January 6, 2004
Quote of the Day
Enamored of their vaunted "uniqueness," the Japanese have been as eager as anybody to promote the illusion that their language is vague and mysterious. Not all of them buy into the myth, of course. Take the linguist Okutsu Keiichiro, for example. "Japanese is often said to be vague," he notes, "partly because subjects and other nouns are often deleted, but if the speaker and listener are both aware of the verbal or nonverbal context in which the utterance takes place, all that is really happening is that they don't have to go on endlessly about matters they both understand perfectly well. Japanese is an extremely rational, economical language of the context-dependent type."
Jay Rubin
Gone Fishin': New Angles on Perennial Problems (Power Japanese), pp25-26
