Lukashenka stages New attacks on our language!

[Yoshimasa Tsuji]

Dear Alina Israeli,

You write

  1. Writing systems exist not so much for the pleasure of linguists but in
  order for people to cummunicate easily in written form. Spelling rules
  should not be overly complicated. Let me offer one idiosyncratic rule: a
  Russian child first learns that spelling is morphological, in other words,
  the stress matters: molodOj, molOzhe, mOlod, and then that it does not
  matter: rOs but rasti.
  Linguists have other ways of reconstructing etymologies without
  complicating the lives of those who just need to learn to read and write.

I would like to say it is always the linguist who would invent "better
spelling/grammar" claiming the new rule will be easier to read/write,
truer to etymology, blah, blah, blah.  Has there been a good
reform in history? I say, "color" for "colour" was arguably better,
but "debt" for "dette" was definitely not (but changing back to "dette" now
or in the future is far worse).
  I don't know the right term for those people in English, but most of the
language teachers are there to inculcate nationalism coded in the official
language they teach. However, there are also linguists who are interested
in non-prescriptive approach to the languages (i.e. scientists of the
language, they are). The number of the latter is smaller, but you cannot
possibly compare two totally different categories.

  2.The fact that

  >Post-war Japan saw a
  >major spelling change and a substantial discouragement of ideographic
  >symbols and I am of the opinion that the command of the Japanese language
  >in general is at a miserable standard.

  may be due to the fact that many more people are literate after the war
  than before the war. In a similar fashion, many American intellectuals
  complain that romances make it to the top of the best-sellers lists, while
  before the war it was Hemingway. Well, this may be the result of higher
  literacy and the fact that many more people read, and Daniele Steel
  represents the taste of the masses.

No, not in the least.  Perhaps America may have improved by
importing brainy people from Nazi Germany and Communist East Europe, but
no such thing has happened in Japan. In pre-war Japan, most of the
people went to school five years only and did not know many ideographic
symbols, so publication for the masses ALWAYS carried phonetic notes for
every ideographic symbols. After the reform, while complicated ideographic
symbols were banned from publication, those phonetic notes also disappeared
as children are supposed to learn all the basic symbols at school whose
period had been extended to the age of fifteen. The result is that most
children do not master those basic symbols (1800 or more!), thus cannot
read literature with ease, and even when they guess how to read a word
in question, they cannot guess the meaning because the ideographic
symbol is usually corrupted.
  I am saying that while pre-war generation kept on learning ideographic
symbols for life by simply reading books, post-war youths have been
deprived of the privilege of learning the language outside school.
They spend more time at school, yet they are definitely less literate.
I am convinced that all this resulted from the unawareness of the fact
that the modern Japanese language can survive only as a written
language. Let me explain a bit further. The Japanese language has
very few phonetic units (five vowels and fourteen consonants, totalizing
to 70 or less syllables). The Story of Genji, the first novel, contains
virtually all the Japanese vocabulary which didn't exceed 12,000. All
the new additions to the language were done by way of using ideographic
symbols which phonetically made sense only for the Chinese who have so
many phonemes and tones.
   For example, moustache, beard, and whisker can be expressed
by three different ideographic symbols but are pronounced the same way as
the original Japanese didn't distinguish them. And as none of these
ideographic symbols are taught at school, when a youth reads one of
these they will easily guess it has something to do with "hair", but
fail to read it as phonetic hints are no longer printed after the reform.

   Combined with the modern tendency that television becoming the major
source of information, the inherent deficiency of the Japanese language
that it is a poor oral language and the wrong language reforms, there is
very little chance for literacy to grow in Japan. (Just imagine if you
could readily understand a person who uses the same word for "God, paper,
upside, hair, adding flavour, chewing, bite, laird, wife, ..."). The
ambiguous notion that it is something up above is definitely inadequate
in modern life.

Cheers,
Tsuji