Living and Dead Languages

I'm slogging through a particularly dry and boring text translation this afternoon at the office. It's a list of rules from a stodgy school principal. It's only a few pages long, but the nature of rules requires that I follow the meaning as closely as possible.

I found this awesome tool for reading Japanese from web pages and text files. If you plug a URL into Furigana.jp, the engine will turn out your text with the wee hiragana gloss that is called furigana. If you are semi literate in Japanese like me, then you can quickly read a text loaded with unknown kanji using this handy phonetic script.

かん じ
漢 字 for example. The three characters above say kanji, which means Chinese character. It's not foolproof, as it can't always find the context in which a kanji is used, but for the most part, it makes otherwise opaque text readable. My job is much easier now.

There are 50 syllables in modern written Japanese, and when you think that there are two syllybaries, hiragana for words without kanji and for writing verb inflections, and katanana for writing loan words, foreign names and as a kind of bold text for emphasis, you must actually learn 100 syllables.

In the old days, a perfect pangram was used to remember all the syllables of Japanese writing. A pangram is a poem or prose text which uses exactly every syllable character, or every alphabet character, exactly once. English is a tough language to make a non-repeating pangram out of, but there are many pangrams that use all letters, many twice. For example, the syntactically correct, if somewhat mysterious, sentence "Sphinx of black quartz, judge my vow."

Japanese, being a syllabic language, can be used to make true pangrams, using each syllable once, and does better than the typical nonsense that appears in English pangrams. The most famous is Iroha -

いろはにほへと
ちりぬるを
わかよたれそ
つねならむ
うゐのおくやま
けふこえて
あさきゆめみし
ゑひもせす

And it's a beautiful poem, too.

Youthfulness shines, but scatters
and who, in this world, is forever?
Today, I climb the deep mountains of life's vicissitudes,
and I will not see shallow dreams. Nor will I get drunk.

Today, the order of seats in a theatre are often marked with these syllables, rather than the modern a, i, u, e, o order everybody learns. Musical notes are indicated with iroha, too.

A few of the syllables in Iroha are weird to a modern learner of Japanese. That's because they disappeared. Languages change.

I was reading today, too, about a language we're losing in Canada. It's a sad thing when we lose the last speakers of a native language, but it's happening right before our eyes in Canada. You can read about the last Musqueam person to speak it as her mother tongue, and the effort to bring the language back to the people, in Reviving a Native Tongue.

Comments

[kanai]

Do you know the hidden message in Iroha-uta ?
Picking up the each seventh letter, we get "とかなくてしす" meaning "(I will )die with a false charge." The code is famous but nobody knows the truth...

[Shawn]

furigana.jp is great! That will really come in handy!

[erizabesu]

Kannai, that's crazy!

Shawn, I'm reading Mainichi in the original as often as I can. I push Wikipedia entries through furigana.jp, too.

Way cooL!

[Christopher Taylor]

Thanks for the lovely words about Furigana.jp. I created the site for my own use and I use it every day, but it is good to hear that other people are finding it useful. If there is any way I can make it better or more useful for you, let me know!

[erizabesu]

Christopher,

I recommended your site to all my Japanese learner friends!

If it's okay with you, I'd happily put a link on my blog to your furigana.jp.

Lemme know.

e

[Christopher Taylor]

Is it okay? Of course! The more links the better :)

[erizabesu]

Cool!

My kids were reciting Iroha the other day at school. I'll share some English pangrams with them next week, and compose some pangrams in English, if we can.