A Southern Influence

When people ask me why I chose Japanese--out of all the languages I could have learned--I laughingly refer to my Southern-US accent as the cause. I did try German in high school, I explain, but it didn't work out so well; as languages go, German is full of harsh consonants one after another. Japanese, like my southern accent, leans towards a heavy use of vowels. For someone who can say the word "southern" with more than three syllables, the vowel-laden syllabaries of Japanese are a relief.

This is, of course, not the entire reason, though it makes for an excellent introduction and often leads to dicussions of what actually makes the Japanese language different from other languages. For me, many of these reasons also help explain why I selected Japanese as my language of interest; its peculiar history and unique composition make it a fascinating study. Of my native language, English, the best that historians can say (after asserting that British and American English may as well be different tongues) is that it is a hodge-podge of different tongues, much of it so bewildering as to be untraceable.

[In one of my favorite movies, the title character--a British professor in 1900-1910--complains that English people seem incapable of speaking their own language correctly. In fact, he laments:

"Why, there even are places where English completely disappears--In America they haven't used it for years!"] "My Fair Lady," (1964)

Despite its confusing past, I have always loved both reading and writing in my native tongue, and traditionally Japanese have a strong respect for both the written and the spoken word, seeming to appreciate that even the smallest change in a single phrase can have a great change in meaning. How can I not admire a culture where language is taken so seriously? To me, language is something magical, and the written language is particularly so; there is something astonishing about being able to make a series of marks upon paper that convey, in the words of Johnny Cash, "the truth in the heart of the far-off man." 

To have open to me an entire new culture, a new literature that I have not read, is a giddying thought. 

I have no doubt there will be challenges and things that I find difficult (reading Japanese, for instance, is worlds easier for me than translating English sentences into Japanese ones--which is nothing to speaking it, something that often causes me to freeze in uncertainty and terror), but I am fortunate to consider these challenges to be both enjoyable and rewarding.