developments

So the thesis process is progressing, and I have finally chosen a direction in which I am proceeding. I think I'm going to analyze the change of Japanese through the influence of English/foreign language and attempt to track the changes regionally to see if certain areas of Japan were earlier adopters of various foreign words and/or recently adopted non-traditional Japanese approximations of foreign phonemes. I was hoping to research regional newspapers and record the ratio of occurrences between the older approximations like フイルム、チーム、バイオリン vs フィルム、ティーム、ヴァイオリン、etc. I wanted to do a chronological and regional analysis of various newspapers around Japan, ie examine at least 3 newspapers - probably a Kyushu newspaper, a Tokyo newspaper, and maybe a Kansai newspaper - and look at the foreign words in use in each paper at different times, eg Meiji, pre-WWII, post-WWII, and current newspapers.

While post-WWII newspapers are readily available in digitized format, pre-WWII newspapers are considerably, if not entirely not at all, available in searchable, analyzable, digitized format. For example, the Yomiuri Shimbun has fully digitized articles from around 1978, and while it has scanned papers dating back to early Meiji, the full texts do not form an analyzable database and are of little more use than microfilm. The Kumamoto Nichinichi Shimbun similarly has digitized versions available from the 80's, but anything earlier is scanned and, along with being difficult to read, does not constitute a searchable database. I'm expecting the biggest change in Japanese newspapers to be between pre- and post-WWII examples, yet without access to large amounts of prewar data, I can't make any statistically significant arguments showing change over time or distance in Japanese newspapers.

A possible reason for the lack of digitization of old newspapers might be due to the near-complete lack of a standardized writing/printing system in prewar Japanese. Old newspapers are presented in many different orthographical formats, examples being kanji/hiragana hybrids, kanji/katakana, hiragana only, katakana only, and a fairly even spread between with- and without-furigana typesets. The difficulties this would create for successful OCR are understandable but regrettable. I'll have to find another way to chronologically and regionally analyze unique katakana occurrences.

One thing I'd like to look into a bit more is the シェ・クァ pronunciations in Kumamoto and see if they influence the pronunciations of loanwords currently being used by Kumamoto natives that say シェンシェイ （先生）and うんどうくぁい（運動会）. Do they say things like シェーター and アメリクァ？

Currently, I'm reading up on the history of katakana usage and when, how and why it became relegated to 外来語. I'm also reading Loveday's Language Contact in Japan to see what has influenced Japanese in the past and if they're similar to the changes Japanese is currently undergoing. Hopefully, this book will provide something of a bridge between the katakana ideas I'm looking at and some of the evolution stuff by Mufwene that I'd really like to investigate more.

I still really want to look at the phonological changes between dialects of Japan and English, but realize that it's too big and involved of a project for a master's thesis, but would potentially like to research more should I decide to aim for a doctorate in the future. I realize I'm getting ahead of myself a bit, but I have a strange attraction to dialects and don't want to abandon that field of study.

The End for now.

Topic

So I was thinking today, reading Mufwene's Ecology of Language Evolution, and I came up with a possible idea for my thesis. I've been wanting to do something regarding dialects and divergence and evolution in the creation of dialects. I'm also interested in why phonological differences appear between various English dialects (eg. pronunciation of "I" in American and Australian Englishes), while they don't really appear in Japanese dialects (eg. something written わたし is pronounced "Wah-tah-shee", with little/no change in vowel or consonant pronunciation in any dialect of Japanese). In Mufwene's book, he explores the influence of the lexifier (base language of a creole) on the structure and vocabulary of a developing creole. However, he doesn't attempt to explain the effect of the lexifier's phonology on the resulting creole's phonology. With English having been influenced by so many languages throughout its long history, its possible that phonological differences in English dialects are the result of extended contact with foreign languages and foreign speakers of English. Japan, on the other hand, has had a famously isolationist history and foreign language influence had been largely non-existant save early Chinese influence and recent English influence.

An interesting thing to note is the current influence of English on Japanese phonology (eg ヴェ and ティ sounds etc. becoming more and more common). These kinds of additions to Japanese phonology seem to be nationwide rather than isolated to certain dialects, maybe due to widespread dissemination of English through TV and music rather than concentrated English influence in distinct regions. Another point to look into would be if Japanese people tend to use the "non-Japanese" constructions like ティ and ヴェ when using 標準語, but tend to use more classically Japanese approximations like チ and バ when using loanwords in dialects. Use corpuses! That Japanese corpus that's in the process of being completed now could definitely be useful. Maybe a corpus of 熊本弁 would also not be out of the question. I'd need to have a sample size large enough for a study to be statistically relevant, and, from casual toying around with English corpuses, words occur at such low frequencies that an immense corpus would be necessary to make any sort of statistically significant conclusion about differences in pronunciation between dialects and 標準語.

Lots of ideas. Doesn't relate directly with evolution, but I really shouldn't attempt to push evolution as a reason for studying. It will be useful regardless of what I decide to research. While I pulled out the 進化学 a lot when trying to get accepted to school, it's really only peripherally related to what I intend to study. We'll see what happens.

I'm back

So, it's been nearly two years. I'm in graduate school now. I've realized what little writing ability I once had has probably vanished after an essay-less, diary-less 2 and a half years. Faced with writing a long thesis next year, I feel I need to get in some kind of shape to write at length.

So I'm going to start doing this blog again.

I'm planning on writing about what I'll be studying; any good ideas or things I'd like to remember, I'll shoot off a quick blog post and it'll be there for me when I need something to write about in my thesis. Sometimes maybe I'll write in Japanese. Mostly it'll be in English. I probably won't post any pictures because posting pictures is a pain.

That's all for today, hopefully I'll hear from me again tomorrow.