(identity 'myron)

Sat, 29 Nov 2003

Japanese [/Japan]

Just some miscellaneous thoughts I've been having about the Japanese language lately....

Japanese seems particularly well suited for describing feelings and emotions. One particular construct does both, though, which I don't think occurs in common conversational English. The word is 感じ / kanji, which means something like feeling or sensation, but seems to simply capture everything felt at at particular moment whether sensory, emotional or whatnot. As an example, after having spent 15 months working in co-op, returning to school will be a sensation I haven't experienced in a long time, so I could say something like "久しぶり、こんな感じ" (it's been a long time, this feeling). In English, I'd probably say, "It's been a while", or "It's been so long since I've been in school". Notice, though, that the focus has changed towards highlighting the action rather than the feeling, as in the Japanese version. The word can also be used in a wide range of cases, anywhere from the mundane, like the way I eat, to very fine-graned situations, like describing the particular feelings I have after an exact sequence of events and comparing them with present feelings. Point is, the versatility of this generic feeling word just doesn't seem to exist in English.

However, this might not be so much an issue of language as it is of culture--it's possible that we never developed a commonly use word like 感じ simply because we don't talk about feelings as often as the Japanese do.

This cultural aspect comes into play again when it comes to cursing. Given that conflict is generally avoided and much more subtle in Japanese, there just aren't many strong swear words, particularly ones that would match up to the strength of, say, motherf*cker. As an amusing side-note, it seems animal names are used sometimes as invective in manga, such as calling someone a たこ / tako, or an octopus.

One last thought on the whole language differences thing is that Japanese can easily be used for obfuscation through vagueness. I can't really give specific examples, but this leads to very easy hand-waving, hyperbole, escaping direct conflict, and "mushy talk". The latter being obvious in a particular kind of engrish like "Let's be happy and enjoy this choco delicacy" on a candy wrapper or something. This occurs because of direct translation attempts of some vague sentence of well-meaning in Japanese to English, where such vagueness implies more that you haven't sorted out your thoughts well enough yet, rather than a general sense of good will.

All in all, Japanese is very interesting to learn, likely because the cultural gap is wide enough that what's considered natural to speak of in Japanese is very different from the norm in English. Likewise the large gap between the linguistic families of both languages makes for a lot of differences in vocabulary and constructs like 感じ. In the end, though, words are only what we come up with to divide and name the things we encounter in reality so that we can manipulate them in our heads. Words are second to the things they describe. And nowhere is this more apparent than in another language where they chose to divide the ideas differently, drawing the boundaries between ideas in different places than we did, as in the generic feeling-word 感じ, or the honorific and polite speech of Japanese.

*shrug* just a thought....

// posted at 19:49. permalink   comments

Here comes the sharia! [/World]

Haven't seen much about this in the mainstream news, but apparently Canadian courts are preparing to allow civil cases to be decided under sharia, Islamic law. Interesting development, but the story linked above prematurely rings alarm bells saying that this will "pav[e] the way to one day administering criminal sentences, such as stoning women caught in adultery."

Thankfully, Eugene Volokh debunks that statement here, with some wider discussion here.

// posted at 03:08. permalink   comments