example ‘walking’ and ‘ambulation’ – Japanese similarly has both native Japanese words and Chinese-derived words. It is the same sort of connection. And moreover, the British are not a bit like the Italians and Greeks, although they look alike. Similarly, the Chinese and Japanese are not a bit alike in spite of looking more or less the same!
Surprisingly, where our Latin or Greek-derived words are invariably long words in English, the Chinese-derived words are very short in Japanese! Clarity-loving Winston Churchill used to say, ‘Don’t use a long word where a short word will do,’ but strangely enough it is the other way round in Japanese. Long Japanese words are much clearer and easier to understand than the short Chinese-derived words, of which so many sound alike.
Americans tend to use long words more than we do. For in-stance American stations have signs saying, ‘Expectoration forbidden’ while we just have ‘Do not spit’! And there was a teacher at my American university who deliberately used long words. Instead of saying, ‘Please phone me about it’ she would say ‘I shall require your telephonic communication’.
The kana alphabets invented by those Japanese monks are imperative in making meaning clear. Nouns and verb roots are generally written in kanji with the verb endings, prepositions, etc., added in kana script. For instance, here is the kanji for ‘walk’ 歩, basically read ‘aru’. Followed by き, the syllable ki in hiragana, the word becomes aruki, ‘walking’. The same kanji followed by ‘kô’ becomes hokô, ‘ambulation’, the Chinese-derived word for ‘walking’. It is just as if we had a picture-word for ‘walk’, and if you saw X-ing you would read it ‘walking’, and if you saw X-tion you would automatically know it should be read ‘ambulation’. This in itself shows how intellectually challenging written Japanese is!
Before the Second World War many more kanji were used, but now that thankfully the list of kanji has been officially shortened, let us hope that the two kana alphabets will be used more and more. It is interesting that the difference between katakana and hiragana is the same as the difference between the two varieties of our own alphabet – upper and lower case; katakana, like our capitals, is angular, whereas hiragana, like our small letters, is cursive.
You can see this difference in the Japanese vowels. Notice the different order from ours. The pronunciation is as in: ‘But he soon set off.’
| A | I | U | E | O |
| ア | イ | ウ | エ | オ |
(katakana)
| a | i | u | e | o |
| あ | い | う | え | お |
(hiragana)
Apart from the vowels, the only other single Roman letter sound in the Japanese kana alphabet is N (n) ン（ん) as used at the end of a word, because the alphabet is made up of syllables. consisting of the vowel sounds, in that order, preceded by successive consonants in the order K, S, T, N, H, M, Y, R, W, as follows:
KA KI KU KE KO, SA SHI SU SE SO, etc.
Certain syllables do not exist. For instance, SI, instead of which there is SHI. Neither are there any L syllables at all.
The nearest approach to f is the syllable fu.
G, Z, D, B and P syllables are formed by adding diacritical marks to the K, S, T, and H syllabic symbols.
Katakana are almost exclusively used today to spell foreign words and foreign names, for like any growing language, over the years Japanese has taken in a large proportion of words from abroad. Many Dutch and Portuguese words entered the Japanese language hundreds of years ago, such as pan from the Portuguese pao meaning ‘bread’, buriki from the Dutch blik, meaning ‘tin’, and koppu from the Dutch kopje, meaning ‘a drinking glass’, which I keep on mixing up with ‘cup’!
In later years, words from other European countries crept in, such as arubaito from the German arbeit (work) which in Ja-pan means ‘work on the side’, and abekku from the French avec (with) which has come to mean not just plain ‘with’ but ‘boy with girl’ – in other words ‘a courting couple’! But the language which has infiltrated Japanese to the greatest extent is the English language, and is going on apace. English has received from Japan a fair number of words itself, such as ‘geisha’, ‘ kimono’, ‘obi’, ‘samisen’, ‘ kakemono’, ‘ rickshaw’, ‘ tycoon’, ‘mikado’ and ‘ tsunami’, as a glance through any dictionary will show, but the greater debt by far is on the other side. Countless English words are by now well established in the Japanese language, and many have been abbreviated out of all recognition, such as suto, which is short for sutoraiku (strike), and biru, which is short for birudeingu (building), the latest being sumaho for ‘smart phone’!
Foreign words in a Japanese text can always be distinguished by the fact that they are written in katakana, which alas, with the paucity of its sounds, is a great hindrance to Japanese learning English. I call it their ‘Katakana Prison’.
It is of course possible to write everything in Japanese just using kana, but even a few of the beautiful Chinese characters expressing whole words sprinkled through the text make the meaning easier to grasp quickly at a glance, so one hopes they will never be completely abolished. But I hope very much that they will bring back that custom they used a long time ago when Japan was not a hundred per cent literate as they are now. It is called furigana, and prints tiny kana next to difficult kanji for the benefit of people like me who have not memorized them all!
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