Golden Days
much. If you want three kurumas, you say “kuruma san cho,” and five plates are saro go mai.” To say simply saiyo (yes), or iye (no), is inadmissible. The whole statement must be made with many flourishes, and frequent de gozarimasus adorn a gentleman’s conversation.
If a curio dealer asks whether you wish to see a koro, and you look for the word in the lexicon, you find that koro means, according to Dr. Hepburn’s dictionary, time, period of time, a cylindrical wooden roller used in moving heavy bodies, the elders, old people, tiger and wolf, i.e., savage and cruel, stubborn, bigoted, narrow-minded, a road, a journey, a censer for burning incense, and the second or third story of a house. So, too, kiku may mean a chrysanthemum, or a compass and square, a rule, an established custom, the moment or proper time; fear, timidity, and a score of other things. The chief compensations of the language are its simple and unvarying rules of pronunciation, every syllable being evenly accented, every vowel making a syllable, and, pronounced as continental vowels are, giving music to every word.
The written language is the study of another lifetime. Having the Chinese written language as its basis, the Chinese, Japanese, and Koreans can all understand one another in this form common to all, though not in the spoken tongue. It is common to see Chinese and Japanese coolies writing characters in the air, in the dust, or in the palms of their hands, and seeming to make themselves intelligible in this classical sign language. The written language has the katagana, or square characters, and the hiragana, or “grass” characters, the latter simpler and more nearly corresponding to our script or running hand.
The efforts of scholars are now turned to Romaicising or transliterating the Japanese sounds and characters, and expressing them by the common alphabet of Latin and Anglo-Saxon people, basing it on phonetic spelling.
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