Golden Days
English, and every hotel and shop has its interpreter. Upper-class people, whom one meets socially, always speak English, French, or German. Scholars declare that the mastery of the language takes from twelve to thirty years, and the compiler of the standard lexicon modestly says for himself that forty years is not enough. With a few most illustrious exceptions, no foreigner, who has not learned Japanese almost before his own tongue, has ever been able to grasp its idioms so as to express himself with clearness and accuracy. The whole theory and structure of the language are so different from and so opposed to European speech—so intricate and so arbitrary, that the alien brain fails to grasp it. The lower, middle, and upper classes have each a different mode of expression, and the women of each class use a still simpler version. He who learns the court language cannot make himself understood by shop-keepers or servants. He who has acquired coolie-talk insults a gentleman by uttering its common words and inelegant expressions in his presence.
As if the differences between the polite and the common idioms and names for things did not make verbal complications enough, the imperial family and their satellites have a still finer phraseology with a special vocabulary for their exclusive use. Saké, or rice brandy, becomes kukon at court; a dumpling, which is a dango in the city, becomes an ishi-ishi when it enters the palace-gates; and a shirt, or juban, is transmuted to a heijo on an imperial back. Well-bred women say o hiya for cold water, and men always call it mizu. A dog not only gets the honorific prefix o, but if you call him, you say politely o ide, just as you would to a child; while the imperative koi! koi! (come, come,) is polite enough for the rest of the brute creation. Children say umamma for food, but if you do not say omamma instead, nesans will giggle over your baby talk.
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