The Land od the Rising Yen

and meaning to say
‘morning dew’, but using the wrong tone and saying instead a phrase of the
filthiest gutter-language, which even a Chinese drill-sergeant could not utter
without blushing.
    I was still puzzled by the meaning of
‘tone’ while investigating the secrets of Japanese. I met a charming young
Chinese girl in Tokyo, a Miss Wong, who told me: ‘But it’s the easiest thing in
the world. I’ll explain it to you.’
    She did. I do not remember all the
actual words but the explanation went something like this.
    ‘Let’s take the word wong, for
instance.'
    As I could not suggest any other
Chinese word, I agreed and said: ‘Let’s.’
    ‘Now, wong pronounced this way
— means drum.’
    ‘Yes,’ I nodded.
    ‘An ear-drum, too,’ she added for the
sake of precision.
    ‘Yes. A drum. Or an eardrum.’
    ‘But pronounced this way: wong' — and she pronounced it, to my ear, exactly as she did the first wong —
‘it means butterfly.’
    ‘I see,’ I said a little vaguely.
    ‘If you say wong — (exactly the
same again) — it means: running up the hill panting. Wong, on the other
hand, means autumn harvest. Who would mix that up with wong, which means
to issue meteorological bulletins twice daily?’
    ‘Who indeed?’ I asked, trying to
sound ironical at the expense of such ninnies.
    As she stopped there, I said: ‘And
it’s your name, too.’
    ‘My name?’ she cried out
flabbergasted. ‘What has it got to do with my name? My name is Wong.’
     
    Nothing like this in Japanese. To
European ears it is a normal, pleasant-sounding tongue vaguely resembling
Spanish or Portuguese. A rich language, a difficult language but not
unlearnable.
    The serious trouble starts with
writing. Japanese characters are beautiful, picturesque and exotic. And that is
all one can say in their favour. Otherwise theirs is the most complicated, most
cumbersome and most pretentious script ever invented by man.
    It was in the early eighth century
that the Japanese felt in need of an alphabet. Following an ancient Japanese
habit they borrowed it from others. To their misfortune these ‘others’ were
their next-door neighbours, the Chinese. Chinese writing is based on a
childishly simple principle, well suited to the needs of the stone age: every
word is represented by a special ideograph. Antiquity produced two important
ingenious inventions which changed the fate of humanity: one was the invention
of the alphabet — writing down sounds instead of words and thus making
it possible to write down any word in any language with about two dozen signs —
and the invention of the wheel. For an advanced, industrial civilization, like
the Japanese, to do without the alphabet is almost as anomalous as it would be
to do without the wheel.
    The precise number of the ideographs
taken over cannot be stated but it must be around five thousand. Some of them
consist of one stroke; the most complicated of twenty-three strokes. If you put
one stroke wrong, the meaning is lost or changed. It may take a child weeks to
learn a single one of the complicated characters; or — put it in another way —
most of them will go through life without even coming across them.
    For a few centuries after the eighth,
the two languages, Chinese and Japanese, were identical in writing. The two
people could read one another’s books and letters but neither could understand
one single word of the other’s spoken language. (The relationship between Urdu
and Hindi was exactly the opposite. In their case the spoken language was
identical and they could converse without the slightest difficulty; but they
could not read one single word from the other’s books or letters because Urdu
used the Arabic, Hindi the Sanskrit script.)
    The original Chinese ideographs are
the kanji. Japanese, however, went on developing in its own way and,
before long, differences between the two tongues revealed inadequacies in kanji when used for Japanese. New words came into use; new ideas and new notions had
to be written down and there were no kanji to denote them. There were
also the difficulties with foreign names. Obviously there was no kanji for ‘Shakespeare’, ‘Praxiteles’ or ‘Hindenburg’. So what to do? The Japanese
helped themselves by inventing two syllabaries. The Japanese language is
quite melodious, it does not tolerate accumulation of consonants. Every
syllable consists either of a single vowel or a combination of a vowel and a
consonant. No word (or