V. M. ALPATOV. Japan. YAZYK I KUL'tura [LANGUAGE AND CULTURE], Moscow: Yazyki slavyanskikh kul'tury, 2008, 208 p. (Studia Philologica)

Japan is usually perceived in Russia as a mystery, as well as a source of all sorts of technical, aesthetic, social and other miracles. There has long been an opinion among scientists that it is on the Japanese Islands that popular utopian thought once placed Belovodye - a land where good and justice reign. Part of Russia's fascination with Japan is also connected with the pan - European cultural fashion-even Marco Polo excited Europeans with stories about Japanese gold, and the subsequent three centuries of closeness of this country to the world created an aura of mystery and attraction around it. And the post-war economic growth contributed a lot to its popularity in America and Western Europe.

However, since the late 1970s, with the expansion of knowledge and research about Japan, as well as with the first signs of a decline in economic indicators, more balanced and objective assessments have begun to appear in Western literature, and sometimes authors of works on Japanese culture take inadequately critical positions, in which there is even some irritation associated, perhaps, with the fact that, with the fact that the" Japanese myth " turns out to be not fully justified and deviates from the desired ideal.

The same phenomenon, with some delay, is happening in Russia - the circle of publications, researchers, and just tourists is steadily expanding, and for many it turns out that there is a certain gap between the real Japan and the usual Japanese charm, which in a certain sense has already become part of Russian culture, which causes some "cultural concern" and requires interpretation.

The book of V. M. Alpatov, a well-known Japanese linguist with a broad erudition, a historian of science and cultural anthropology, answers many of these challenges of the time, while it sets itself much broader and more significant tasks. The range of problems raised by him goes beyond linguoculturology as such. Language data and their linguistic expertise do not limit the narrative to a strictly defined framework, but rather allow the author to express his opinion about Japanese culture throughout its history and in its current context, and at the same time draw conclusions in the widest possible range with reliable facts in hand, maintaining the unity of method and tools throughout the book.

At the beginning of the work, V. M. Alpatov gives a brief summary of the earliest stage of textual activity in Japan, when the Chinese hieroglyphic script was borrowed and at the same time its active development and use, as well as adaptation to the needs of a completely different Japanese language, took place; in parallel, the formation of conditional, phonetic use of hieroglyphics, which gave rise to two syllabic alphabets, they are still used in Japanese graphics. Moving on to the subsequent stages of language development, the author briefly dwells on the most important historical periods essential for the main theme of the book, conditionally dividing the entire history of Japan into three periods: the era of the origin of the Japanese language, the era of Chinese influence, the era of American and European influence, according to V. M. Alpatov, which began with the Meiji restoration and until now.

Here, the following briefly formulated propositions, called "constants of Japanese language culture" by the author, are very important: "the geographical and genetic isolation of the Japanese language, the unusually long coincidence of state, ethnic and linguistic borders, the duration and significance of purely written contacts with the Chinese language, the formation of vago subsystems (Japanese words)within the language system. and kango (Chinese words - L. E.), to which a third subsystem of gairaigo (foreign borrowings - L. E.) has been added in recent centuries" (p. 29).

Interesting are the chapters in the book where V. M. Alpatov writes about the Japanese language as a subject of special interest on the part of the Japanese themselves, who, for the above reasons, perhaps more actively than other ethnic groups, identify their cultural and ethnic identity with the language as such. Hence, the author points out such features as asserting the uniqueness of the Japanese language in the world, exaggerating the difficulties of one's own language, especially for learning by foreigners, and including language features in various Nihonjinron theories, i.e., in arguments about the national character of the Japanese.

Let's say, by the way,that there are more than a thousand studies on the topic of "Nihonjinron", built most often on the principle of comparison and contrast with the West, from the time of Meiji to the present day. The author seems to focus on those works that seem most interesting to him for the chosen aspect of reasoning, while listing many of his predecessors, from Kindaichi Haruhiko to A. Vezhbitskaya.

The section of V. M. Alpatov's work related to the field of humanitarian knowledge, which is commonly called the language picture of the world, will arouse increased interest in any reader. It will be interesting to learn about the richness of Japanese onomatopoeia (onomatopoeia), which often have the status of words that are quite literary and stylistically neutral, despite the phonetic appearance that is comical for the Western ear, and about the differences in the differentiation of concepts related to traditional economic activities: for example, the Japanese word wuxi can be given four Russian equivalents - "cattle", "cow", "bull", "ox"; at the same time, the Russian word "fish", as the author writes with reference to Kindaichi, can be attributed to seven Japanese words that do not completely coincide in meaning, including "fish as food", "live fish", " fish as a zoological class" , etc.

