. Nine years in Nipon. Sketches of Japanese life and manners. e thus in plaintivetones:—The things of ancient days wereadmirable, but in modern times customs aremore and more deteriorating. The beautifulvessels made by ancient carvers of wood arefiner, as their forms are the more so, too, in literature we find that the styleof language used by the ancients, as preservedon every scrap of paper which has come downto us from them, is very fine. But at the pre-sent time the popular language grows ever worse andworse. In the olden time people were accustomed to say Please, raise the v
. Nine years in Nipon. Sketches of Japanese life and manners. e thus in plaintivetones:—The things of ancient days wereadmirable, but in modern times customs aremore and more deteriorating. The beautifulvessels made by ancient carvers of wood arefiner, as their forms are the more so, too, in literature we find that the styleof language used by the ancients, as preservedon every scrap of paper which has come downto us from them, is very fine. But at the pre-sent time the popular language grows ever worse andworse. In the olden time people were accustomed to say Please, raise the vehicle, * Pray, favour me by elevatingthe lamp-wick. Now-a-days they bluntly say Raise it, Poke it up, and thus in many ways the Ministers ofState, and even what pertains to the sacred majesty ofthe Mikado himself, are spoken of in less honorificlanguage than was customary in days of yore. The fact is the wave of aufkldriing which rose in Francea century ago has now broken on the shores of those fairislands in the Pacific. Words and sentences are fossil N. 202* Nine Years in Nipon. thoughts. When organic nature rises to a higher level ofbeing, effete forms are soon left to bury themselves in thepreserving rocks. But words are not merely when buried in old books they haunt in ghostlyform the busy throngs of men. In China, Corea and Japan the Chinese writtenlanguage is understood by all highly educated men, but Ifind a very common and erroneous impression prevailsthat the Japanese language is just a dialect—a slightvariation of Chinese. The question is much morecomplex than many suppose, and another commonmisconception must first be cleared away. When twoChinamen from provinces not far apart meet, they cannotalways converse together. If they are educated enoughto be able to read and write they can communicatethrough the written language as adopted by the often in settlements like Shanghai they may beheard resorting to the much maligned pijiyi or bu
Size: 946px × 2641px
Photo credit: © Reading Room 2020 / Alamy / Afripics
License: Licensed
Model Released: No
Keywords: ., bookcentury1800, bookdecade1880, bookidnineyearsinn, bookyear1888
