If I wanted to destroy the Japanese culture, I would make them learn *more* kanji...

[owlectomy]

I picked up an issue of Bungei Shunju a couple of weeks ago out of a vague but recurring sense that I should have more vocabulary for current events and politics and stuff. I am still sad that Ronza is no longer being published; Sekai is a bit too staid for my tastes; all of the other current events opinion magazines at Kinokuniya have a reputation for being right-wing, Bungei Shunju included, but I thought because of its good reputation (it's the magazine in which the Akutagawa prize is announced every year), and because it's not exclusively a political magazine, it wouldn't be so rightwingy.

...So obviously "To The People of Japan" was the wrong article to read (日本国民に告ぐ, by 藤原正彦. Who is a retired math professor. OBVIOUSLY he knows more about Japanese history than a historian does）. But I'm pretty fascinated by rightwingy Japanese nationalism, and if I actually knew enough to write a post about it than maybe I would, but I don't.

I'm making a post about it because today I came upon an idea that utterly gobsmacked me.

One of the things that occurred in the wake of the American occupation of Japan was the official writing reform, which declared that newspapers, magazines, and official legal and governmental documents had to restrict themselves to an official list of 1850 kanji. I'm not sure how many were in use before then -- prewar literature is notably more difficult to read, but for any number of reasons, not just the higher number of kanji. At any rate, the author declared that the writing reform was an American plot to destroy Japanese culture and make Japanese people stupid.

...

Per Wikipedia, he's hardly the first person to think so, and I am trying to be empathetic and think about how I would feel if, for example, the government suddenly said that I had to spell "through" as "thru" and "knight" as "nite." That's not a very good analogy, but I can't think of a better one for English. And, to be sure, I don't want to discount the effects of cultural imperialism. But I try to picture a bunch of bureaucrats sitting around a table and rubbing their hands evilly together. "I know! We'll crush their culture by making them spell 倦む　as あぐむ!"

...I guess I'm biased because my linguistics classes always emphasized that the true form of a language is the spoken language, not whatever system you use to write it down with. On the other hand, if you had a fantasy world where writing was literally mystical power, you've got a story there.

Comments

[starlady]

I think a slightly better analogy might be weird Restoration spellings (the only one I can think of is "highth" for "height" which is actually Miltonic) to contemporary ones. Or like ƒhow and ƒtellar inƒtead of show and stellar.

[owlectomy]

That's a good point! It's not a period of literature I really know anything about, though I remember those ƒs giving me a hard time in French lit.

[flemmings.livejournal.com]

Surely only a linguist *would* think the spoken language was the true one? Don't know about the Japanese, but writers on English usage have always deplored half the speakers of English because of their slang, colloquialisms, vulgarities, and what not; and when they import those atrocities into written English, ohh but the fur and feathers fly. (The other 50% of English speakers are deplored because of their accent, but that's a different issue.)

[lordameth.livejournal.com]

Indeed. On a theoretical level, in a sort of contemporary sociology sort of context, I fully understand where linguists are coming from when they say that the true version of a language is what's actually being spoken. After all, if the people themselves are speaking it, how could there be anything more real than that? *This* is the real Japanese that real Japanese people actually speak.

That said, I do think there is room for there to be a difference between the "true" version of a language as actually used by people on the streets, and on the other hand, the "correct" or "proper" version of the language, as follows certain rules. Language is always evolving, and there will always be new words, grammar constructions, and spellings that work their way in, but that's a slower process than that which happens within slang and colloquialisms on the street. At what point does "nite" become equally acceptable as "night"? Just because a ton of people use it, does that immediately make it correct, because people are using it and therefore that's the true version of the language? At what point does "orientate" (the incorrect verb form reverse engineered from "orientation", the correct verb being "orient") become a real word?

....

But, in any case, getting back to the subject of the Japanese spelling reforms, I think that the argument that it was somehow imposed by the Allied Occupation authorities to crush Japanese culture should be quite easily countered.

Because the spelling reforms were not imposed by the Allies. There were very few Americans at the time who spoke Japanese (outside of those of Japanese descent themselves), and so the idea of MacArthur and his boys imposing any kind of changes upon a language they didn't understand, inventing simplified forms for characters they didn't know, seems fairly absurd.

The Japanese imposed the spelling reforms upon themselves. If you want to blame someone, blame your own people, your own officials.

[takumashii.livejournal.com]

I don't think this is necessarily a prescriptivist vs. descriptivist thing.

What my linguistics classes emphasized was that, humans as a species had maybe tens of thousands of years of developing language before writing was even invented. Widespread literacy is an even more recent development (and kids seem to be wired to pick up spoken language in a way they're not wired to pick up written language). And there are a lot of times when there's some morphological or phonological process happening that is obscured by the writing system. (For example, I went along thinking that for the most part you add -s to make a plural. But in a lot of words -- "Shoes," "Guns," "Balls," "Eggs" -- it's pronounced like z. And in fact, it's "originally" a z that gets turned into an s in particular contexts.) And for linguists (though not for grammarians!) what the spoken language does with plurals is a lot more interesting than what the written language does with plurals, particularly in terms of telling you what the brain does when it processes language.

Yeah, I myself was really doubtful that many of the people involved with the occupation knew enough about Japanese to develop a plot to simplify it. But the postwar writing reforms are one of the things I really need to study in more detail.

[takumashii.livejournal.com]

I do have an inner grammar nitpicker that is persistently at war with my inner linguist. But I'm just too delighted to hear kids back-formation "versus" to say "I'm going to verse you next in [Wii] bowling!"