Babel, page 30
Back in Japan, this early solution had two inconveniences. Firstly, it left undetermined whether a character represented its usual meaning or was merely used for the sake of its sound value. Being accustomed to a lot of ambiguity, Japanese writers and readers might not have minded this so much if it hadn’t been for the second inconvenience: the drudgery of having to add elaborate characters over and over again to render mere endings. In our fictitious example, the or /ying/ character comprises nine strokes, and many others are much more labour-intensive.
Quite soon then, the writers hit upon the idea of simplifying the characters with a grammatical function, so that they became different from the real kanji. This solved both problems in one stroke – figuratively speaking, that is, for while the resulting signs were far simpler than the originals, most of them still required several strokes.
Today, these simplified signs are collectively known as kana.* And while their forms and uses have changed over time, they have remained a major component of Japanese writing, second only to kanji. From a strictly practical perspective, kana is all that Japanese would need, because every word and sentence of the spoken language† can be written in kana, without the use of any Chinese characters. Between 1945 and 1965, the Japanese government and its Language Council planned on abolishing the characters altogether. But the cultural perspective is very different from the strictly practical, and literary authors managed to sway the council’s position, and thus the government’s. Today, a writer relying entirely on kana would to Japanese eyes be a Philistine. That has not always been the case: while characters have traditionally held higher prestige, there was a time, before 1700, when kana-only texts identified the writer not as uncultured, but as a highly cultured … woman. (The linguistic gender divide that we saw in chapter 13 also included the written language back then.) Known today as HIRAGANA, it is one of two different kana that are currently in use.
A different script for every occasion
Hold on – two different kana? But didn’t I say just now that kana is all Japanese would need for every single word in the language? I did. And yet, there they are: HIRAGANA and KATAKANA, literally meaning ‘smooth kana’ and ‘partial kana’ respectively. They look mostly quite different, but they represent the very same sounds. Each one of the forty-six hiragana signs has one katakana counterpart, and vice versa. The differences, like those between lower case and upper case in our alphabet, are not in pronunciation, but in appearance and function.
As for appearance, hiragana is called ‘smooth’ for a reason. Its shapes are not angular, but curvy. They make Japanese writing visually distinctive: , or (representing /tsu/, /no/ and /o/ respectively) could never be (printed) Chinese. Katakana signs do not exist in Chinese either, but this is less obvious to the outsider’s eye: , and are katakana for, again, /tsu/, /no/ and /o/. The reason they’re called ‘partial’ is that they are parts – fragments – of the characters they were derived from. The , for instance, is derived from the left half of . Hiragana originated in a similar way, but based on cursively written rather than printed characters.
In function, the two sets of kana are also clearly distinct. Hiragana plays the vital role we discussed before: it spells out the grammatical endings. (It also somewhat remedies the lack of spaces between words, as endings indicate word boundaries.) In addition, hiragana also replaces characters when for some reason they are not a practical option: because the writer doesn’t know the right character or because the readers (such as children) may not recognise it. Hiragana are also used to write words for which no character exists. Finally, hiragana is sometimes placed right next to kanji, as a reading aid – a practice called FURIGANA (‘assigning kana’) or YOMIGANA (‘reading kana’) that underlines how dispensable the characters are.
The function of katakana, on the other hand, is to mark and make accessible what we might call ‘difficult and strange words’: those of foreign (but not Chinese) origin, either borrowed or merely quoted; technical and scientific terms including names of species and minerals; and onomatopoeias such as boom and swoosh. Katakana can also lend emphasis to a word. To summarise the difference, we might say that hiragana is a grammar and pronunciation aid, whereas katakana functionally overlaps with our italic type.
Japanese keyboards are fiendishly clever: you can type in hiragana or Roman letters and they’ll convert the words into whatever you want: katakana, hiragana or even kanji – though in the last case, you’ll usually be asked to choose between several homophones.
Elegant and not so elegant acrobatics
The beauty of the kana system is that each sign represents one syllable.* But in modern Japanese, over a hundred different syllables exist, while the number of kana in either set is forty-six plus some additional signs. This mismatch has been resolved with orthographic acrobatics, not all of it elegant.
Little diacritical marks get to do most of the work, especially one that consists of two short strokes in the upper-right corner of the sign (DAKUTEN, colloquially known as ‘dots’). It softens the consonant, or to put it more technically, it ‘adds voice’. Thus, is pronounced /ka/ (hard, voiceless), but add the dots, like so: and what you get is /ga/. There is also a sign called HANDAKUTEN or ‘circle’ which changes consonants in a different way.
