Nihongo, also known as Japanese, is the language spoken in the nation of Japan, as well as Hawaii (ha-ha). Its origin is somewhat unclear, with no agreed-on linguistic connection to other language groups except for Okinawa, although evidence sometimes crops up suggesting an ancient link to Turkish, Hungarian or Basque. Among the many unique aspects of Japanese is the way its based on syllables rather than individual sounds, meaning you can express ka, ki, ku, ke and ko but not “k” by itself. In addition to contributing to the thick accents Japanese speakers of English sometimes have, this strange “poverty” of sounds means there’s a higher instance of unrelated words having the same pronunciation (homonyms), which can sometimes get in the way of communication. For example, the words for “public” and “private” schools in Japanese have the same pronunciation (shiritsu meaning public and private) despite their opposite meanings, forcing people to invent linguistic workarounds to avoid being unclear. The words for “science” and “chemistry” are also the same, so when you hear kagaku spoken you’re never 100% sure if it’s ‘science’ or ‘chemistry’. My 13-year-old son is currently interested in how atoms work and is reading many books on the subject, which puts me in the rather precarious situation of needing to learn the basic terminology of particle physics in Japanese if I want to talk with him about it. (It’s hard to explain, but a bilingual brain abhors not having words in both languages properly stored and cross-referenced.) I was surprised to find another confusing accident of phonetics: the word for the nucleus of an atom and the shell that the electrons travel around are both called kaku, a linguistic accident that has probably tripped up more than a few students at test-time.
