yochi-yochi

That would be ヨチヨチ the tottering motion of, say, a toddler making their first steps. I guess it could be added to those tedious lists of words for which there is no equivalent in English: hiraeth and saudades , or indeed kokoro 心, looking at you. But I've been mining a deep lode of such words in Polly Barton's memoir Fifty Sounds (2019, Fitzcarraldo publ.).

Actually it's much more than a what I did in my summer hols memoir because Barton studied Philosophy at Cambridge and did a deep dive into the gnarly tortured thinking of Ludwig Wittgenstein on the nature of communication and language. Immediately after graduating she travelled to Japan as a TEFL assistante at a group of school in a remote area of that alien country. Alien to her and me and probably you too; even if you are really into manga and/or ramen.

Because of her earlier training in how to think, she didn't just try to confront and hopefully master the many examples of doing things different there. She came to appreciate and start to unpick how much of our monoglot anglophone 'lang & comms" is only partly to do with the words (which you can look up in your lexicon) but a lot to do with the gestures, pauses, emphasis and intonation. It is also an opportunity to confront the embedded certainties and warm-bath background of her native tongue: English spelinge much?

Intonation? A professor of linguistics in full flow during class announced that there is no known language in which two positives are used to indicate a negative. Voice from smart-arse at back of hall "Yeah, right!". I had something to say about phatic elements of communication back in 2019. These are all the establishing empathy and common ground that make up most of our daily interactions with other humans. All those comments about the weather, asking how d'ye do without expecting a reply - let alone a view of the stitches on the other person's hernia repair.

Barton spend 15 years in Japan learning the language, culture and customs before returning to Bristol to hang out her shingle as a translator from the Japanese of which she has a dozen books to her credit. A good translation is quite as much effort as the original book - more perhaps because the creative flow is hampered by the original author's plot line and sensibilities. Fifty Sounds is essentially 50 chapters each one riffing in a Japanese word or phrase, where she encountered it and what it made her think.

One short telling chapter is about moja-moja モジャモジャ - the adjective routinely applied to Barton's curly hair. Not the more common (loan-word?) kuru-kuru - that wouldn't do. A friend explained that her hair was beyond curly it was wild unruly electric like Struwwelpeter. The poor women's moja-moja hair [as R with a moja-moja sheep in the background] attracted A Lot of uninvited pawing and poking . . . and not only from curious pupils. This skin-crawling observation has the ring of truth because it's the frequent experience of Dau.I the Librarian who has the bestest biggest hair in the family. What is wrong with people's assessment of personal space that they feel licensed to touch other people whose work is inevitably public facing?

moja-moja? Young feller from The North comes back from college in The South raving about The Dubliners. Uncle who has seen them on the TV: "That Ronnie Drew and Luke Kelly, they look like a pair of sheep's arses." The prev jokes are the best jokes.