1 Language and thought
1.1 The features and attractiveness of Sapir’ linguistics
I will explain the features and attractiveness of the theories of American linguist Edward Sapir (1884-1939) by using his book “Language”. Sapir pursued the subject from the universality of language to the features of individual languages and then he talked about race, language, culture and literature to bring anthropology into view.
I will make his linguistic research clear about the issues of Chinese and Japanese because Sapir’s linguistics become focused on individual languages. His linguistic research consists of six kinds of grammatical processes.
They are word order, composition, affixation (including the use of prefixes, suffixes and infixes), internal modification of the radical or grammatical element, reduplication and accentual differences. Similarities between Chinese and Japanese are in the process of composition and reduplication, while there are differences in word order, affixation, internal modification of the grammatical element and accentual differences. I will explain the similarities a little.
The process of composition is seen in both languages. When two or more radical elements bind together, a simplex word will be formed. The process implies the relation of the elements and it is also related to word order. As Chinese word order is strict, it is inclined to develop compounds. Chinese compound words are much greater in number than Japanese.
For example, consider a Chinese word sequence such as renquán (jin ken “human rights”) or a conventionalized juxtaposition such as nóngfu (no fu “farmer”). The meaning of these compounds are different from the etymological meaning of the component elements.
Reduplication repeats the whole or part of a word, such as in the Japanese phrase omoi omoi “random”. It is seen in Korean, Chinese and Ainu language, but it isn’t often seen in Indo-European languages, Uralic languages and Altaic languages.
Let’s take a look at the differences between Chinese and Japanese. There are word order free languages and word order fixed languages in the world, but most languages are located midway between them. For example Latin is word order free and Chinese is word order fixed. Japanese word order is also almost free.
When viewed from typology, Germanic languages like German and Dutch are also partially free. Chinese word order is type SVO (Subject-Verb-Object) and Japanese and German word order is type SOV. In order to represent the grammatical relation, Chinese depends on word order and Japanese and Korean use particles.
Therefore Chinese is an isolating language and Japanese is called an agglutinative language. In fact Chinese word order is similar to English, but Chinese has no inflection and conjugation. Type SOV languages, such as Japanese, account for approximately half of the languages in the world type SVO, such as English and Chinese, accounts for 35％, and type VSO, such as Polynesian, accounts for more than 10％.
花村嘉英著（2015）「从认知语言学的角度浅析鲁迅作品－魯迅をシナジーで読む」より translated by Yoshihisa Hanamura