It Made Robert Wonder

We were sitting at dinner the other night, serving the last of the salad - which Miasa was about to finish up - when her sister Mitsuki said "Mitsuki wa mada tabetenai!" ("Mitsuki hasn't eaten any yet!"). I had heard this J-syntax countless times before, but for some reason I heard it literally for the first time, and it dawned on me that Mitsuki was speaking of herself in the third person! This form of Japanese is used mostly by females, toddlers to teens; not by males or older women.

I wonder if that is a cultural practice in any other language, and what effect that subtle sublimation of the "I" might have on the socio/psychological development of the female self. She is thereby enabled to consider and speak of herself as another person! This unique structure seems to be a sort of semantic means of averting negative emotional response to actions that would otherwise be seen as overtly selfish (by saying "I want x"), focusing any social negativity on a target abstraction out there in the semantic ether that bears one's name, but is not one, exactly; rather it is a selfless third entity, apart from oneself, a sort of cavitation in the emotolinguistic sea. It is only used in that specific way; Mitsuki wouldn't say "Mitsuki saw a great movie last night," a declaration of past action that would beget no possibly negative reaction.

Offhand I know of no other language in which it is traditional to distance selfness with such facility, pretty much enabling one (at least a young female - and why only females?) to speak of oneself as an additional member of the group... I know of no other culture wherein the power of politeness drives the need to make an other of oneself (only young females!), so as to deflect any negative reactions toward overt "I"-ness. I try to sense the difference between me saying: "I haven't eaten any yet!" and me saying: "Robert hasn't eaten any yet!" But as an adult male American semantic alien, it doesn't work for me; I can't 'feel' it, even in the slightest way.

Whence in long-ago Japan was such a word structure inspired to appear in a moment's discourse - and be understood! Be approved! Be carried on into the future of the language as useful! Apparently, when it was first said, no one went "Huh?" They accepted the distancing, and the need for it.

Given the cultural changes now ongoing in Japan, I suspect that this subtle usage, like the need for it, may disappear before too long; thought I'd mention it.

 DEER GRAMMAR

Out in the garden this morning fiddling with the firewood, moving some last year's wood to the top of a less-old stack to consolidate my equity in more manageable form - energy is one commodity sector to go for in the foreseeable investment future-- where was I - oh yes, fiddling with the firewood, when I heard an odd rustling over in the far corner of our bonsai 40 acres. I looked up, focused into the shade over there and could finally make out the shape of the young scion of these parts, heir to the Baronial estates, the as-yet unnamed teenager too new to know how things work around here, unlike his father the Baron (wonder where he is?)... 

As the noble youngster strolled elegantly into the sunshine and my clear sight, still munching some of the mitsuba that he loves and that is wildly plentiful on our property, I was standing upwind of him so he could smell me, but to be sure there were no surprises at this proximity I clunked a couple of  pieces of dry cherrywood together (great sound) to let him know I was in fact physically there and was looking at him so I knew he was there too. In response he raised his head and looked at me, his young punky horns still velvety-knobbly (a scientific term), but those eyes were not at all punky.

They were more like soft, dark and unreadable. The strong, silent type. Wild. So I raised my hand and waved goodbye at him as a hint that he should depart. My deerese is poor, plus deer grammar is so dense and the inflection so subtle, he'd probably just chuckle at my efforts in that subdued deery way. I just said "Sayonara!" in the polite Japanese version of humanese, and he - understood! He paused a moment - to assert his dignity, like any teenager - then headed down the stone stairs, out the gate and across the road, where his friend the German shepherd lives and the grass is excellent. No mitsuba there, though, so it is a step down from these royal gardens, where the gardener also raises lettuce and spinach just inside the fence that one time had an open gate...

ENDLESS BREATH

There are spells within time and language by which the living words are transformed and no longer hold precisely the old meaning because of their new shape, which causes them also to be pronounced differently in the language of the current tongue, and then some generations down the etymological expressway there is an exclamation of surprise at the discovery that a given word, so native to the tip of this very own tongue, stems from a tongue that spoke the word differently a long time ago, a word that in its own turning came from an even longer-ago tongue that spoke another of the same language altogether, passing the soul of the word along the length of breath from the hum of beginning, just as all things and people and tongues have been passed along without cessation if they exist today, and transcending the surprise is the enlightenment that 'your' language is not yours at all, but a borderless portion of a vast, living, autonomically shifting aurora that illumines the minds of the earth and outlives us each, can never be pinned down as so many have so humanly vaingloriously tried to do, and that this one endless breath that is language, as it breathes through you is breathing you too, breathing you into meaning, for you think along the lines and seams it affords you, as dictators (from the Latin root dicere, "to speak"), for example, have always known, and that the freedom and flexibility in your language correlate with the freedom and flexibility in your life; you are as free as your language, and as confined, unless you go beyond its edges into the wilds...

