On Studying Japanese: Disappearing Electricity

Studying Japanese, or any other language for that matter, is a challenging and frustrating experience, but quite rewarding if you put the time in. My favorite part of studying a foreign language is the moments of insight, usually quite small and nuanced, that introduce a new perspective or deepen cultural understanding.

Prior to the Japan chronicles, my experience with languages extended to only a couple of the romance languages, Spanish and Latin. Latin was enjoyable because our teacher was crazy (that fun kind of I-love-Latin-more-than-anything-else crazy that only Latin teachers possess) and the etymological aspect was interesting. Etymology is your standard, run-of-the-mill language insight that you expect to receive when taking a language class. I can’t recall any moments of surprise and reflection during my tenure as a Latin student, though I do remember asking, in Latin I, if the phrase ‘Aes Sedia’ had any meaning (if you are familiar with The Wheel of Time books then you know what I’m talking about). However, I’m not interested in what’s expected, but rather what is unexpected, the insights that make you go hmmmmmmmmm.

Spanish was interesting mostly because of the idioms, such as llover a cántaros which means raining pitchforks (and makes more sense than raining cats and dogs). I also found the tener (to have) + noun idioms a refreshing way to think about things, as opposed to their English state of being counterparts. For example, if you are hungry you would say ‘tengo hambre’, which literally translates to ‘I have hunger’. The use of the state of being in English to express both temporary and permanent characteristics seems clumsy and unpoetic. In English there is no linguistic difference to saying ‘I am hungry’ and ‘I am a girl’, whereas Spanish boasts not only the tener + noun idioms but two, count ‘em, two verbs to express the nuances of being.

Japanese is a whole different ball game chock-full of delicious and surprising insights that I’m not going to talk about here. Except for one. Recently I’ve been using Tae Kim’s Japanese guide to Japanese grammar[1] to navigate the murky waters of prepositions and conjugations (the Japanese aren’t satisfied with only conjugating verbs, so they decided to conjugate adjectives and adverbs as well). A few days ago I was reviewing transitive and intransitive verbs. The examples for this section involved lights being on and lights being off. The first mildly interesting bit is that the verb used to express the action (both transitive and intransitive) of turning lights on is ‘to attach’.

Things get really interesting when we want to talk about turning the lights off. The transitive verb for turning the lights off is “to erase”, and the intransitive verb is “to disappear”. How wonderful is that? Erase the electricity, or disappear the electricity, depending on the agency. Thinking about attaching, erasing, and disappearing electricity got me thinking about how we talk about electric lights in English. That the lights are either on or off is pretty straightforward, but why we ‘turn’ them on is a bit more curious and perhaps related to the original construction of electric lights and the fact that they had a lever or switch that could by physically turned. Imagine in a parallel universe where ‘the clapper’ was the first electric light invented; “clap on the lights” would become the default was to phrase the action of ‘letting there be light’.

I kept thinking about this while driving through town the other day, and began to giggle uncontrollably (no wonder my driving is so poor) when I thought about the intransitive equivalent in English to the lights disappearing and my generic linguistic exclamation as a result. In English, the intransitive interpretation of turning the lights out would be to say the lights ‘went’ out. And when the lights ‘go out’ I always ask, “where did the lights go?” as if they had slipped on a pair of sneakers and run to the corner store. So if you think it’s funny that the Japanese talk about erasing and disappearing lights, just step back and look at how we conceptualize it in English.

Ain’t language fun?

[1] I cannot stress how wonderful this resource is. Tae Kim has an amazing ability to illuminate the why and how of Japanese grammar concisely and with examples. The examples don’t pussyfoot around with romaji, but use katakana/hiragana/kanji, an added bonus for students of Japanese (I’m firmly in the camp that when learning Japanese, students should dive right in and learn the syllabaries and logograms of written Japanese… learning Japanese written in romaji is, well, shooting yourself in the foot). But yeah, an essential bit of reference material to have in your study library.

Image courtesy of josefuteimu.