To this reasoning I will add another interesting and vivid fact from the life of the Japanese language. Just as in Russian there are words from different roots that denote the same animal: for example, "cow" - "bull" - "calf", "chicken" - "rooster" - "chicken", so in Japanese, the same tempest fish, depending on its age, is called in Japanese. In Eastern Japan, wakashi-shada-varasa-buri, in Western Japan, tsubasu-hamati-mejiro-buri, and all these are names of the same Yellow-Tailed Lacedra (Seriola lalandi) of the horse mackerel family, but only at certain periods of its life and, accordingly, different gastronomic properties.

Undoubtedly, the problem of color designations in different languages, which is often associated with color perception, is also interesting. Speaking about Western studies on the selection of primary colors on the scale of the spectrum, which are diverse in different cultures, V. M. Alpatov, of course, also mentions the famous non-distinction between green and blue in the Old Japanese culture (the same word aoi), and also quite rightly points out that this phenomenon is already in the past, and now for many people it is necessary to these two colors have separate words. Unless there is a traditional expression of aoi haru - "green spring".

Here I will add one detail from my own observations: so, if you ask Japanese students of Russian studies to name the colors of a traffic light, most will automatically call green the Russian word "blue". Apparently, in the subconscious mind, the Japanese ao appears, since we are not talking about shades, but rather about the main colors of the spectrum, which are firmly connected with historical, traditional names.

It is difficult to list all the topics covered by the author, but it is impossible not to mention those chapters of the book that are devoted to the rules of speech etiquette - one of the areas of long-standing special interest of the researcher, as well as the ratio of male and female speech. These chapters are brilliant examples of how strictly scientific data, developments, and research results can be presented in a fun and accessible way without losing in complexity and depth of information.

The section on Japanese graphics is also extremely interesting. It is known that Japanese graphics are considered the most complex in the world not in terms of difficulties in mastering, but in terms of the number of components, since it not only consists of hieroglyphs (which usually have several reading options), but also uses two syllabic alphabets (and now also interspersed with words written in Latin). In addition, hieroglyphs are often used not only one at a time, but also in combinations of two or three, but their reading can not always be obtained by adding up the readings of each hieroglyph separately. V. M. Alpatov writes about all these and much more subtle things, language games, graphic effects that create multi-layered subtexts in detail and deeply, drawing on a wide range of facts of Japanese culture and history. An important and indisputable advantage of the book is the author's constant appeal to typological parallels, primarily to Russian linguistic realities, but also to the data of Western European, classical, and other languages.

I would like to clarify some details in the book. For example, in the chapter on Nihonjinron theories, the reader would be interested in the opinion of the linguist author on the theory of the Japanese sociologist Kumon Syumpei, who analyzed the internal form of the word (and hieroglyph) with the meaning of "understand" in Latin, in modern Western languages, and in Japanese, and came to the conclusion that the processes of understanding in Japan and in the West are opposite - from synthesis to analysis in the Japanese case, and from analysis to synthesis in the European one.

The author's claim that prose appeared in Japan at the end of the ninth century is somewhat controversial. Even if you believe those Japanese philologists who attribute the creation of "Taketori-monogatari" not to the X, but to the IX century, it is still difficult to call this early story "prose" in the Western or modern Japanese sense: this work is usually called "narrative", but this word is rather a translation of the Japanese name of the monogatari genre ("narration of things"), and, on the one hand, is a fairy-tale folklore, and on the other hand, it is quite densely saturated with poetic texts, which makes it similar to such medieval literary monuments as "Ise-monogatari" and "Yamato-monogatari", the main purpose and compositional center of which is clearly the five-line tank.

There are also some little things in the book that don't seem very well formulated or raise doubts. Thus, on page 15, it is said that the term hoogen (now "dialect") means "foreign language", but the meaning of the Russian syllable "foreign" is "external", "alien". Meanwhile, the Japanese word hoo does not have the connotation of " foreignness "and means" direction", as well as" terrain", i.e."local language". It is also advisable to use the Japanese word in Cyrillic transcription when it appears in the text for the first time in the nominative case, so that the reader who does not know Japanese does not take such case variants as kanu or wabuna for the dictionary forms of these nouns.

In general, the reviewed work is an important and complete study of the various aspects and features of the Japanese language in their constant correlation with various aspects of Japanese culture - from economics and politics to cinema and advertising. This is the first time such a book has appeared in our country, and there is no doubt that it will have a long life ahead of it.

Permanent link to this publication: