Interesting and well-illustrated article. The claim that Japanese (or any other language) totally unique is a romantic one, showing the ignorance of the author with the very wide variety of languages and writing systems (the effect go writing system on language is not covered a lot in Linguistics, whose focus is the spoken language).
For example, they mention furigana, characters that aid in reading Kanji characters (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Furigana). There are many examples of similar use in the languages, one that I'm familiar with is the use of determinatives in Ancient Egypt (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Determinative). Their use is similar to radicals in Mandarin, which is to provide additional semantic clarification. If you want phonetic clarification, examples are even more numerous, e.g. the use of shaddah in Arabic (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Shaddah).
The idea expressed in the "Dissociation from Birth" section sounds interesting until you learn that all alphabetic systems arose from a similar process, e.g. aleph was a drawing of an ox's head, etc.
> they mention furigana, characters that aid in reading Kanji characters ... There are many examples of similar use
TFA's main point about uniqueness with furigana was how it's occasionally used for out-of-band communication, like an author having a character say one thing while conveying to the reader that they mean something else. Do other languages have similar features?
Tones in non tonal languages do this, which can make tonal languages very difficult because instinctively you aren't used to tones being used for in-band communication.
Every language has various out-of-band features (gestures, etc). I was asking if any of them are similar to the (written) furigana usage described in TFA.
As others have said, this is common in Chinese writing. The unique thing about furigana is that it's typeset above/beside the kanji for the second meaning.
Perhaps the more interesting thing is how even songs will often use kanji for a concept but the sung lyrics are expressed in furigana, but IIRC Chinese culture has this too.
How is that common in Chinese writing? I haven't seen anything similar to gikun in Chinese. Outside of graded readers, I've not seen the pronunciation written above a character and in the case of graded readers, it would always be the expected pronunciation not a different pronunciation that carries a different sense. That's something I agree with the writer as being unique.
It is not common at all, but in Taiwan there is bopomofo, which is used the same way as furigana in Japanese – to indicate the pronunciation of Chinese characters. In fact, children in Taiwanese schools learn bopomofo first and only later proceed with learning the traditional Chinese characters.
Yeah, most of my son's children books are from Taiwan (we're in Hong Kong so use traditional characters too) and I do see bopomofo sometimes. But it's mostly the normal use of furigana, doesn't seem to be used to give another alternate meaning/pronunciation to the word.
Writing the pronunciation above a character is normal when the character is rare or has an unexpected pronunciation. For example recently 龘 was often written with the pinyin above.
Writing a different pronunciation with a different sense is also often seen on WeChat or in adverts. Often with a positive meaning in characters and a negative meaning in pinyin.
That felt to me to play the same role as "local footnotes" (those footnotes that sometimes appear not at the end of the page, but at the end of a short section or paragraph)?!
The nuance is a bit different. With what TFA is talking about with furigana, the implication is that whoever is speaking has said one word but pronounced it like another. That doesn't really make sense in English but with JP and kanji having lots of readings it's kind of a normal way to think.
So in some cases it's really no different from a footnote - e.g. in the JP version of Neuromancer there are bits where dialogue has the word for "immerse" with the furigana "jack in", and the effect is that the character has said the in-universe slang, and the base word is giving the reader a sense for what the slang means.
But if a character says "She's my friend" and "friend" has the furigana for "lover", or vice-versa, the effect becomes very different. You can think of it as one word being in the speaker's mind and another coming out of their mouth, or maybe as the character saying one thing and the author telling us another.
I'm not a native speaker, just fluent, but anyway that's how it works in my mind.
I think the way the author calls it "reading in stereo" is a very good picture. It's not a footnote or a liner note that explains the meaning of a word. Those live outside the text. It _is_ the word and it lives within the text. It's the inherent meaning of the characters painted on to another word.
No, that isn't a language feature. Japanese doesn't have that feature either. Note that a written text displaying this feature has no spoken equivalent.
