I’ve been reading the novel Shogun by James Clavell. It is set in Japan around 1600. Elizabeth I is on the throne of England. Portugal (da Gama and Magellan) has sailed around the horn of Africa, and circumnavigated the globe. Portugal is making a mint importing spices and exotic goods from Southeast Asia and “the Japans.” Spain (Jesuits, Cortez and Pizarro) is busy conquering and plundering the Americas. England and the Netherlands want their piece of the pie. The secret to the far east is the log book of the navigators, the “pilots,” who have been there and know how to navigate ships by sun and stars and set the course that gets you there. (– which solves the latitude problem. It would take another 150 years to solve the longitude problem.) Pilots keep meticulous notes on the star and sun sightings, weather, currents, coastal features, etc., in this log book, which at this time is called a “rudder.” Blackthorne, the English navigator, has managed to obtain what amounts to a Portuguese state secret — a Portuguese rudder that tells how to get to the Japans. He has been guiding a fleet of Dutch ships across the Atlantic, around Cape Horn and the stormy seas at the tip of South America. Through storms and encounters with the Spanish, only one ship manages to reach Japan and is nearly wrecked on the Japanese coast. So, imagine a man with 17th century attitudes, who speaks English, Dutch, and Portuguese encountering the language and culture of Japan for the first time. The book has to do with the aftermath of Blackthorne’s mental and spiritual train wreck as a result of that culture clash.
The book was originally made into a miniseries that was broadcast on TV in 1980 staring Richard Chamberlain as Blackthorne. It was filmed on location in Japan, and when the female lead (Yoko Shimada) was cast, there was a good deal of gasping and clutching at pearls among the Japanese about this big-deal Western heartthrob actor being cast alongside “their” Japanese actress (To be fair, there was still a sizeable segment of the Japanese population that remembered the American occupation of Japan after WWII, among other things.)(We know now what we didn’t know then: How little danger her virtue was in.) The miniseries was broadcast over five days, and was a big deal. I was working at Texas Instruments at the time and there was a Japanese programmer in our group. After each episode, we’d rehash it over lunch and she provided some interesting insights into Japanese culture and told us how accurate the English subtitles were. The miniseries has recently been remade and is available for streaming on Hulu. I may or may not watch it. I have the original miniseries on DVD, and I will definitely be rewatching that.
Reading the book got me to thinking about the Japanese language. Learning to speak it would be easier than learning to read it, and coming from European languages, it would be a booger to learn to read because it is a ideographic rather than an alphabetic language. It would be orders of magnitude harder than learning to read Russian, or any of the Indian languages, or Southeast Asian languages, where you only have to learn a small, finite set of alphabetic symbols for the sounds of the language. Learning Japanese (or Chinese, come to that) requires memorizing thousands of abstract visual symbols — one per word.
That got me to thinking about how hard English is to learn as a second language (English speakers — like the French — have never felt particularly obligated to pronounce all the letters in a word . . . ). In England, the printing press was invented right smack in the middle of a great linguistic shift when “the language of the Britons” was amalgamating and digesting Old Norse, Anglo-Saxon, Latin and Norman French into something more resembling modern English, and shaking off the remnants of Anglo Saxon orthography (through, rough, night) and regularizing the spelling between different dialects of English with varying proportions in the admixture in an age when there was no standardized spelling and people tended to spell words the way they said them. As a result, English spelling is “half baked” — the printing press set the spelling in lead type before it was completely sorted out, which makes reading English a mine field of mispronunciations. (tough cuff, through though, to two twin, neighbor, and the ever popular “I” before “E” except after “C” or unless it sounds “AY” as in “neighbor” and “weigh” — or it’s “weird” . . . In English, the exceptions to the exceptions to the exceptions have exceptions, except when they don’t . . .) And then there are those nouns that change stress when you use them as a verb: CONvert, but conVERT; PROject, but proJECT; CONtract but conTRACT, etc.
Compared to other European languages, English has acres of vocabulary that is a history lesson in itself. (The Anglo-Saxon speaking peasants call them chickens, pigs, and cows when they were raising them, but their Norman French speaking overlords called them poultry, pork, and beef when they sat down to eat them.) We inherit our compoundwording tendency from the Angles and Saxons, who were a Germanic (Haustürschlüssel!) people: Hotdog, bookkeeping, ditchdigger, wallpaper, etc. The Vikings gave the language a massive nudge toward simplicity by “immigrating,” marrying their Anglo-Saxon neighbors’ daughters, and refusing to put up with all those Anglo-Saxon case endings (especially the ones that changed the pronunciation) and all those other grammatical fiddly bits.
And then there is language as a means of transmitting culture from generation to generation . . . .
The Owl Underground 