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The Mermaid points to these articles that talk about how Japanese is supposedly taking on too many English words and how the government is setting up a committee to deal with it. This is one of those topics that seems to come up every few years on slow news days.

In Japanese, as in English, about 90% of the total vocabulary comes from elsewhere. In the case of Japanese, this is mainly China, and more recently from English. In English, it comes from Latin, mainly through French.

In English, the 90% of the vocabulary base that is non-Anglo-Saxon-based gets used only 10% of the time. The most commonly used words in English are Anglo-Saxon-based. Likewise, in Japanese, the most commonly used words are native, not imports.

In English, it’s the native words that have meanings that can be stretched, used in metaphors, to evoke imagery. For example, two English words: glass and a word with similar meaning: silicate. Glass is a good old English word, from Middle English glas, from Old English glæs.

Silicate is scientific, from French, probably Latin before that. Notice that glass is used in a variety of meanings, and poetically: “The stars shone like cut glass”. You can’t say “The stars shone like silicate.” A similar situation holds for imported words in Japanese. They tend to be used for specific one-off well-defined meanings, and while they enrich the language, they do so in a limited manner.

So any committee set up will probably have a minor effect, encouraging bureaucrats to write comprehensibly, not writing every second word in English to cover up for the problem that they have nothing to say. And it’ll have no effect at all on anything else. The “generational” problem exists in English too, even without borrowed terms. I realized the other day that if the 25-year-old version of me had followed me around for a day, he wouldn’t have understood most of what I was talking or writing about. This happens everywhere, and abuse of foreign words aside, languages change to accommodate conceptual shifts.

I went to a concert of South Indian classical music at Cooper Union yesterday. This was clarinet accompanied by a kind of oboe (a nadaswaram, about four feet long, quite rare in North America) and two thavils (large double-headed drums).

Clarinet is not something that generally excites me: it’s the kind of instrumentBob from Accounting plays on the nights he goes wild. But this was very different. This was wild, challenging and sensuous, almost reminding me of modern jazz. Except of course it wasn’t. No western scale, and in place of complex harmony there is complex polyrhythm. And the improvisatory style is different.

I’ve always had problems following Indian polyrhythms: it’s probably something you have to grow up with to feel intuitively, but I think I managed well enough this time, because the musicians were also visibly keeping the time through the tala cycle.

Later in the evening I discovered that a coffee house I used to go to in Hong Kong has opened branches in New York. So I went in and relived my wild youth with an order of ginger tea (this stuff makes the inside of the body tingle, and I am now immune from disease for the next several weeks).