Japanese is really a nice language to learn. Not only that
it will open a window to the hearts of one of the world’s most hard working
people, and also it convinces you of the constancy and invariability of human
needs of communication. Man is the same everywhere. If you allow for the
sophistication brought about by technology, you’d also realize that he is the
same, over the ages. But this does not deny that etiquette and manners had
tremendously improved as time progressed. We live in a far better place than
our ancestors did and our descendants will obviously live a happier and better
life. What caused this? Technology did it, as I will explain.
Noble ideals like altruism,
charity, social help and support of the weak do not come about naturally.
Evolution is all about survival ensured through success in the competition for
limited resources. But explicit competition over food or mates is frowned upon
in modern society. So what should be the alternative? Increase the resources so
that there is no need to compete that would sometimes end up in the death of
one of the rivals. You willingly hand over the first cup of tea in restaurant
to your friend with the full assurance that another cup will follow soon. If that
self-confidence is lacking, and you grab the first cup, you’d end up as an
anti-social person in a rich, modern society, whereas you will be just another
normal guy in a primitive society where food is scarce. In essence, we are able
to live happily in a socially responsible way only because we had had
technology with us for the last 10,000 years or so. In short, we owe our
morality and principles to technology.
But that was not the observation
I had originally planned to make. How easily one is swerved off the track! I
was mentioning the Japanese language based on a brief exposure to it lasting
hardly four months in 1999, fourteen years ago. We learned the alphabet in
Katakana script which is sound-based, rather than the impossibly difficult
Hiragana script which was pictogram-based. The alphabet is similar sounding to
its Indian counterparts which is having the same sounds, but in different
scripts. We found it much easier to learn the pronunciation of Japanese terms
by transliterating it in Indian scripts rather than in English. However, there
was a major difference between Indian and Japanese languages. There is no sound
of ‘la’ in Japanese. They replace it with ‘ra’. This ends up in awkward
rendition of English words like ‘hotel’ which is voiced as ‘hoteru’. Similarly,
‘link’ becomes ‘rink’. This had caused much amusement back then when
pronouncing the participants’ names which contained the sound ‘l’.
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| A comparison between Katakana and Brahmi scripts |
What I find now is that the
transposition of ‘r’ and ‘l’ is not unique to Japanese. In fact, it was practiced
in India itself, though removed 2200 years back in time to the Mauryan period.
Here, the reverse happened, that is, ‘la’ is used in place of ‘ra’. Emperor
Ashoka’s inscriptions in rock and pillar edicts are our main sources of
epigraphic information about this period. We see two instances of ‘l’ replacing
‘r’. Ashoka’s Bhabra Edict contains the words, “piyadassi laja
magadhe” (Priyadarshi, Raja of Magadha), while inscriptions of Dasaratha,
Ashoka’s successor, on the caves in Nagarjuni Hills includes the words “dasalathena
devanampiyena anantaliyam abhisitena” (given by Dasaratha soon after he was
crowned by Ashoka). The language is Prakrit which was a vernacular dialect of
Sanskrit. The script is Brahmi, which is widely assumed to be the forerunner of
many scripts in south and south-east Asian languages. Who knows, there might
have been a connection to Japan as well. A curious coincidence in deed.
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