Compiling "Strange" Japanese from Immersion - Decoding Japanese Way of Thinking

Japanese
#21

Maybe confusion is that we are so used to using “should” in command like fashion that we forgot what it really means?

For example if I say: “You should pay taxes” I in fact do not order you. I am reminding you of your duty. Or if “Where is smoke there should be fire” I do not order the nature: I am point out its “duty”.

But we use it so often in sentences like: “You should go to school now”, “You should read more” etc that we started to think it is command where it is not really? It only implies an order between the lines.

That would actually be in line with Japanese mentality. Instead to order you directly it should be more comfortable to make general statement about responsibility and assume that receiver will get the hint :upside_down_face:

I make wild assumption that in Japanese it should work similar to other languages. But I don’t see a reason why not.

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#22

べき and べし both come from the kanji 可, which is generally accepted to mean ‘permissable’, or something along those lines. Personally, I like to think of all the dakuten (ten-ten) containing kana as ‘logical opposites’ of their non ten-ten partners. So if へ ‘in general’ means to head toward something else, べ therefore means to steer clear of something else. So I derive that べき shows an action that is the ideal state, and that steering toward another course of action is undesirable.

This is linguistic philosophy though, and my own personal feeling for how ten-ten work. The most obvious other example is か and が, only the speaker can ever know the identity of が, because it only exists in their logic. Only the person being spoken to can ever know the identity of か, because it only exists in their logic.

This doesn’t really answer any questions, and it certainly isn’t a hard fact. It’s just how I perceive the language. Hope this (strange) insight might help someone think in a different way… or at least be open to it haha.

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#23

It look like more of psychological problem than language problem per se.

We make a statement about what is “good” and we assume people want that which is “good”. So if there is dissonance between their behaviour and what was mark as “good” we expect them to make natural conclusion that they should aim at changing their state or feel bad about it.

For example: Let’s assume you are my sister husband and you are cheating on her and are afraid that I know it. I have a beer with you and telling you about story about very honourable man I read. What made me impressed with him is the fact that he stayed faithful to his wife even years after her death and lived on caring on her dream.

In those communicates there is not order, nor suggestion for change. I in fact may not know what you do. But you will still feel that it is call to action and be worried I must know the whole thing.

#24

I mean that the kana with and without ten-ten are quite literally logical opposites of eachother though. As in it is something that is built into the language from as far back as I can tell. The only exceptions to this are あいうえお (which usually get ten-ten to create a V sound, and is NOT part of original Japanese).

The rows of kana that don’t have ten-ten are reserved for things that have no logical opposite (constants), and the ‘pa’ sounds are the only special cases, as they don’t imply a logical opposite, moreso they imply a complete shift in somethings existance. Example
は (The state that something currently exists in)
ば (The state that something has the ‘potential’ to exist in)
ぱ (The state of something that is shifting between a current and new type of existance… or encompassing both the speaker and listeners existance… pa sounds are super hard to describe, as the concept doesn’t exist in English)

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#25

I don’t disagree. I just wanted to broaden the spectrum of our discussion. It looks to me that Japanese people tend to be more aware of that function of the language. In any given communicate the words itself are just 1/3 of the story. You have person speaking, and person listening. So having solid theory of mind seems to be important.

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#26

I think I finally got the answer! So I was right that indeed it is 私 that is serving as the thing in that position. The thing is that there is a different meaning for ある where the distinction between animate and inanimate objects does not apply. This post expounds on it pretty well: https://japanese.stackexchange.com/questions/57285/how-to-parse-にある-in-this-case

The definition for ある at play says something along the lines of
“Something that is recognizable; specifically, to be deemed as being in a certain state” So when he says 私は今、その立場にある, he is saying that he was placed in that position, and is recognized as such.

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#27

I find your claim that each hiragana has a meaning by itself very interesting, but never found any such claim anywhere else (but I am not as advanced as you seem to be). In Japan times’ Dictionary of basic japanese grammar, there is something similar about the feeling conveyed by sounds in onomatopoeia, but it seems different from what you are saying.

Could you elaborate about your claim and its origin? And maybe give references (in English preferably)?

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#28

It really is just a claim, although I am working hard on proving my claim (if it’s even possible). Yes I also agree that onomatopoeia very strongly convey the base meanings of kana, although it’s very difficult to describe in English, due to Japanese and English having different language deixis. A book I usually recommend is ‘Learn Japanese from sound symbolism’, by Masamichi Watanabe. Unfortunately the English translation of this book is pretty average, but it is by far better than nothing. The Japanese version is far better.

