan (in the Palaeolithic or Neolithic) and the subsequent crossing over of cultures and/or languages?
V: Well, the bridge must have been there during Ice Age, but J migration to islands occurred no earlier than 4 c. BC -- too late. It must have been maritime.
M: Is there any connection between Indo-European languages and Sino-Tibetan languages (i.e. Russian and Chinese or English and Chinese), or have the two language families developed in complete isolation from each other?
V: They are completely unrelated, and some linguists even question the validity of ST -- most likely we have there Chinese family and Tibeto-Burman family, with [...] lots of contacts, but originally unrelated.
What am I still curious about? 1. Why are two Indo-European languages like Russian and English so different in terms of word order? 2. How can the ostensible similarity between Russian and Chinese phonemes be explained (if there is any)? 3. Can something like "стыдно" be correlated with "恥ずかしい" (as complete units of meaning)? 4. Why are English and Chinese SVO but Japanese is SOV? 5. Why is historical linguistics such a contentious field and why are my Chinese friends so protective about their linguistic theories?
Well, I hope you enjoyed my foray into the world of linguistics more than I enjoyed being looked upon as an idiotic white guy indoctrinated into believing falsehoods by an evil Japano-American academic armada. It's all in a day's work, right?
the better poet
before the teacher sat
on her knee
below him
adoration adulation fascination
of him she wrote
the poet
- if he is any thing
that he would be
(maybe an asshole
or is that redundant)
seeks to educate
and cultivate
his apprentice
lays before him
clean white pure
soft and moldable
teaching
the flesh of words
and words
of the flesh
that whets
the appetite
and she swallows
as she speaks
edifying
the master
on colors and curves
on form
the poet
writes
himself
spilling
onto the page
he tries
tries to instruct her
to come
to the page
open and welcoming
soaked
in determination assurance
arrogance
and creativity
he lies her down
a tablet
his arm poised
above her form
stroking
the smooth white
with the brushing
of his quill
he says
write
write
in rivers
like a fountain
spouting
spurting
bleeding onto the page
as he slays me
impales me
thrusting
his pen deep
into my chest
writing my heart
writing Calliope's hand
writing
writing
the scratch of letters
the grain of syllables
the texture of words
mouth them
he says
as he slides them
between my
lips
to rest on my tongue
know your words
roll them
massage them
feel them on your
tongue them
as he thrusts them in
swallow and choke
and let it slide
down your throat
slide
into your core
and let it pulse
beat
in your depths
the depths of your soul
This will never be finished I think.
dammit. it lost the format again. anyways. a token for you. I miss you.
Sweetie, this is beautiful, and, I think, if it is not finished and you can keep going, you definitely should. One thing I can say with certainty about this piece is that it reads very well. Speaking of reading, I restored your formatting (in the future, simply replace all spaces with and it will format properly. I also took the liberty of italicising S12L5, as per the WIP copy; I thought it was apropos.
Being an English teacher and all, I have a couple of suggestions to make: In S3L2, "lay" should be replaced with "lie" ("lie" refers to its subject, whereas "lay" refers to its object; thus, the apprentice cannot "lay before him" because that would imply that the apprentice lays an object before "him"). Conversely, in S8L1, "lies" should be replaced with "lays," for the same reason. In S4L3, the conjugation "whets" causes confusion in connection to "that" because it can refer to both "words" (thus being grammatically incorrect) or "flesh" (being correct). In general, the shift from first person to third person (S9-S10) is a little confusing, but, in the end, you pull it off. Finally, as I often do with my own pieces that simply refuse to terminate, perhaps removing the last line would at least give it an illusion of finality.