Directory_and_Chronicle_1841 — Page 219

1841.

Notices of Japan, No. VIII.

205

ART. 111.

Notices of Japan, No. VIII.: character of the Japanese language; its various syllabaries; poetry, science, divisions of time, &c.

THE Japanese language was long supposed to be, if not a mere dialect of the Chinese, yet as closely connected therewith as the Italian and Spanish languages are with each other, or with their common parent, the Latin. This supposition, not based upon any knowledge of the two languages, was probably deduced from the fact, that the Japanese understood written, though not spoken, Chinese, whilst the Chinese reciprocally understood Japanese when written in the Chinese cha- racter-one of the many used in Japan: a circumstance perfectly intelligible, when it is recollected that the Chinese characters express, not letters or unmeaning sounds, the mere constituent elements of words, but the words themselves, or rather the ideas which those words signify; and therefore must convey the same ideas, expressed by different words, to whomsoever knows the meaning of the characters: just as the numerals 1, 2, 3, convey the same ideas of numbers, ex- pressed by different names, to the natives of different countries.*

The more profound and accurate knowledge of the oriental languages acquir ed of late years by the scientific philologists of England, France, and Germany, has thrown light upon this erroneous idea respecting the Japanese tongue. The erudite Klaproth explicitly declares, in his Asia Polyglotta, the Japanese to be so dissimilar to all known languages in structure, grammar, and every characteristic, as to prove the nation who speak it to be a distinct race. A disquisition on this subject would be out of place here; but a glance at the specimens given by Meylan and Fischer, is sufficient to show one essential dissimilarity between Chinese and Japanese. Every body knows the former to be a monosyllabic lan- guage, while Japanese is polysyllabic; nay, it might be called hyper-polysyllabic, since the simple pronoun I cannot be expressed in Japanese by a smaller number of syllables than four, watakusi; and to multiply I into we, requires the further addition of a dissyllable, as watakusidomo. At the same time, it must be admitted that, of these syllables, some are held so far supernumerary as to be dropped in speaking. Thus, in the Japanese dialogues given by Overmeer Fischer, who avows his knowledge of the language to be merely adequate to the common pur. poses of every-day life, the watakusi and watakusidomo of Meylan's gram. matical specimens are contracted into the less euphonous, but much shorter, watakfs, and watakfadomo.t

* [It is not quite correct to say that the Chinese understand Japanese when written in the Chinese character. A sentence written this way is nothing more or less than Chinese, and when thus expressed it can with propriety, no more be called Japanese than it can be called Corean, or Cochinchinese, or even English. The comparison introduced of the Arabic numerals is an apposite one; see also Chinese Repository, volume III, page 15. That the Japanese understand the Chinese language when written, after they have learned the meaning of the characters, although they cannot converse in it, is no more surprising, however, than that an Englishman comprehends French when he sees it in a book, but hardly understands one word of what a Parisian says to him when he first crosses the Channel.]

† [Like the Chinese, the Japanese have a great variety of terms for expressing