Kinship 142
• Social position and sex distinction 144
• Terms of respect 146
• Social interaction 149
• Colors 155
• Abstract ideas 156
PART V SENTENCE CONSTRUCTION 159
• Sentence form 161
• Sentence endings 163
• Sentence length 167
• Significative words and phrases at the ends of sentences 174
• The subject and the topic words 176
• Expressions ending in nouns 179
3. Word and Phrase Arrangement 183
• The principle governing word order 183
• Languages with similar word order 185
• Freedom in Japanese word order 186
• Modifiers at the beginning 187
• Predicates at the end 189
4. Word and Phrase Combination 196
• Joining sentences 198
• Linking participial adjectives 201
• Flexibility of noun phrases 205
• Word modulation 210
• Omission of subjects and modifiers 214
• Ellipsis in the predicate 216
Postscript 219
We create Japanese 221
Publisher’s Foreword
No one would believe it now, but sixty years ago, the Japanese language was living on borrowed time. In the agonizing national reappraisal that followed defeat in World War II, even the most hallowed national institutions were subjected to keen scrutiny. The language itself was no exception.
Some people—and not just the Americans—blamed the war itself on the formality and complexity of the national idiom. At one time, the occupying authorities seriously considered replacing Japanese with English as the sole offcial language. And a renowned literary figure of the prewar period proposed the adoption of French.
It was in 1956, barely four years after the end of the occupation, that Haruhiko Kindaichi wrote his classic defense of the national language under the title of Nippongo. Rejecting the arguments of those who had predicted linguistic decline or degeneration, he pointed instead to the language’s sturdy powers of assimilation. Far from collapsing under a tide of foreign words, Japanese was becoming bolder and more innovative.
Kindaichi was determined to explore all facets of his forbidding subject. To do so, he drew not only on the resources of the literature but also on Japan’s numberless dialects and professional jargons, about which he is the acknowledged expert. No one can emerge from this book without a feeling for the richness and complexity of the language spoken today throughout the world by over 130 million Japanese in all fields of human endeavor.
Foreword to the New Edition
Nippongo (The Japanese Language) was originally published in 1957 in Japan, and translated into English and published in 1978. I read this accessible and very insightful book for the first time while I was in college in Japan. It was before I became familiar with linguistic theories in the U.S. Now I am fortunate to be given an opportunity to read it again and discuss how pertinent to current linguistic theories Kindaichi’s original insights are.
First, I would like to remind readers to read the author’s preface and the translator’s notes so that his essays can be placed into the context and time period of when this book was originally written. Being mindful of the historical context will allow his remarks to be interpreted appropriately.
PART I: The Position of Japanese presents Kindaichi’s view towards the Japanese language. He first discusses the origin of the language. As Shibatani’s (1990) textbook title, The Languages of Japan, suggests, there is more than one language in Japan. They are Ainu and Japanese, which are considered unrelated whereas Ryukyuan is considered a dialect of Japanese. Generally speaking, Japanese is regarded as related to Korean, but Kindaichi thinks that supporting evidence for this view is insuffcient. Recently, Vovin (2009) also challenged this general view and argued against the idea that Japanese and Korean share the same ancestry. Unger (2009), on the other hand, supports the common origin hypothesis of the languages. Given new linguistic, methodological, and archeological developments, this again became a hot topic of debate.
PART II: Aspects of Speech refers to pragmatic and socio-linguistic aspects of the language. Speech styles commonly discussed in relation to politeness and gender issues deal with empowerment, but commonly accepted speech styles change over time as the society changes. Certain forms are registered as part of grammar. For instance, an appropriate honorific verbal form appears when the subject referent is exalted. This subject-verb agreement can be considered similar to morpho-syntactic subject-verb agreement seen in many languages including English. Osterhout and Inoue (2007), however, found in their study about the brain’s electrical activity (Event Related Potentials) that the brain activity for the subject-verb agreement in honorification (i.e., the appropriate use of honorific form) is not the same as that observed with the English subject-verb agreement. Furthermore, this brain activity on agreement was only seen among those who often used the honorific language. As we know, it takes time for Japanese speakers to
