Page:Lange-Noss - A text-book of colloquial Japanese.djvu/17

 most distressing feature of the spoken Japanese language. Men of the same set or clique have no difficulty in understanding their own technical terms, but to the uninitiated, even though they be well educated, rare Chinese compounds convey no sense until the speaker by writing in the air or by explanation indicates what the ideograms are.

In comparison with the Chinese the number of words imported from the European languages is small. Thus we have from the Spanish and Portuguese biidoro (vidrio) glass (modern glass, garasu), kasuteira (castilla) sponge cake, kompeitó (confeito) candy; from the French, shabon (savon) soap, shappo (chapeau) hat; from the Dutch, kóhii (koffij) coffee, dontaku (zondag) holiday ; from the German, chifusu {Typhus), torahómu {Trachoma) granular eyelids, etc. Many words have lately come in from the English ; e. g., baiorin violin, bóto boat, burashi brush, dokku dock, furaneru flannel, fútobóru football, haikara (lit. high collar) a foreignized Japanese, hankechi handkerchief, inki ink, irumineishon illumination, katsuretsu cutlet, matchi match, naifu knife, peiji page, pointo switch (on a railway), rampu lamp, ramune lemonade, sandoichi sandwich, shatsu shirt, shichú stew, sutekki stick, suteishon station, tonneru tunnel, etc. From the English through the French : bifuteki (bifteck) beefsteak. Buranketto blanket has become ketto.

In English there is now only a slight difference between the language of an essay and that of everyday conversation. In Japanese the written language and the spoken language have for centuries been developing separately. Scholars absorbed in the study of the ideograms and the literary style associated with them, have been quite indifferent to their mother-tongue proper. Even now it is hard to find a Japanese with any sense of colloquial etymology or grammar. When asked about the origin and significance of a word your informant proceeds to discuss the ideograms used to write it. Ask him about the conjugation of a verb, and he gives you paradigms from the