Sunday, March 18, 2007

Dear Sir/Madam,

I read the article “Who’s who in Japanese” with great interest. To certain extent I do agree with some of what she wrote, however, I can hardly sympathize with the way she analyzes the Chinese language and culture. I’d like to raise my own point of view here.

The article starts from the different language systems Chinese and Japanese use to interpret foreign words and concludes the different values and ways of identifying things. What is written seems reasonably right, however, it is obviously a biased article.

I learned that Norimitsu Onishi is a journalist of Japanese descent who works for New York Times. Her lack of knowledge about Chinese language and culture leads to the improper conclusion in the article. What is more absurd about this article is that in the first sentence she tells us “Japanese is the only one that has an entirely different set of characters to express foreign words and names”, which means Japanese is a unique exception, then she picks Chinese to be compared, claiming that “Chinese culture and values take it for granted that everything is made Chinese because of its Middle-Kingdom position. I would argue, if rational, can we conclude the same way for every country since every language differs from Japanese in this aspect?

In my opinion, it is that language systems that actually result in different ways of interpreting foreign names and words. Japanese, a non-alphabetic language, uses kana (including hiragana and katakana). Kana does not have tones or any variations, and hiragana, which is used to write original Japanese words, has no more than 50 characters altogether. What’s more, Japanese is a language where load words are very widely used, and it would cause trouble and ambiguity if there is no distinction for foreign names/words in a language using less than 50 characters other than letters. Therefore, it would be really difficult to use only hiragana to interpret foreign words, and naturally katakana is developed and used.

On the other hand, Chinese language contains tens of thousands of characters having hundreds of pronunciation combinations and vivid meanings which are well enough and suitable for expressing foreign names/words. There is no need to invent a different system to do that and it is really stupid and clumsy to do so. Chinese people just naturally translate foreign words like sofa, tank, coffee and cola, rather than intentionally make foreign works Chinese.

This is how I personally think of the difference. We needn’t always draw to an “in-depth” conclusion based on differences and comparisons. And reader’s discretion is really advised in articles like this.

“Forever a Chinese”

Clear Water Bay, Hong Kong