Bad language

I read this a while back on bbcnews

A group of French speakers in Japan are suing the governor of Tokyo after he described French as a failed language.

The 21 teachers and researchers are demanding compensation and an apology for the "insulting remarks" from Governor Shintaro Ishihara.

Mr Ishihara is accused of saying he was not surprised French did not qualify as an international language, as it was "a language which cannot count numbers".

The veteran politician is well-known for his outspoken comments.

He has previously drawn criticism for saying the Nanjing Massacre, in which hundreds of thousands of Chinese were slaughtered by Japanese troops in the 1930s, never happened.

Mr Ishihara is referring to the fact that French, not having simple words for seventy, eighty and ninety, has to resort to periphrasis to count between 69 and 100. Some numbers are quite challenging to give out over the telephone: 84 24 20 14 94 comes out as quatre vingt quatre vingt quatre vingt quatorze quatre vingt quatorze, which read fast comes out as 84 84 94 94.

French also has over the centuries suffered a process of phonetic attrition unparalleled in other European languages, so that an instruction to put a thermometer in the baby's armpit (dans l'aisselle) could be quite legitimately be misconstrued as meaning to put it in his stools (dans les selles). Only Tibetan to my knowledge has so many silent letters.

So Mr Ishihara's remarks appear justified - so long as he is not trying to imply that Japanese counts better than French and should therefore be an international language. Let's start at the very beginning (a very good place to start - in Julie Andrews's immortal words). "One day" in Japanese is ichinichi, and "one person" is hitori. Where is the word for one? We all know the word for "person" is hito. But counting upwards, we find that "two persons" is futari. Where did hito go?

"Two days" is futsuka and so fut means "two"? But "two portions" is nininmae (which is written as futari followed by the character mae). So where did fut go?

Or maybe ri means person? But "Three persons" are sannin, so where did ri go?

Confused? Counting in Japanese is a killer, and we only got as far as three.

In the seventh century Japanese was a primitive unwritten language possibly with Korean ancestry and phonetically not unlike Polynesian in its simplicity. It then had the misfortune to import the entire Chinese "alphabet" in order to write itself. But Chinese writing is not phonetic, and along with the characters of Chinese, came the words they represented. This huge influx of words already contained a mass of homonyms even when correctly pronounced with the right tonal distinctions; when adopted into the limited sound palette of Japanese the mass became an unnavigable ocean. Sixteen Chinese syllables: zang, sang, cang, cao, zao, suo, xiang, qiang, sao, zheng, song, zong, cong, zhuang, chuang, zeng and ceng, each with a possible four tones which helped you guess the meanings were reduced in Japanese to one sound: sô.

Right up until the twentieth century the Japanese muddled bravely along with the weight of this huge foreign vocabulary distorting their grammar and overloading their phonology, so they had to trace characters in the air to make themselves understood. And then came the American occupation. For the second time in Japanese history an entire (for them) unpronounceable vocabulary was imported wholesale, along with meanings which they could only grasp after their own fashion.

Without going so far as to say Japanese is a failed language, it might be instructive to make comparisons based on the amount of money and school time spent in each country on simply mastering reading and writing. Wouldn't some kids do better kicking ball?

Languages are the greatest shared creations of humanity. But languages, like bridges, evolve towards failure. Each bridge that doesn't collapse serves as an incitement to streamline the design and cut costs until...