Worse than these Japanese diacritics, at least to my foreign eye, is that the ‘one kana, one syllable’ regularity seemingly breaks down in syllables where a /y/ appears between consonant and vowel, such as /kya/. This is written as , which clearly consists of two elements. But a skilled Japanese reader sees only one kana here: the sign on the right is smaller than the one on the left, and therefore it’s considered part of the larger one. In other words, the couple form a digraph, much like English ch. A digraph is made up of two signs, but represents a single sound, and in several languages, including Japanese but not English, they are therefore treated as one and inseparable.
Irashunal, shaw
More than 2,000 kanji, most of them with more than one pronunciation; two sets of kana, comprising more than 100 basic and compound signs each, which sometimes get placed alongside kanji – surely, this would be enough to earn Japanese the title of ‘world’s most complicated script’. But we’re not quite there yet.
To most of us, Japanese texts are an unintelligible sea of dark kanji waves with lighter kana crests. But every once in a while, we see something familiar. Numbers, for one thing. And more surprisingly, Roman letters. Japanese journalists, bloggers, emailers and other writers don’t think anything of including the occasional word in RōMAJI, as they call our alphabet. After all, their readers have mastered so many signs with so many pronunciations that they don’t mind such a trifling little addendum as our twenty-six letters.
Most of the words written in Latin letters are acronyms, either of an international nature, such as km, CD or SMS, or Japanese creations based on English, such as OB and OG for ‘alumnus’ and ‘alumna’ (from ‘old boy’ and ‘old girl’) and OL for ‘office lady’, a female service worker in an office.
And there’s another complicating factor: Japanese can be written either vertically, in which case the columns will be arranged from right to left, or horizontally, with lines going from left to right. This means that some Japanese books open to the left, as in European languages, others to the right, as in Arabic and Hebrew.
I could ask once more why this complex writing system hasn’t been rationalised, but the answer would be the same as in the previous chapter: the idea of tinkering with the written language, be it the rules of spelling or the choice of script, brings out a conservative reflex in most of us, which only in times of great social turmoil is likely to be overcome. Several organisations in the later part of the nineteenth and the first half of the twentieth centuries campaigned for either kana or the Roman alphabet, but all to no avail. In the late 1940s, research produced clear evidence that Roman-script textbooks did not harm primary-school students’ performance, and might even enhance it. As this outcome was the opposite from what the researchers had expected and hoped for, the results were immediately hushed up. Irrational? Sure. But language, as we’ve seen, is also about national identity and culture.
* Throughout this chapter, I will use the words ‘character’ and ‘kanji’ interchangeably. I do not use the word ‘character’ for other elements of Japanese writing.
* Kana may refer to either a single sign (a ‘letter’, as it were) or to the complete set to which each sign belongs (the ‘alphabet’, so to speak).
† In written Japanese, there are many Chinese borrowings that can only be distinguished in writing: their pronunciation is identical, but their kanji spelling is different. This means that, when read aloud, they may well confuse the listener, unless the context gives sufficient clues. It could be argued – I would – that sentences puzzling the listener usually represent bad writing. In that light, kanji that merely serve to differentiate between meanings of otherwise identical words may do more harm than good to the Japanese language.
* Which make it, technically speaking, a syllabary, as we saw in chapter 6 about Indic scripts. Though very technically speaking, it isn’t, because a single sign does not represent one syllable, but one mora, which is a linguistic unit of time. Most Japanese syllables coincide with one mora each, but those that end in a consonant or that have a long vowel (written with a macron in Latin script: ā, ō) are twice as long, so Nippon consists of two syllables of two moras each, as does the name Tōkyō. The Japanese drew their inspiration for kana from a system in which each sign did represent one syllable, namely the Brahmi script used for Sanskrit, the language of Buddhist texts from India.
1
English
1.5 billion speakers
375 million native speakers in the United Kingdom and some of its former territories, particularly the US, Canada, Australia, Ireland, New Zealand, South Africa and some Caribbean islands. Over a billion second-language speakers, principally in other former possessions (South Asia, Africa) and Europe, but elsewhere, too. Substantial numbers of English-speaking migrants can be found in all but the most unwelcoming countries.
English
DESIGNATIONS In the other nineteen Babel languages, English is called as follows (the order is that of the chapters): ANH, YŎNGŎ, ĀṄKILAM, İNGİLİZCE, INGGRIS, ENGELISI, AṄGREZĪ, EIGO, KIINGEREZA, ENGLISCH, ANGLAIS, INGG(E)RIS, ANGLIYSKIY, INGLÊS, INGREJI, ʾINGILĪZIYY, AṄGREZI, INGLÉS AND YĪNGYǓ.
FAMILY English is a Germanic language heavily influenced by Romance, and as such a member of the Indo-European family.
SCRIPT Latin alphabet, practically without diacritic signs. The spelling is infamous for its idiosyncratic and whimsical relation to pronunciation.
GRAMMAR English is remarkable for an Indo-European language in having scanty inflection and the merest traces of gender.
