7 January 2005 (26 Tevet 5765)
Suppose two people have mutually exclusive suffering. One (henceforth, she) suffers if she does not do a certain thing she really likes, and is neither ready to suffer even if her action may cause suffering to others nor bothered by this. The other (henceforth, he) suffers from her action rather than from lack of his own action, and only wants her to stop the cause of his suffering. Which one of the two should take precedence over the other? Intuitively, I would answer that the second should, but the question is whether there is any sufficient justification for such intuition.
Seemingly, both of them are on a par as they suffer in some way or other and are equally entitled to avoid their respective suffering, but a closer examination shows that there is an essential difference between these two types of suffering. She has two positive choices she can make for herself, i.e., to do something or not. On the other hand, he takes no positive action, thus has only one choice, i.e., to do nothing. One of the choices she makes can bother him, while his only choice cannot bother her as he does nothing. Since he does not bother her in any way with his positive action, she has no right to bother him with hers, either.
Unfortunately, many of those who cause pain to others in this way are still thinking that they have the equal right not to suffer. The following are, in my opinion, some of the "good" examples of this kind of selfish behavior: 1) to smoke in public, 2) to speak loudly and endlessly on the cellular phone in public, 3) to play music loudly in an apartment house, 4) to keep a dog that barks incessantly and unnecessarily in a residential area.
14 January 2005 (4 Shvat 5765)
It is rather paradoxical that we human beings as naming animals cannot decide our own names. We are totally at the mercy of others in this respect though there are people who change their given names like an uncle of mine. I am full of gratitude to my parents for everything they gave me, but there is one thing I am sorry for until this very day: the name they gave me. It has been a source of constant suffering for me since my childhood. I am not sure who chose the name "Tsuguya", my parents themselves or someone else among our relatives or neighbors, but the fact remains that it is very rare both phonetically and graphically, even in Japan.
In Japan I had to waste my time explaining how to spell it. Here in Israel I have to repeat it at least ten times so that those who ask me at all what my name is may be able to reproduce it at least temporarily. Unfortunately, I am empirically convinced more and more that nine out of every ten people have no ability to go beyond the phonetic limitations imposed upon them by their respective mother tongue. What few people who take the trouble of asking me what my name is remember it at all in the first place, and even if they should remember it, most of them cripple it phonetically; even many of my friends do not pronounce it correctly.
I have lost not only patience for explaining the correct pronunciation of my name but also hope that someone will remember it at all, to say nothing of pronouncing it correctly. People with common names would never be able to fully understand this daily suffering. I am simply so tired of my given name. We are like Siamese twins: on the one hand, I have no special liking for it, but on the other hand, I feel as if I myself were denied when someone mispronounces or misspells my name.
I am sure that if my given name were something less peculiar, I would be much more sociable. I often find myself hesitating to introduce myself mainly for fear that I may have to repeat my name a hundred times at least. What I mean by the peculiarity of a name is not only its frequency in a given language or languages but also its phonetic composition. Of the five cardinal vowels, i.e., I, e, a, o, and u, the last has the lowest sonority. Names that have two occurrences of the vowel that is the most difficult to discern auditorily are, therefore, more difficult to remember, especially if they are so rare.
Many parents, who have never thought enough about this, may think naively that it is a positive thing to choose a name that is unique phonetically and/or graphically for their newborn child. According to my own experience, this can cause more suffering than good to him or her, even if the meaning of the name cannot be better. If you are expecting a child, please think twice before choosing a phonetically and/or graphically nonconventional name for him or her, whose life can even be affected negatively by this decision of yours.
21 January 2005 (11 Shvat 5765)
I have been a bookworm since my childhood. Although I do not remember exactly how I came to love books, this must be thanks to my mother, who spared no time and effort to give me everything and more than everything she could, including buying interesting books for me periodically. I was born and brought up in a very rural area, but at least until I finish high school there, there were good bookstores there that had more quality books than most bookstores in Jerusalem, for example. Books were almost the only window to the outside world for me. My life must have been totally different if I had been born there later with less quality books or in a big city like Tokyo and Osaka, where there are huge bookstores.