Other writing systems do have similar features; it's common in Chinese internet culture.
Yeah the Chinese language simply uses parentheses for that purpose. The convention is that each Chinese character is placed into its own parenthesis unlike a regular parenthetical remark. For example, if the one thing being said is ABCD but the other meaning, most likely an ironic one, is WXYZ, the author simply writes A(W)B(X)C(Y)D(Z). Of course this requires the two to have the same number of characters, which is reasonably easy to do.
> "Dissociation from Birth" section sounds interesting until you learn that all alphabetic systems arose from a similar process, e.g. aleph was a drawing of an ox's head, etc.
My understanding of Korean (Hangul) is that the alphabet design is based on the shape of mouth in articulation, sonics, category, etc. of the letters themselves: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hangul#Letter_design
Hangul is an exception to many similar "historically true" patterns mostly because it was created so late. Hangul is more a single person's well-educated effort, not something that emerged over time from various local customs. The castle I grew up near is easily 150+ years older than Hangul.
I definitely found Chinese was much easier to learn to read at a minimal level.
Since the sounds per character are 1-1 and the semantics are very clean you can get a lot out of a text by looking characters up in the Unihan database. Words are usually composed out of the semantics of the characters and the grammar is pretty regular, more than some artificial languages.
> Since the sounds per character are 1-1 and the semantics are very clean you can get a lot out of a text by looking characters up in the Unihan database.
You probably got a lot of wrong meanings this way. The characters aren't 1-1 mapped to sounds and their semantics are profoundly context-dependent.
The characters are mostly 1-1. There are a few exceptions, but usually one is a lot more typical than the other, so reading it with the typical reading won't usually get you in trouble
While not as egregious as Japanese where characters can have 15+ readings, the number of exceptions certainly are not few. Below is a link to the official table of words with multiple pronunciations in standard Mandarin.
While I couldn't find any characters with more than three or four readings in this list, the Taiwan list (https://language.moe.gov.tw/files/people_files/%e5%88%9d%e7%...) has one character with five readings (著) and one with six (和). Still a long way from 15, though.
It's worth noting that the aforementioned list is the unified pronunciation list that was published in 1985 by the Ministry of Education. The reason why you see some words only having a single (unified) reading in that list is due to the necessity of having to unify them in the first place, although there are still quite a few words with multiple readings. Keep in mind that there was no official language of China until 1932. Without going into detail about how pronunciations evolved with the change of dynasties and how China actually has 300+ spoken languages, the need for a unified pronunciation stems from the fact that many people in China, historically and even today, do not speak standard Mandarin as their first language. In other words, prior to 1985 it was much more chaotic. If you want a more up-to-date comprehensive list of words with multiple readings (多音字) you can find it below (although this is not an official government list). I've linked directly to the common words of which there are 106 (although the page does not define what is considered "common").
The multi-sound characters are common in usage. For example 长 can be cháng meaning "long" or zhǎng meaning "to grow". 行 is xíng "to walk" or háng with no real single coherent meaning, appearing in compounds like 银行 yínháng "bank" and 行业 hángyè "profession". All of these are very common usages. In context they are essentially never ambiguous, but if you are going through character-by-character it's not going to make sense.
I think GP's assessment that Chinese is semantically clean and regular might not be completely correct, rather it's quite close to his primary that friction is much reduced compared to Japanese, or many others for that matter. It's very well known that Chinese grammar is super close to English for whatever reasons.
> It's very well known that Chinese grammar is super close to English for whatever reasons.
They are both felt to have gone through a lot of simplification. It isn't well known that they have similar grammars, for the fairly straightforward reason that they don't have similar grammars.
As an English speaker I find it frustrating that languages like German and French have so many irregular verbs and that you also need to keep track of grammatical gender which seems pretty arbitrary.
In Chinese though you find structures which are pretty regular such as "measure words" where you might write
yi zhang zhi
which means
one (piece) of paper
where the word "zhang" is used because paper is thin, but you might use "ke" for something round like a pebble or "tiao" for something long and flexible like a snake. This and a lot of of what I read in the grammar book comes across as rational to me.
