Japanese grammar is quite straightforward. To start with, no case or gender or articles to worry about. And with only a few exceptions the phonology is a cinch.

But Japanese orthography was devised in the very bowels of hell. Despite inventing a simple syllabary called kana (it was good enough for Tale of Genji, the world's first novel), Japanese then adopted kanji from Chinese (with which it shares zero linguistic similarities). And then 1500 years later started using the Latin alphabet to boot.

There are actually two types of kana: hiragana for writing native Japanese words, and katakana for writing foreign "loan words" (cognates). Once typeset print became widespread, a third type emerged: furigana. Furigana are small kana characters set adjacent to or atop kanji that instruct the reader how to pronounce the kanji.

These characters mean "vast store of knowledge." The furigana spell out the pronunciation: unchiku. The first character is "nonstandard," meaning that it is not taught as one of the 1945 "general use" kanji. But the average Japanese would recognize the word from the pronunciation, the same way English speakers know far more words than they can spell.

Believe it or not, while it's a bear to learn, reading Japanese with kanji is easier than reading Japanese without it. (Writing, though, is another matter entirely. Equally true of English.) But there are other ingenious uses for furigana + kanji as well, such as giving kanji invented or nonstandard phonetic readings (ateji).

One is to introduce foreign words into a narrative. This is common in science fiction. By pairing the katakana loan word with the kanji, the meaning becomes apparent to the reader. On the right, unisex is paired with the Japanese kanji meaning "gender neutral" (chuuseiteki). Any doubts about the English meaning are cleared up by the kanji.

A second is to artificially embed a single word with two associated meanings. Here, the English word "slum" is paired with furusu, meaning an "old haunt" or "place where one grew up," meaning a "childhood home in the slums."

Lastly, a recent invention that shows up a lot in manga, where dialogue balloons can put space at a premium. You should be able to guess this one yourself. The reading of the kana (not a kanji) is waza, an adverb that means "on purpose." So what does adding that furigana ² mean?

Waza-waza, of course. Meaning: "really doing something on purpose." This works well in Japanese because so many adverbials and especially onomatopoeia are expressed as trochaic pairs.

Labels: japanese, language, loan words

Okay, Japanese dogs don't speak English. They speak, um, "Dog." But Japanese guide dogs are specifically trained to respond to English commands such as "left," "right," "go," "straight," and "good," as in "Good dog." Yes, at first you think somebody is yanking your chain, until you see it in action, and: "Hey! That guy's talking to his dog in [badly-pronounced] English!"

Many reasons have been offered for this phenomenon. To start with the most cynical, training guide dogs in English means that the dog owners as well must be trained to address the dogs in English. This gives the trainers pretty much total control over the whole process, rent seeking par excellence.

That is obviously not the reason offered by the guide dog trainers. Here are some of the alternatives:

1. Training guide dogs in English avoids problems created by gender and dialectal variations in Japanese.

Except if that were truly the case, then settling on, say, the standard Tokyo dialect (made ubiquitous by mass media) would be easier than teaching dog owners another language (and not all guide dog commands actually follow English grammar). Does a guide dog trained in New York flounder when shipped to Georgia?

2. English commands are shorter.

Sort of. Most words in the guide dog vocabulary do have fewer syllables in English than Japanese. Except the average Japanese is quite incapable of articulating final consonants and consonant clusters (other than /n/) without adding a vowel. So "right" turns into righto and "straight" becomes sutoraighto. (And "McDonald's" turns into Makudonarudo.)

Besides, "right" and "left" are no less phonemically complex than migi and hidari.

3. Using English commands avoids confusion with similar words that might occur in conversational Japanese.

This is my favorite explanation. It's certainly the most logical. It's the same challenge faced by voice-recognition software: discriminating between "text" and "command." For example, if I say "period," do I mean the end of the sentence or thought, or the punctuation mark, or the word "period"?

Except that guides dogs across the English-speaking world are not wandering about in a confused daze wondering which is which. And loan words like "straight" have already become part of the Japanese lexicon. Dogs are apparently pretty smart critters when it comes to divining the intentions of their masters.

So the real reason? Well, I think this is an example of what physicist Richard Feynman called "cargo cult science." Back in the mists of time, a practice is introduced that yields certain results. Soon, the specific reasons for the practice are lost, and completely unrelated reasons are concocted in their absence.

The first officially-sanctioned branch in Japan of the International Guide Dog Federation was established only in 1967. The U.S and the U.K. train more guide dogs than the rest of the world combined. Japanese love doing things by the book. The book in this case was surely translated from English and incorporated the original English commands.

Plus, in Japan English still lends anything that extra cachet. Besides, as long it works, who cares what the real reasons are?

I predict that in time the cult will weaken as guide dog trainers and owners figure out that dogs understand Japanese just as well as English. In the meantime, monolingual Americans in Japan can rest assured that if nobody else can understand them, they can always go to the dogs.

Labels: japanese, language, loan words

Kantai is a hanjuu, a bear in animal form. See chapter 74 of A Thousand Leagues of Wind.

As Napoleon Bonaparte said (re: Kantai's converation with Youko), "An army travels on its stomach."

The expression "blow off a little steam" is a deliberate anachronism. The word Kantai actually uses is sutoresu, a English loan word that Youko has obviously introduced into the language of the Imperial Court, a fact the author cleverly emphasizes by "spelling" the word in hiragana rather than the customary katakana.

Labels: 12 kingdoms, loan words, shore in twilight