Because books were the main sources of knowledge for me in my childhood, I have come to develop some special sense of respect to them not only in terms of their contents but also physically. I still treat books, whether they are mine or they are stored in public libraries, with utmost care. I seldom write even in my own books, so I cannot imagine daring to disgrace someone else's. I do not even dare to put something else on books.
Who said the Jewish people are the people of the book? This does not seem to apply to many of the people living in Israel. It really makes me sad to witness that books in public libraries do not receive even the minimal respect they deserve and are put to sheer vandalism. Actually I almost forgot the existence of such vandalism until I came here again and borrowed books in the university library. Of course there are people in Japan who doodle in public books, but not in such a violent manner and so frequently as in Israel.
I have been wondering why so many people here feel no remorse for such vandalism. Although I cannot understand them at all, I can at least try to imagine a couple of possible reasons for their anticultural behavior. The first reason is egocentricity or lack of consideration to others which is characteristic of quite a few people here; they have an illusion as if those books they borrow were their own, thus misappropriate them for their own use. The second is that many of them seem to think that they know better than others, so they believe that they do good for others by witting their comments or underlining in books, but in reality these comments almost always reflect their ignorance both in language and in content rather than any intellectual revelation.
Now I find myself doing what I used to do when I was a student here more than a decade: whenever I borrow a book from a public library, the first thing I do is to erase all the traces of graphic violence and noise found there. This is not so much for myself as for the book itself. Ribono shel olam, please have mercy on books stored in public libraries in Israel.
28 January 2005 (18 Shvat 5765)
As a linguist and ex-teacher of languages I have often been asked by people from all walks of life what I think is the most difficult language in the world. Although I am sure that they do not expect me to answer scientifically, I always have to explain to them why I cannot give them a single straightforward answer. There are two kinds of difficulties, i.e., in absolute and relative terms. The former are difficulties intrinsic in the structure and/or use of a certain language, i.e., difficulties in its orthography, phonology, morphology, syntax, lexicon, pragmatics, etc., regardless of one's mother tongue. For example, the orthography of Japanese, which is probably the most complicated in the world, is difficult even for its native speakers and requires years of study to use it actively and passively in various social settings. On the other hand, the second difficulties depend on one's mother tongue. For example, the nominal inflection of Russian, which is difficult in absolute terms, must be easy for speakers of Polish.
I think I can now give a straightforward answer to the above question. The most difficult language in the world, at least for about 50% of the population of the human being, must be women's language. I find it especially difficult to correctly decipher its variety (or varieties) used by unmarried women in their twenties and thirties. When you and someone else speak, e.g., English and Hebrew respectively, you are aware that you speak two different languages. But when a man and a woman speak what is considered the same language (e.g., English), they are liable to have an illusion that they really use the "same language", which in turns leads to misunderstandings, con fusions and quarrels, often unnecessarily, as has been plaging me continuously.
A man and a woman who are native speakers of, e.g., American English, use more or less the same langue, i.e., their respective idiolects are regulated more or less by the same grammatical rules. But the problem is that they can use the same expression to mean two totally different things, or vice versa. I have met and spoken with various people from various cultural backgrounds in several languages. I have almost always felt that we are speaking more or less the "same language" when my interlocutors are men. But when they are women, especially those in their twenties and thirties, I have had to ask myself from time to time whether we are deciphering correctly what each of us means in what is supposed to be the same language. I have started to think that the differences between men's and women's languages, as well as some other behaviors, are conditioned not only socially but also biologically. But, of course, this is just my impression not based on any scientific study.
Although I used to learn a new foreign language every year in my twenties, I feel neither desire nor motivation now to do so. I do, however, want to learn systematically a language that is not new but often foreign and enigmatic to me, i.e., women's language. After all, I enjoy speaking with women more than with men, probably because the communication with women is crosscultural in a sense for us men. This, of course, does not have to be accompanied by constant mutual misunderstandings. I want to avoid or at least minimize them whenever I can, though correctly deciphering women's language, to say nothing of mastering it, seems a daunting task.