Kanji and speech, kanji and mind
One of the things that interest me in Japanese are the references to written language—specifically, to Chinese characters (kanji)—in speech. Of course, literate speakers of most languages will sometimes refer to writing (“I meant cue, cue with a ‘c’”). It’s my subjective impression, however, that the Japanese do it more often, and the morphographic nature of kanji makes it feel… different.
Unfortunately I have no way of backing my impression with facts, lacking expertise and access to a Japanese spoken conversation corpus. But, as an illustration of the kind of thing I’m thinking, here’s an excerpt from Masayo Koike’s げんじつ荘 Genjitsu-sou. The main character is having a telephone conversation with her friend Yoriko, who is bragging about giving natural birth at her age:
普通はテーオーセッカイといって、おなかを切るのよ。よりこさんはそれだけは自慢していいことだというように、わたしに告げた。
ふうん、テーオーセッカイか、わたしはよりこさんほど丈夫じゃないから、産むとしたら、きっとそれね。頭のなかで、「テーオー」という音を、「帝王」という漢字に変換し、なぜ、こんなりっぱな名前が付いているのかしらといぶかしく思いながら、わたしはよりこさんにそう答えた。
Normally they do what’s called a “tēōsekkai” [テーオーセッカイ], you know, where they cut your belly. Yoriko-san told me this as if it was enough for her to be proud of.
Hmm, “tēōsekkai”? I’m not as healthy as Yoriko-san, so if it was I giving birth, surely it would have to be that way, right? While I replied Yoriko-san thus, I converted that sound “tēō” inside my head to the kanji 帝王 ["Emperor"], and wondered why they gave it such an impressive name.
The mental process described by the narrator must be familiar to readers of all languages: you did manage to catch a sequence of phonemes, but failed to parse and retrieve their corresponding morphemes (meaning-units), so all you’re left with is a meaningless string of sounds. The narrator retains it and bluffs through the conversation, and then, mid-speech, suddenly manages to retrieve the meaning, and only then wonders about semantic overtones. What’s interesting, to me, is that she equates grasping the meaning with knowing the kanji—even more, she describes the process of retrieving morphemes from phonemes as henkan “converting”, which is what a computer does when you feed it a string of (phonetic) kana and press a henkan “conversion” key to find the appropriate kanji. Both ideas—kanji as “meaning”, and henkan as meaning-retrieval—are by no means exceptional to this story, and I often hear in actual speech such expressions as henkan dekinakatta “I couldn’t convert it”, or sore no kanji wa? “What’s the kanji of that?” (= “What does that mean?”)
To my mind, this is evidence that kanji are felt as primarily morphographic, as argued by Joyce; and that, as proposed by Hansen, they correspond approximately to “ideas” in the popular conception of language. Hansen in particular has been much maligned by the “visible speech” school—De Francis, Unger and so on—so I should insist on the often-overlooked point that what Hansen (a philosopher) was talking about was the popular conception of language, not the “correct” conception, much less the empirically verifiable model. Insofar as we’re talking about how the average Japanese in the street conceive of kanji I’d say that, yes, they conceive of it as fundamentally semantic. Adepts of the phonetic model (like Boltz or Matsunaga) often express perplexity at the tenacity of Chinese and Japanese attachment to the characters, given that kanji are both complex and unnecessary; and then they dismiss their continued use as motivated by “social, cultural and emotional” factors. As if cultural, social and emotional factors weren’t the most important ones.
Writing Japanese without kanji: It’s possible, but…
Of course, these references to characters in speech are occasional, and it would be absurd to say that the Japanese need kanji to speak; contrary to legend, there are in fact such things as illiterate native speakers, and they can communicate perfectly well in purely spoken Japanese. What’s more, contrary to many Japanese I’ve met, I don’t even think kanji are strictly necessary for writing the language. After all, it is possible to understand a lecture or speech in spoken Japanese, so Japanese has to be communicable through sound only (it’s true that Japanese television, significantly, has an unusual tendency to attach subtitles to their own language; but, while helpful for “henkan“, these are by no means necessary).
A common objection to kanji-less writing is that an existing text, when converted to kana or Latin characters, usually becomes much harder to read, or even unintelligible. But this is easy to account for, if we remember that Japanese writing tends to use a lot more Sino-Japanese (kango) vocabulary, which is highly homophonic (too many morphemes sound the same). For example, there are five different shiyou-suru verbs; but in speech, if there was a possibility of confusion, the speaker would naturally choose an unambiguous native Japanese equivalent, like tsukau or tamesu.
Why are kango words so homophonic? Simple: kango morphemes came from written Literary Chinese (Jap. kanbun), which was itself homophonic to the point of unintelligibility. Literary Chinese was a kind of condensed abbreviation of the spoken language, relying on visual signs to distinguish morphemes. In other words, the reason why Japanese used five different shiyou verbs is because they could—as long as they had visual support available, there’s no reason not to overload the sounds. But in speech one has to control the ambiguity, which often means toning down on kango loans. So the way to write kanji-less Japanese is simple: just change the kind of Japanese you write—make it closer to the spoken language (“ii-kae”).