ALPHABET

Yesterday when the grandies came and I was to babysit for a few hours, Kaya (9) and one of the twins (Mitsuki, 6) set immediately to playing with the toys, while the other twin (Miasa, also 6) sat quietly at the kitchen table, hunched over a notebook, drawing-- or so I thought.

When I happened to walk by and glanced at what she was doing, at first it looked like English words... But that couldn't be of course, since she doesn't speak English - though she has expressed a desire to learn English... Besides, she's only 6, and 6-year-olds often say things... But they WERE English words, beautifully printed and she was printing them! Beautifully! Huh?

One of her sisters was jumping rope and the other was rolling around the room on the big red ball, which are essential activities in themselves, but have the addictive quality of being fun. In stark contrast, Miasa had, before coming to visit, made ruled lines in her blank notebook, asked someone to print an English word on the left of each line and was now intently copying each printed word carefully and in surprisingly expert fashion, over and over till she reached the end of the line, when she would start on the next line and word. She wasn't having fun or showing off, she was just doing it, and had started doing it the moment she'd arrived. While her sisters were playing noisily, she was quietly studying English!

I... I... I was speechless. I just stood there. I... I had never seen a 6-year-old focus with that much intensity, for that long, on a real grownup study task. I... I waited till she had finished the whole two pages (without looking up even once!), when she ruled fresh lines on the next two pages and held it up to me, asking me to print some new English words on the left. I... I... I said: This is fantastic! You are amazing! You are ... This is... Wow... and so forth, at which the other two girls looked up to see what all the praise was about, and later after dinner, when they were about to watch the Wizard of Oz they insisted on watching it in English.

Later, when Kasumi came to pick them up and take them home across the Lake, they had fallen asleep... Out in the car Miasa lifted a sleepy hand and said "My notebook..." She'd left it by the warm wood stove, where she'd been ruling in more lines, just before falling asleep...

My English fails me...

STARS ON THE GROUND

Interesting, watching western celebs get interviewed for Japanese tv by reporters who don't speak English or respond to English or its tonal, facial, manual gestures and intimations, but work through an interpreter on the side whom the audience does not see and the celeb does not address, so for the less manic celebs the general PR boilerplate is thereby minimized and the usual dross falls away so you hear only Japanese questions asked, with the celeb's English replies and subtitles edited in for the response, and as all the usual nuancing is no longer of value, the celebs become more neutral, culturally isolated, no longer rely on polemic manipulations etc., so are more personal, open and 'normal,' less guarded, like Michael Moore the other night, he wasn't 'on' the way he always is, thinkingagendathinking, he just chatted, no psychic drumrolls, no showmanship, seemed like a nice concerned guy you might have sat next to in a bar in Flint...

MORE EDITING DELIGHTS

I used to work there during my middle ages.

This festival is well-known to the community by mouth-to-mouth advertising.

You can find a kind of grass that helps cats vomit hairballs on the shelf of pet shops.

Have a big heart and a big humberger.

As you take a sip, our beer's focus on the real thing is poured into your mouth.

Please submit your position list earlier than now.

The patients had some problems, such as fogy vision.

Company values are sufficiently penetrated into employees.

It is vitally important for Indonesia to move forward so that it can look back...

Please note that you may not enter the park if you choose not to.

THE ART OF J/E MACHINE TRANSLATION

I was in front of him, what happened with my phone?
(Click to enlarge)

How many roads must humanity walk down
before they can talk to themselves...

HAND ME THAT UMBA

Think about it. About language. Imagine way back in your own language, before it existed, back where you can't even use words to think about it, it's just pure thought there at the beginning when no one said anything, everybody just breathed, and just breathing was enough for an eon or two, then one day something clicked in the mind of one individual and in an early form of illumination a light went on.

She now saw (it was most likely a she, we're talking deep nuance here, after all, and she had heard her baby say ma-ma; the guys were likely out cracking rocks together or running after mammoths, other essential learning tasks) some radically efficient modality, a way to simplify yet introduce/embody a new realm of complexity, a new spiritual reality or whatever, there were no words for it yet, which was part of the just-dawning problem, the neochronic need to codify memory and whatnot--

In any case, the lingomother suddenly saw the gateway, decided to name something, pointed at an item of frequent daily use (it must have started with a practical aspect, necessity being the mother etc.) and said: "Umba!" the first intentional word. Before her oddly puzzled colleagues she pointed again at the item, more insistently this time, and said: "Umba!" Then she watched the light come on in their eyes, heard the nickel drop in those brains and language was born in their smiles of sudden understanding of what had just happened. And it was cool. Thus that item of frequent daily use within that small linguistic startup group became "umba." And so it still is today, somewhere, if only in the etymology.