Note that Latin is generally considered to have about four irregular verbs, possibly a few more than that depending on how you're counting.
A verb in Ancient Greek has six principal parts, which means that to correctly inflect it you need to memorize six more-or-less independent forms.† (They're often "less" independent, but sometimes they'll surprise you!)
By contrast, an English verb, except for the single verb be, has a maximum of five forms. (Not five principal parts - five fully-inflected forms!) So by the Greek standard, English has just the one irregular verb. That's not a correct application of the concept, but it is worth observing.
> I don't think French has examples as crazy as go -> went. I mean, there aren't even letters in common!
This is a suppletive verb. (That is, a verb in which some forms descend from one ancestral verb and other forms descend from a different ancestral verb.‡) Went was originally the past tense of the still-existent verb wend, in the same way that bent is still today the past tense of bend; wend has had to shift over to wended.
Not only does French have suppletive verbs, it has the same suppletive verb, aller [to go]:
1sg pres. je vais [< Lat. vadere]
1sg impf. j'allais [< Lat. alare]
1sg fut. j'irai [< Lat. ire]
The Latin verb is ire; it is minorly irregular but not suppletive in Latin. Suppletion is present in Latin anyway; the best-known example would be fero, whose third principle part tuli is taken from tollo. In turn, tollo uses sustuli [= sub- + tuli] as its third principal part, and then sustuli is left ambiguous between being the perfect form of tollo or of suffero [= sub- + fero].
Circling back around, we can note that while fero is one of the rare Latin verbs that comes with a warning that its conjugation is irregular, that's not because its perfect forms are taken from an unrelated verb. By itself, that would barely be worth remarking on.
† And this is a convenience for modern students. Actual speakers of the language would have thought about their verbs a bit differently - in a number of common cases, one of the principal parts is a form that doesn't otherwise exist in the language, which native speakers would never have considered.
‡ Suppletion as a linguistic phenomenon is not restricted to verbs; compare person -> people.
> the effect go writing system on language is not covered a lot in Linguistics, whose focus is the spoken language
I’d frame this a little differently: the vast majority of languages in the world are not regularly written, so linguists must focus on the spoken language. For languages which are written more often, linguists can and do focus on the relationship between the written and the spoken language.
There's an case that can be made that "written language" is somewhat of a misnomer and that spoken language is to "written language" somewhat as music is to sheet music (or as chess is to chess notation), and so spoken language alone belongs to the proper subject matter of lingusitics. E.g. Saussure:
> A language and its written form constitute two separate systems of signs. The sole reason for the existence of the latter is to represent the former. The object of study in linguistics is not a combination of the written word and the spoken word. The spoken word alone constitutes that object. But the written word is so intimately connected with the spoken word it represents that it manages to usurp the principal role. As much or even more importance is given to this representation of the vocal sign as to the vocal sign itself.
That's correct. A fascinating topic is how the written representation shapes the user's language, and, by association, their thinking - a written word version of teh Sapir-Whorf Hypothesis if you will. For example, for the aliens in the (story and) movie Arrival, was their superior all-temporal thinking capability due to their language, or their interesting written form?
Interesting personal anecdote: My son is learning French in school, he's native in both English and Turkish, but not very good with Turkish spelling and does not use it often. I've seen him struggle with memorizing French words and their pronunciation, because he doesn't have an alternative phonetic representation of them (he doesn't know IPA, naturally :-). But Turkish spelling is (almost 100%) phonetic and I remembered that's how I memorized English when I was kid, I would think about their pronunciation in Turkish! E.g. cheese would be "çiyz".
Chinese also has furigana-like characters that can be written next to characters, bopomofo or zhuyin fuhao https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bopomofo, although only taught and used in Taiwan as far as I know.