A form of this argument is presented by Matsunaga, with psycholinguistic experiments to back her up, and it’s all perfectly sound. But it misses the point that just because the Japanese could change their writing practice to abolish kanji doesn’t mean they want to (Unger’s argument that kanji are too hard for computers to deal with seems frankly naïve to my computer-science sensibilities—it´s just data munching, hardly an NP-hard problem!—and at any rate I think Time has already disproved it). And, to my mind, the Japanese motivations to stick with kanji are as valid as any. Sure, Chinese characters aren’t the simplest writing system, but “simplicity” was never the question; the metrics were never so crudely utilitarian. Au contraire, from the beginning, it was precisely the complexity that delighted the Japanese (or they’d have long switched to kana or bonji). And remote classical poetry isn’t the only example, either; kanji inscription-play was a constant through history of Japanese writing, from Heian court culture to Edo mass literature to modern teenagers’ manga comics (some examples of the latter being forthcoming in this blog).
The mental conception of kanji: related morphemes
Let’s go back Hansen’s observation that the average native assign to kanji more or less the same role that the average European assign to “idea” in their conception of language, i.e. that of a nexus of different sounds with the “same meaning” (Hansen was thinking of Chinese culture, but the observation extends naturally to Japanese, possibly even more so). I want to look at this from a purely linguistic angle—that is, synchronically, and phonetically.
Consider the mental lexicon of e.g. a child who’s still unschooled in kanji but already fluent in the language. Recall that the Japanese vocabulary is partitioned into four components with quite distinct phonotactics (ways of combining sounds):
- The aforementioned kango, or Sino-Japanese morphemes, which (either in borrowed SJ words or in original combinations) are said to account for up to 60% of the total lexicon (as measured in a dictionary, not by frequency of use);
- The native Japanese wago, or, to call them by the wago equivalent, yamato-kotoba;
- Sound-symbolic words (giseigo “onomatopœic” and gitaigo “mimetic” words);
- And modern loans (gairaigo), notoriously the growing “Anglo-Japanese” stratum (by a crude count of “katakana words”, already some 24% of the EDICT dictionary).
Sound-symbolic words are a special category, and Anglo-Japanese is still “green”, but it’s usually the case that SJ morphemes have native equivalents and vice-versa. So it must be the case that the Japanese lexicon is organized into sets of near-synonyms (some, like Morioka and Joyce, even consider them to be allomorphs—different forms of the same morpheme). For example, once I saw someone ask why a tea ceremony shelf was called shun’shuu, and the answer was Haru no ‘Shun’ to Aki no ‘Shuu’ no desu kara “It’s the shun of haru [spring] and the shuu of aki [autumn]“. The speaker must group together parasynonyms like {shun, haru} and {shuu, aki}, because, when asked, they know it’s “the same shun” in seishun “springtime of youth” but “not the same” in shunji “instant” (they’d say something like “no, that’s the shun of matataku, not the shun of haru“). These morpheme sets can be compared to Germanic/Latinate pairs in English, such as {freedom, liberty} or {green, verdant}, except that 1) in Japanese, having alternate forms is the rule rather than the exception; 2) both forms see frequent use, and 3) one of them often has many homophones.
What’s more, the sets can be larger than two ({kiyo, sei, shou, shin}), and each morpheme (or allomorph, in the Morioka model) must have a property specifying it as SJ (kango) or native (wago), because the speakers can tell. Harukaze means “spring wind” just like shunpuu, but any speaker knows that the two words feel different, on the pragmatic level (kango is heavier, more formal and serious).
So the Japanese lexicon has this partitioned organization, with islands of related morphemes with “the same meaning” (or almost) but different feel. Notice that nothing in this structure needs kanji at all, and the same organization exists for children and the illiterate and the blind. Nonetheless, literate Japanese often think of the morpheme-sets in terms of kanji. I believe that’s the reason why we find the spoken expressions mentioned above, “knowing the kanji” for “understanding the meaning”, and “converting to kanji” for “retrieving the meaning”. “Kanji”, here, is just a convenient shorthand for the natural relationships between Japanese morphemes.
Now if we expand our analysis from the individual to the history of the language, it’s hardly surprising that kanji are such convenient “labels” for the synonym-sets. After all, the kango words were imported through written Chinese, and the equals-sign that exists between certain SJ and native morphemes was first drawn by the traditional “explanatory readings” (kun’yomi) of kanji. For example, the morpheme san/mountain first entered the language as a “reading” of the Chinese character 山, and it became a (quasi-)synonym of native yama because that was the set kun’doku “reading” of the same character. So it’s quite natural for Japanese to think of their morphemes as on’yomi and kun’yomi “readings” of kanji, even though, historically and individually, the spoken language came first.
Kun´doku still lives
Perhaps the key issue here is the very peculiar kun’doku reading technique, which converts Chinese text to Japanese on-the-fly (it’s more mechanical than a real translation, but more complex than a word-for-word rendition). It was considered to be a valid way of writing Japanese, making it perhaps one of the most indirect writing systems devised so far. And kun’doku is hardly a thing of the past either, as I learned when I tried to find a Japanese “translation” of the Tao Te Ching and found instead “explanations” attached to the original Chinese text. Once I asked my (Japanese) teacher about how to read a Chinese calligraphic scroll, which was written in hard-to-read cursive:
風從虎
雲從龍
He replied:
風從虎、雲從龍。風は虎に従い、雲は龍に従う。
Fūjūko, Unjūryū. Kaze wa Tora ni shitagai, Kumo wa Tatsu ni shitagau.(“Wind-follow-tiger, cloud-follow-dragon. The winds follow the Tiger, and the clouds follow the Dragon.”)
I instantly realized I had just been treated to what was technically a live rendition of kanbun ondoku and kanbun kundoku: He first “read the sounds” (in Chinese, with SJ phonetics), and then gave an “explanation-reading” (converting to yamato-kotoba in Japanese syntax). Later I’d learn this is common practice when “explaining” hanging scrolls.