The only problem with this book is that Masamichi understands Japanese, but doesn’t understand English, so he doesn’t ‘bridge the gap’ very well in understanding. What I mean by this is, imagine if you lived in a house your whole life (never left the house), and tried to explain to someone what a house looks like. Masamichi describes Japanese from within Japanese ‘the house’, not realizing that foreigners can only see the ‘outside of the house’, not the inside.

I am very… very slowly putting together a theory for the kana though. But it is taking a ridiculous amount of time and research into the history of the language… And I may well be wrong anyway, I just enjoy researching :joy::joy:

As for the origin, I am not sure if you mean where I got the idea from, or where I think the actual language origin is, so i’ll do both.
Personal origin - honestly I have no idea, the more I studied Japanese, the more I could ‘feel’ the meaning for each kana, so I wondered if there was a reason for this… Or if I was just crazy :joy:
Language origin - My best guess based on my research is Kukai, he was said to be the man that invented kana, reinvented the way Japanese uses kanji, and was deeply buddhist. I believe he may have fundamentally influenced the way modern Japanese works. I could talk for hours about Kukai, but it’s all just speculation based on personal research unfortunately.

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#29

Thanks for the info and the reference. It seems there is a huge litterature about sound symbolism. And sound symbolism seems quite common in non indo-europan languages. So, even though what you said seemed quite strange to me at first, languages with sound symbolism may be the rule rather than the exception.

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#30

It would be strange to think otherwise. Language come to existence by assigning meaning to sounds. That pretty much the simples working definition of the language.

#31

I actually read somewhere that there was a famous Japanese professor about 30 years ago that tried to prove that Japanese was very close to tamil… Or at least I think it was tamil. They both have the exact same grammar patterns in regard to first/2nd/3rd person sentences. In the end I believe he was laughed at because he couldn’t adaquately prove his claim, and his colleagues thought he was nuts… Wish I could remember his name, I will try find it again.

If you are interested (and open minded), look up ‘The meaning of Om’, on YouTube. All buddhist cultures (including Japanese), believe that there is a deep symbolism in chanting Om. Kukai wrote that Om was the beginning and end of all possible communication, It starts with A, extends into O, and finishes with M. Kukai postulated that this sound was called さんみつ, the 3 spheres in which all things occur. 身、口、意。Interestingly, every single other heavily buddhist country said the exact same thing. Regardless of which branch of buddhism they were.
意 refers to conciousness, and the perceivable world. 身 refers to ones self confined within your body, and 口 refers to the passage through which all actions/interactions take place.

You probably didn’t want to know half of this… But I find it interesting :joy:. It blows my mind the different way humans can communicate, that seemingly share no relationship to each other.

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#32

some food for thoughts

#33

Actually, the main trend in linguistics (dating back to Saussure) is (or was?) quite the opposite: it is claimed that there is no natural or innate rule to associate sounds and meanings and that all such association is purely a convention, i.e. there is no sound-symbolism. But some experiments seem to show that there may be some sounds that are more often associated to the same concept (such as shapes…) even for people whose native languages are différent.

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#34

While there definitely are languages with strong sound symbolism. There are also definitely those without it. I believe that half the problem is that there isn’t a person on Earth that is fluent enough in enough languages to accurately speculate. I ‘half jokingly’ sent an email to Noam Chomsky about a year ago, asking him about modern linguistics. Much to my surprise he actually replied… Within less than a day! :flushed:. He said that we just don’t know enough about linguistics yet to answer many questions related to language history… And that’s coming from the man that invented modern linguistics.

I definitely agree with a lot of what you are saying. I just think there’s more to language than any of us really understand.

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#35

Generally European language are strange case study since they have been basically created by Latine. And Latin was really really centred around classical philosophy so we have very Platonic idea of what words are. To this day you have people defending platonic realism in linguistics (the idea that concept assign to words have real in ontological meaning of that word, existence in some sense).

But even with that there is natural tendency to assign meaning to sound itself. You can see it all over the place. My favourite example is polish word for tank. We used to just use english word but it sounds to light in our language. And tanks are heavy as hell. After many attempt to eliminate that annoyance we come up with word “czołg” (https://forvo.com/word/czołg/ last two are best pronounce) which has very heavy tone. It actually from the word"czołgać" - “crawl” so semantically it is working as well.

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