As a tourist, maybe. Bopomofo (aka. zhuyin) is universal in all children's books until 3rd-4th grade, and is the most common keyboard input system used in Taiwan.
> Their use is similar to radicals in Mandarin, which is to provide additional semantic clarification.
Radicals are used in the same way for Hanzi (Chinese/"Mandarin") and Kanji (Japanese). Most of the Japanese characters are the same as the unsimplified Chinese characters. Furigana is used in a fairly different way, though. You occasionally see phonetic writing similar to furigana underneath characters in books that are used to teach children how to read. But it’s not nearly as common as in Japan, and it’s only (from what I’ve seen) used as a study aid for kids, not in the more creative ways the author discusses here.
The big difference as well is that the phonetic writing in Chinese isn’t part of the language itself. It’s like IPA (the dictionary pronunciation symbols) - they’re used to tell you how to write something, not to actually communicate. Kana (which furigana is written in), is actually part of the Japanese language.
Furigana are frequent in many technical and scientific texts, not only in children books, because such texts may include many words that would not be used in normal conversations.
This was already true for the books published before WWII, i.e. before the writing reform, even if those books contained much less hiragana than the modern texts (after the writing reform a lot of hiragana word terminations began to be written in order to disambiguate the readings of kanji for which native Japanese readings are chosen, even when the complete furigana are not provided; this post-WWII writing style may reduce the need for furigana).
While, as you say, there have been and there still are other writing systems that mix semantic elements with phonetic elements, or in which what is written does not determine completely the intended pronunciation (like in the systems that write only the consonants), there has been no other dead or alive writing system where these features are so extreme, causing a complexity and ambiguity even remotely comparable with the Japanese writing system. There is nothing romantic about this.
Apart from its writing system, the language itself would not be unusual at all, except for being a mixed language, especially in the technical and scientific styles, with a huge amount of words of Chinese origin that behave very differently from the native words, which is also a consequence of the writing system, through which these words had been imported.
Yes, author of the article obviously never tried to learn Sumerian, because the Japanese written system is quite regular and easy to deal with in comparison.
While the Sumerian writing system presents some of the same difficulties of the Japanese writing system, like many signs that have multiple possible readings and a combination of semantic signs and phonetic signs, the total number of signs and the number of possible readings for them are far greater in Japanese, so the Sumerian writing system is easier and more regular than the Japanese writing system.
The main difficulties of the Sumerian writing system are due to the fact that many of its rules had to be guessed, e.g. about where to use certain readings for some signs, depending on their context, because the last people who knew the complete system have died millennia ago, and such guesses are seldom completely certain.
In the comparison with Sumerian, Japanese is aided by the existence of native speakers who can always show the correct reading and meaning of a text (though many young Japanese can have great difficulties in reading any book published before WWII, because the writing reform has made drastic changes, replacing both many kanji signs and the furigana used for many kanji signs, so even where furigana are written they may not help enough a modern reader).
However, while the availability of native speakers eliminates the problems caused by not knowing the correct rules, that still does not make the Japanese writing system simpler than the Sumerian writing system.
I could easily write a wall of text about Polish honorifics, that can easily be used to express all the honorifics mentioned in the Wikipedia article, and much much more.
But probably nobody's really interested.
I mean, there are even ways how a bum refers to you, when they ask you for spare change.
For example, they mention furigana, characters that aid in reading Kanji characters (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Furigana). There are many examples of similar use in the languages, one that I'm familiar with is the use of determinatives in Ancient Egypt (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Determinative). Their use is similar to radicals in Mandarin, which is to provide additional semantic clarification. If you want phonetic clarification, examples are even more numerous, e.g. the use of shaddah in Arabic (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Shaddah).
The idea expressed in the "Dissociation from Birth" section sounds interesting until you learn that all alphabetic systems arose from a similar process, e.g. aleph was a drawing of an ox's head, etc.
The part that I find really interesting about Japanese is it's well-developed system of honorifics (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Honorific_speech_in_Japanese).