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Japanese learn to bend it like Bekkamu
HE no longer wears the red of Man Utd or plays as a No 7 -
the number he loved so much that he had it tattooed in Roman
numerals on his forearm.
But David Beckham, winding up a £10 million tour of
Japan this weekend, has been accorded two extraordinary honours
this month from beyond the world of football.
The Queen has decided this captain of the England team is
to be an Officer of the Order of the British Empire. And the
Japanese have proclaimed him to be, quite literally, an aristocrat.
No one who has not lived in Japan can fully appreciate the
richness of the honour bestowed, not by Japan's government
but by its people.
When his plane touched down at Narita airport, Tokyo, thousands
of fans screamed for Bekkamu-sama.
Sama means 'most honoured and noble'. Sama means 'sir'. Sama
means 'lord'. And in a culture which values status above all
other social accomplishments, it is the ultimate accolade,
and one which is almost never accorded to foreigners.
When my children were babies, we lived in a tiny house at
the foot of Mount Fuji - all of us, my wife, her brother,
my mother and myself. It was a time of spiritual cleansing
after the excesses of the Seventies, which had made me very
ill.
We walked to the local village every day to buy food, and
played on the banks of the lake. There wasn't even a television
in the hut.
The Japanese called me 'Uri Gerrer' -when they wished to
be formal, I was 'Uri-san'. The word 'san' denotes a respected
person, but not an aristocrat.
I was often startled, as I worked to master the language,
which is unlike any Western tongue, to hear strange mutations
of European words.
The first was 'kohee', which was simply coffee, a drink introduced
to the Far East by Dutch merchants 400 years ago. The word,
like the drink, was something the Japanese could easily get
their lips around.
Unlike Geller, with its impossibly Western double-L. That
became 'Gerrer'.
I gradually learned that Japanese do to words what they do
to everything from beyond their islands - they test them,
then discard them or remake them.
And when they remake something, they usually make it better.
Think of the French phrase 'a la carte', for instance. It's
always seemed a clumsy and pompous way to refer to a menu,
but in Japanese it becomes 'arakaruto'. I think that's mouth-wateringly
beautiful.
A vowel is always added to final consonants - but Spanish
and Italian do that, too.
What makes Japanese different is the way it inserts a vowel
between every consonant as well as softening most of the hard
sounds.
Taxi becomes 'takushi'; tuna is 'tsuna'; bus is 'basu'; electronics
is 'erekutoronikkusu', Xmas is 'kurisumasu'; mass communication
is 'masukomi'.
Some words, like 'haburashi', contain purely Japanese elements
- 'ha' means tooth. (See if you can work out what 'harburashi'
is). The whole phenomenon of remaking foreign words is called
'gairaigo', which means 'language that comes from outside'.
And that's how Beckham became 'Bekkamu'.
We speak English and Hebrew at home. The one is a hybrid
of Celtic and Latin and French and Anglo-Saxon and Nordic
and a lot else.
The other has changed little since the time of Moses, making
it perhaps the oldest language on Earth.
But friends who speak Yiddish assure me that Jews absorb
words from other languages at least as easily as the Japanese.
''Yiddish is like a sponge,'' I was assured. ''We soak up
whole lakes of language, and we squeeze out rivers.''
The process can't be forced. Try to coin a new word or borrow
from another language and, whether you're talking Japanese,
English or Yiddish, you'll discover how cold and cruel a language
can be.
You've got more chance of getting a novel published than
you have of seeing your new word adopted by a dictionary.
I've tried. I called myself an 'explorologist'. But does
anybody every call me anything but a spoon-bender?
No. And where did that neologism come from? I certainly didn't
coin 'spoon-bender' myself. For one thing, I get many of my
most dramatic results with forks.
Language isn't created in dramatic flashes of inspiration.
It evolves, like a plant that constantly pushes out buds and
tendrils.
So it's ironic that one of the most obnoxious new words I've
seen in a long time is being touted enthusiastically by ultra-Darwinists.
These scientific extremists, people like Richard Dawkins and
Daniel Dennett, insist that all creatures evolved from chemical
soup, and nowhere in the universe was life ever created.
And then they try to create a word to describe this belief.
A perfectly good word has already evolved, of course - 'atheist'.
It means 'an absence of God'.
The atheists wanted a cheery, positive word to describe their
soulless belief system, so they picked one: 'Bright'.
(I do literally mean 'soulless' - atheists think there is
no human soul. I honestly cannot understand how anyone can
deny the existence of the soul. It's like saying the mind
doesn't exist, or love doesn't exist.)
There's a web-page where people can endorse this nauseous
neologism. I see my old friend James 'The Amazing' Randi is
there, describing himself as a Bright now.
He spends decades denying the existence of the paranormal,
then imagines he can create a new word by magic. Obviously,
Bright is the new Stupid.
(NOTE: 'Harburashi' is toothbrush).
Email
him at uri@urigeller.com
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