SOUNDS English has an uncommonly high number of different vowel sounds (over twenty, including diphthongs). Its set of consonants, at about twenty-four, is fairly average in size.
LOANWORDS English has borrowed massively from French, Latin and classical Greek, with more moderate numbers flowing in from Spanish, Italian, Dutch, German, Arabic, Hebrew, Persian and Sanskrit.
ON ITS OWN An unusual thing about English is that, due especially to its massive borrowing, no other language is similar enough to make it easy for English speakers to pick it up. For speakers of Portuguese, learning Spanish is a piece of QUEQUE, and my Vietnamese teacher assured me that she found Chinese not terribly difficult. Being a native English speaker has a raft of advantages … but it does have this one major drawback. Most English speakers are severely monolingual.
1: English
A special lingua franca?
As we’ve seen throughout this book, lingua francas have been with us for millennia, and in many parts of the world. But no language has ever been such a runaway success as English is today. Reliable figures are once more non-existent, but it seems that roughly one in four people on the planet might speak English – albeit not necessarily very well.
And that number keeps growing: today, Chinese schoolchildren begin to learn English before they have even mastered the art of writing Mandarin. One in five books published worldwide is in English. Over 80 per cent of scholarly articles are written in English. Nearly all international blockbuster films and hit songs are in English. And about half of the homepages of the most-visited sites on the Internet are in English. The official language of non-military aviation is English, the lingua franca of Antarctica is English and the only language ever spoken on the moon was English. In a way, English is the end of Babel – or rather, it’s the end of Babel as a problem. Linguistic diversity is still high – towering, if you like – but it’s no longer an impregnable wall to communication with strangers. English is the gateway.
It’s time for another conversation. And being a second-language speaker myself, let me welcome again the native English speaker we met in Persia.
Thank you – it’s good to be back. When we talked about Persian, you explained how it thrived for centuries over a vast area. What are the qualities that have made my own language so dominant?
What makes you think it’s a question of qualities?
Its success, of course. If it didn’t have some excellent qualities, it wouldn’t be so successful, would it?
‘Why not? Genghis Khan, bubonic plague and the News of the World were all extremely successful in their day. Oil wells have given the Arabian Gulf a huge share of the world’s wealth. Many things can thrive if the conditions are just right. English had to wait for centuries before political, economic and cultural developments made it go viral. In the late 1400s, it was spoken by just three million or so people – in England – and by hardly anybody elsewhere. Nobody at the time felt that there was anything intrinsic to English that destined it to become a global lingua franca. The country and its language were pretty marginal. Only in the early seventeenth century did England and English begin to show political and economic promise.
You’re talking about British merchants arriving in India? I mean, they laid the foundations for the British Empire that would spread English across the globe, didn’t they?
Up to a point. The British Empire was huge, indeed the biggest empire ever, and it sent out roots and shoots for English across the world. But for most of its existence, what came closest to being the world language was French. English only began to make its challenge after the First World War – right after what’s sometimes called ‘the British Century’. In fact, English didn’t begin to look like a world language until after the Second World War, when the American Century began. And its unquestionable hegemony is even more recent: it was achieved with the end of the Cold War, when Russian stopped being a competitor.
Russian, a competitor? You must be kidding.
I’m not. In the democratic and capitalist world, sure, Russian was marginal, but in communist countries it was much more widely spoken – and in the 1970s, there were lots of those. China paid virtually no attention to English either. Even in Latin America, the US backyard, English didn’t have much of a presence at the time.
Of course, I’m not saying that Britain played no role at all in the expansion of the language – it did, especially in North America and the Commonwealth. But elsewhere, the language arrived from America, carried by multinational companies, consumer products, TV shows, films and music. English has spread in much the same way as lingua francas always spread: it has followed the power, the money and the good things in life. It just so happens that thanks to modern technology, it is now possible for one language to have a strong presence in most of the world.
Par avion: when postal services became global in the nineteenth century, French was still the language of choice.
And to be spoken by one in four people.
Yes, perhaps. That would work out at 1.9 billion people. It’s possible: 375 million native speakers and a good billion and a half of second-language speakers. Those figures ring true, if we include people whose English is pretty hard to understand and those who are nervous or reluctant to speak it.
I still think the rise of English must be to do with its particular qualities, especially the straightforward grammar. You said yourself that Persian became a lingua franca for builders from all over the empire because it had simple grammar.
Not quite. What I said was that Persian became a lingua franca among those builders, and then, as a result, its grammar was simplified. It lost most of its ‘morphological complexity’ – its endings and genders, to put it simply. And the same thing happened to English, back when the Vikings settled in England and married local women. Those linguistically mixed households, like the linguistically mixed Persian building sites, produced a simplified language. And the fact that English has few endings and no genders makes it easier to master.
No political borders for English – even North Korea promotes its film festival in the global lingua franca.
