of its situational complexity. Therefore, it was not strange for the study to find honorification grammaticalized among only those who were familiar with this type of language. Given the diversity of dialects and their media exposure today, speech styles have changed and so have people’s feeling toward them. In particular, men’s and women’s languages are moving toward more neutral styles, and given societal needs, more politically correct expressions are expected to increase in the near future, though not to the extent of those found in American English. Historical difference in speech style can be seen in this section.
PART III: Pronunciation offers segmental and suprasegmental analyses of the language. For instance, it discusses the difference between seion and dakuon, which is not necessarily the same as the difference between voiceless and voiced consonants. It refers to Norinaga’s finding that voiced consonants and the /r/ series do not appear at the beginning of a word in ancient Japanese. This reminds me of the fact that /r/ resists palatalization in Japanese mimetics (Tsujimura 2007). These may be related and may suggest the underlying restriction of /r/ in Japanese. Kindaichi also discusses the bimoraic rhythm of the language and the pitch characteristic of the word initial mora. The latter is well-known as Haraguchi’s (1977) Initial Lowering Rule in the Tokyo dialect. He also mentions that low pitch indicates word/phrase break, which relates to the “down step” prosodic characteristic. As can be seen, these segmental and prosodic characteristics Kindaichi discusses have been studied in more depth in recent years, and Optimality theoretic applications may be found from his insightful discussions as well.
PART IV: Vocabulary easily attracts both those who study the language, but have not studied theoretical linguistics, and those who study linguistics. Various characteristics of words are discussed in this section. Although one has to consider the time period in which this book was written, Kindaichi’s insights are applicable to the current diverse linguistic issues surrounding Japanese words. Japan annually identifies the most popular word, but does that popular word become a permanent part of the language? As the society changes rapidly, new words are created and disappear. In the age of abundant media and cyber-communication, cell phone text messages and blogs and discussion boards on the World Wide Web and 2 channel bring very interesting and innovative uses of letters as well as words (e.g.,
PART V: Sentence Construction offers various perspectives on sentences, not only related to syntax, but also discourse analyses. The sentence length and the word order of the language bring an interesting challenge to sentence processing theories, e.g., serial vs. parallel processing, incremental vs. delay processing, and memory load (see Nakayama [1999] and Nakayama, Mazuka, and Shirai [2006]). Part V also looks at sentences from the discourse perspective. When phonologically null pronouns are used, when ellipsis occurs, and how the topic of the sentences moves in the discourse, e.g., centering, are all still being investigated in current linguistic theories.
The Japanese Language is a gold mine for those who are studying Japanese linguistics and looking for topics to investigate. Although the book was written more than half a century ago, many characteristics of the language discussed in it have been analyzed in a new light in recent years, and the book remains pertinent in current linguistic theories. This is an indication of how insightful Kindaichi was. I hope those who read The Japanese Language for the first time and those who are reading it again find this book as illuminating and insightful as I have found it to be.
—MINEHARU NAKAYAMA
Professor, Japanese Linguistics
The Ohio State University
Editor, Journal of Japanese Linguistics
References
Haraguchi, S. (1977) The Tone Pattern of Japanese: An Autosegmental Theory of Tonology. Tokyo: Kaitakusha.
Kubozono, H. (2002) Shingo-wa kooshite tsukurareru. Tokyo: Iwanami Shoten.
Mutsukawa, M. (2009) Japanese Loanword Phonology. Tokyo: Hituzi Syobo.
Nakayama, M. (1999) Sentence processing. In N. Tsujimura (ed.), The Handbook of Japanese Linguistics. 398–424. Boston: Blackwell.
Nakayama, M. R. Mazuka, and Y. Shirai (eds.) (2006) Handbook of East Asian Psycholinguistics Vol. 2: Japanese. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.
Osterhout, L. and K. Inoue (2007) What the Brain’s Electrical Activity Can Tell Us about Language Processing and Language Learning. In T. Sakamoto (ed.) Communicating Skills of Intention. 293–309. Tokyo: Hituzi Syobo.
Shibatani, M. (1990) The Languages of Japan. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.
Tsujimura, N. (2007) An Introduction to Japanese Linguistics. 2nd edition. Malden, MA: Blackwell Publishing.
Unger, J. M. (2009) The Role of Contact in the Origins of the Japanese and Korean Languages. Honolulu: University of Hawai‘i Press.
Vovin, A. (2009) Koreo-Japonica: A Re-evaluation of a Common Genetic Origin. Center for Korean Studies Monograph. Honolulu: University of Hawai‘i Press.
Author’s Preface
Nippongo (The Japanese Language), my earlier book, has been translated and is about to make its appearance before the English-reading public, thanks to the endeavor of Miss Umeyo Hirano. I feel happy about this, perhaps to the point of mild embarrassment, but at the same time I have a vague apprehension as I look back through my original Nippongo and find points that I should have revised or wonder if there may be other defects here and there which escaped my notice.
I have looked over Miss Hirano’s translation and found that it is a painstaking work, for in my original, especially, there are several places that could easily have been misinterpreted. Up to the present, the Japanese people have not been so strict about errors in their own literary works, but with translations of Western writings into Japanese there has been a disposition that does not allow even a tiny error. I can see now that we should be more broadminded in the future, for not all translators can possibly bring to their works the care and tenacity that is exhibited in this volume.
What Miss Hirano has taken special pains about is the clarification of the notes for each of the sources of material I quoted from other people’s works. In my original Nippongo, notes were removed one after another at the request of the publisher, who said they made the book hard to read. Some of these notes involved quotations from the lesser magazines, and I cannot begin to imagine how troublesome the search for their exact sources must have been. Indeed, without such diligent labor this translation would perhaps have been completed earlier.
One thing I noticed when I saw this translation was the system of roman letters used to transcribe Japanese words. It is the romanization developed by James Hepburn, who came to Japan in the early Meiji period, and has been used in this book because it is the system most generally used in Japan and abroad. Of course, since it cannot conform exactly to the phonemics of Japanese, there are in Part III, which deals
