An inherent quality of any culture or language is its uniqueness. To be classified as a separate entity, a culture or language must possess characteristics that differentiate it from others. So, while the commonly heard claim that Japanese language and culture are ‘unique’ is self-evident, this claim is often really intended to mean that Japanese and Japan are ‘uniquely unique’. This is mirrored in the use of the popular term ガラパゴス化 (Galapagos-ka), whereby the cultural and linguistic results of Japan’s previous isolation and its island nature are compared with the results of millions of years of biological evolution on the isolated islands on the other side of the Pacific.
How does Japan’s uniqueness rank?
However, these claims of absolute uniqueness should not be taken at face value, and one should certainly not believe the associated implication that this uniqueness makes Japanese culture and Japanese language, at some level, fundamentally incomprehensible to non-native Japanese. In fact, when comparing Japanese to the Académie française’s ongoing attempts to defend the French language against Anglicization or the official substitution of foreign loan words for new words based on Old Norse or Old Icelandic and the continued comprehensibility of 800-year-old texts for modern speakers of Icelandic, or indeed the nature of language isolates like Basque (France and Spain) or Ainu (Hokkaido, Northern Japan), then Japanese seems like an open-minded and adaptive global citizen.
In the case of the Japanese language, there are many footholds that speakers of other languages can find thanks to the influence of other languages upon Japanese. The most evident of these is the use of logographic Chinese characters in the form of kanji, which also shows considerable overlap with the hanja characters in Korean. This gives Chinese and Korean speakers a distinct advantage when starting to learn to read and write Japanese. Furthermore, Japanese is often grouped with Korean, along with the Ryukyuan language of the southern islands of Japan, which indicates that there are patterns of grammar and sentence structure that show some overlap between these.
Katakana and foreign words
The major feature of the Japanese language that speakers of Western languages will find as potentially some help (but sometimes not) isがいらいご (gairaigo, 外来語) or loan words from foreign languages written in katakana. Although many of the newer introductions of this kind come from English, and American English in particular, the early contacts of Japan with Dutch and Portuguese travelers and settlers, and later with French and German culture, which was particularly important in the fields of Law and Medicine, have left some imprint on the language.
For example, ズボン (zubon) and バカンス (bakansu) are from the French jupon and vacances for trousers and holidays, respectively, アルバイト (arbaito) refers to part-time work as associated with the German word arbeit, and マルモット (marumotto) is related to the old Dutch word for guinea pig.
However, while the above examples show that knowledge of other languages can provide some, albeit not much, help when learning Japanese, some of these connections can be rather difficult to understand or obscure, as a result of the need to adapt certain pronunciations to the Japanese range of syllables. So, バブル (baburu) refers to the ‘bubble’ economy, ノートパソコン (nooto-pasokon) refers to a notebook personal computer, ワンピース (wanpiisu) refers to a dress (one-piece), and ビッグバン (bigguban) refers to financial reform.
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