But go from there to: "No not that umba; that one-- the green one with the new audio jack-- the one I got at Circuit City. BTW, have you seen the umbas with system 94.0 and 1500 gigs of RAM? Free holomovies online, Dude!"

How the hell did we get all the way here?

CRAZY ENGRISH

Since early times, English-speaking travelers (yours truly included) have made fun of the　"English" signs etc. they find around the world, as though they never did the same thing themselves...

Someone spotted this English road sign in Swansea, with helpful Welsh translation for frequent travelers from Wales...

Looks great to the natives, but Welsh folks driving through laugh their heads off at these linguistically inept Brits when they read the Welsh part that says"I am not in the office at the moment. Please send any work to be translated." A colonial history catches up with you sooner or later...

via

BRADY TALKS HAWK

These Spring days, the hawks grace the air in high blue romance, the males gliding, squealing and whirling around demurely spiraling but attentive females, the way love soars in wide-winged feathered beings.

Speaking of being, while I was out splitting wood late yesterday afternoon (after double-digging a new garden bed and transplanting some overgrown potted herbs into the soil) I heard a hawk who, at the end of his own days' labors, was majestying atop a pole over by the road, scanning his vast hawkdom and singing his heart out for love, like a feathered troubador. Maybe I was prompted by my exchange in Warbler the other day, but I figured I might as well see if I could get the big feathered being to converse, so I gave Hawk a try.

To anyone acquainted with it, Hawk is a difficult language; Warbler is a lyric breeze in comparison. Hawks work over long distances, so they start off piercingly loud (and far-reaching) at a high pitch and then go higher, the note thinning yet widening somehow, with an even higher-pitched and very difficult vibrato curlicue added at the end. The note is hard, but the vibrato is really tough, not only because the note goes so high and then flattens and widens, but because while whistling that note you have no oral room to move, so have to make the vibrato with your diaphragm, which is at counterpurposes to whistling, to get the whole thing just right.

Hawks have been doing it all their lives, but I just started, so I gave it a couple of feeble tries and garnered no attention other than what might have been a hawkish chuckle. After a while, though, I at least got into the vibrato ballpark, and my general pronunciation didn't seem too bad, but the hawk, who, if I was getting it right, should be needle-eyeing me as a competitor, instead turned and looked at me funny, pulling his head back from his shoulders, like 'What the-- Who the hell-- Was that noise YOU?' Must have been my accent. I tried a few more times, but he could take no more and flew away-- shaking his head, if I'm not mistaken. I tried to whistle my apologies in accented Hawk, but he did not respond.

In further proof of my failure at mastering the wide-winged language, not a single female hawk cruised by to check out this cool dude with the interesting east coast accent. A good thing, too; I wasn't feeling the slightest tinge of feathered romance. Which lack, now that I think about it, probably doomed my effort from the start.

Made wood chopping kind of high and airy, though.

ENDLESS BREATH

There are spells within time and language by which words are transformed and no longer hold precisely the old meaning because of their new shape, which causes them also to be pronounced differently in the language of the current tongue, and then some generations down the etymological expressway there is an exclamation of surprise at the discovery that a given word, so native to the tip of this very own tongue, stems from a tongue that spoke the word differently a long time ago, a word that in its turning came from an even longer-ago tongue that spoke another of the same language altogether, passing the word along the length of breath from the hum of beginning, just as all things and people and tongues have been passed along without cessation if they exist today, and transcending the surprise is the enlightenment that 'your' language is not yours at all, but a borderless portion of a vast, living, autonomically shifting mindlight aurora that illumines the earth and outlives us each and can never be pinned down as so many have so humanly vaingloriously tried to do, and that this one endless breath that is language, as it breathes through you is breathing you too, breathing you into meaning, for you think along the lines and seams it allows you, as dictators (from the Latin root dicere, "to speak"), for example, have always known, and that the freedom and flexibility in your language correlate with the freedom and flexibility in your life; you are as free as your language, and as confined, unless you go beyond its edges into the wilds...


[Adapted from the version originally published in Kyoto Journal "Word" issue, #29, 1995]