On Messing With People (in Japanese)
Jan. 16th, 2008 12:04 am![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
tobu_ishiHappy New Year, everybody! In honor of it being 2008 now and one of my resolutions being to write more, here is a short essay I banged out about how awesome a language Japanese is for screwing around with people!
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Japanese is a fascinating and sometimes alarming language, because the verb always comes at the end of the sentence. You putter along making the setup, with subjects and objects and adjectives and adverbs and so forth, but you don't have to actually tell anybody what you did with all these things until the end. If it's a particularly long, involved sentence, you can get a lot of suspense going this way.
English isn't like this. The most punch you can put into an English sentence of any real length is what you did whatever it was to. Last week, I ate...my grandmother with a nice Chianti. Okay, great, that packs a wallop. But the action gets established too soon. I ate... Fine. There is eating going on here. Something is being violently consumed. The majority of the suspense has been cleared up already.
Not so with Japanese, oh, boy, no. "Kachou to watashi wa...(my boss and I)...senshu...(last week)...Sapporo ni...(in Sapporo)...kuruma de...(in a car--uhoh, this is getting interesting!)...opera ni miniikimashita(to the opera went)." There we go, man! That is linguistic suspense! What the Sam Hill were you and your boss doing in a car in Sapporo? Who knows? It's a mystery right to the end!
And Japanese allows for almost unlimited qualifiers in between, so you can string it along as far as you want:
My boss and I last week in the downtown part of Sapporo at nine pm on a Friday in a red 1999 tinted-windowed Mercedes Benz to the opera went.
Anna's black labrador retriever and the neighbor's grumpy tabby-striped green-eyed cat this morning at five am under a bridge near the sports center in a box wearing their best collars before I could stop them me whole swallowed.
Our grumpy antisocial science teacher today in the middle of class in front of everyone in a bad mood in a red sweater with skill and grace totally unexpectedly the new school building blew up.
And best of all, the only thing that really comes after the verb is the suffix that marks past/present/etc tense and positive/negative! So it's totally possible to pull a stunt like, While that currently being eaten by you extremely tasty lemon-jelly cheesecake I making was, I all over it sneezed DID NOT! and completely get away with it grammatically.
The possibilities are endless! You can keep fleshing out the sentence until Judgement Day! As delightfully corruptible sentence patterns go, it much better than Japanese get does not. :D
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Japanese is a fascinating and sometimes alarming language, because the verb always comes at the end of the sentence. You putter along making the setup, with subjects and objects and adjectives and adverbs and so forth, but you don't have to actually tell anybody what you did with all these things until the end. If it's a particularly long, involved sentence, you can get a lot of suspense going this way.
English isn't like this. The most punch you can put into an English sentence of any real length is what you did whatever it was to. Last week, I ate...my grandmother with a nice Chianti. Okay, great, that packs a wallop. But the action gets established too soon. I ate... Fine. There is eating going on here. Something is being violently consumed. The majority of the suspense has been cleared up already.
Not so with Japanese, oh, boy, no. "Kachou to watashi wa...(my boss and I)...senshu...(last week)...Sapporo ni...(in Sapporo)...kuruma de...(in a car--uhoh, this is getting interesting!)...opera ni miniikimashita(to the opera went)." There we go, man! That is linguistic suspense! What the Sam Hill were you and your boss doing in a car in Sapporo? Who knows? It's a mystery right to the end!
And Japanese allows for almost unlimited qualifiers in between, so you can string it along as far as you want:
My boss and I last week in the downtown part of Sapporo at nine pm on a Friday in a red 1999 tinted-windowed Mercedes Benz to the opera went.
Anna's black labrador retriever and the neighbor's grumpy tabby-striped green-eyed cat this morning at five am under a bridge near the sports center in a box wearing their best collars before I could stop them me whole swallowed.
Our grumpy antisocial science teacher today in the middle of class in front of everyone in a bad mood in a red sweater with skill and grace totally unexpectedly the new school building blew up.
And best of all, the only thing that really comes after the verb is the suffix that marks past/present/etc tense and positive/negative! So it's totally possible to pull a stunt like, While that currently being eaten by you extremely tasty lemon-jelly cheesecake I making was, I all over it sneezed DID NOT! and completely get away with it grammatically.
The possibilities are endless! You can keep fleshing out the sentence until Judgement Day! As delightfully corruptible sentence patterns go, it much better than Japanese get does not. :D
