Isn't Pamela Miles the one who said "The Japanese language has no words?" Hmmm, credibility?

Bruce





edited 2/19/2010 see,split
Recipe for Reiki Credibility by Pamela Miles.

Bruce wrote:Isn't Pamela Miles the one who said "The Japanese language has no words?" Hmmm, credibility?

Bruce

Bruce, did you actually read what she wrote? The words she wrote, I found, were incredibly valuable.

Thaak wrote:

Bruce wrote:Isn't Pamela Miles the one who said "The Japanese language has no words?" Hmmm, credibility?

Bruce

Bruce, did you actually read what she wrote?.

Yes.

The words she wrote, I found, were incredibly valuable.

I'm assuming you're referring to the words that Bridget most recently quoted. Your finding them valuable is okay. My point is that it's ironic that she's commenting on what makes a practitioner credible, after her (literally) incredible insistence that "the Japanese language has no words." It's very unfortunate that she's undermining not only her own credibility with such a statement, but perhaps also compromising the credibiilty of other practitioners.

Bruce

Bruce wrote:

Thaak wrote:

Bruce wrote:Isn't Pamela Miles the one who said "The Japanese language has no words?" Hmmm, credibility?

Bruce

Bruce, did you actually read what she wrote?.

Yes.

The words she wrote, I found, were incredibly valuable.

I'm assuming you're referring to the words that Bridget most recently quoted. Your finding them valuable is okay. My point is that it's ironic that she's commenting on what makes a practitioner credible, after her (literally) incredible insistence that "the Japanese language has no words." It's very unfortunate that she's undermining not only her own credibility with such a statement, but perhaps also compromising the credibiilty of other practitioners.

Bruce

Bruce your referring to what she wrote

Reiki Is Not a Word

November 5th, 2009

How often have you seen information about Reiki that starts with this: Reiki is a Japanese word meaning universal life energy.

What is wrong with that sentence?

First of all, there are no Japanese words. The Japanese language is written in pictograms, not words.

I hear someone saying, “Picky, picky, picky.” And I completely own it. I am picky, picky, picky. But that doesn’t make a pictogram a word, or even a reasonable equivalent. A pictogram is a stylized picture. Even the most florid word is linear compared to a picture. Words define; pictograms suggest. And they can only be understood in context.

The definition above traces back to Hawayo Takata, the Reiki master who, with her Reiki master Chujiro Hayashi, brought Reiki from Japan to Hawaii in the late 1930s.

I want to go on record as having only the most profound admiration and gratitude for Mrs. Takata. But that doesn’t mean we freeze dry everything she said and use it without reflection.

Anyone who heard Mrs. Takata say those words also heard her say more, and likely felt her hands as well. Taking a line from a live event and turning it into the lead of an article doesn’t work. When writing, we have only our words with which to interest people. Make them count.

Use your words to tell people what they want to know about Reiki–how it can help them. If you lead with a definition that tells them nothing, you may not get a chance to elaborate.

Hi, Bridget,

Yes, I'm commenting on the irony of an incredible (edit: that is, not credible) source who lists criteria for credibility.

Bruce

chi_solas wrote:

Bruce wrote:

Thaak wrote:

Bruce wrote:Isn't Pamela Miles the one who said "The Japanese language has no words?" Hmmm, credibility?

Bruce

Bruce, did you actually read what she wrote?.

Yes.

The words she wrote, I found, were incredibly valuable.

I'm assuming you're referring to the words that Bridget most recently quoted. Your finding them valuable is okay. My point is that it's ironic that she's commenting on what makes a practitioner credible, after her (literally) incredible insistence that "the Japanese language has no words." It's very unfortunate that she's undermining not only her own credibility with such a statement, but perhaps also compromising the credibiilty of other practitioners.

Bruce

Bruce your referring to what she wrote

Reiki Is Not a Word

November 5th, 2009

How often have you seen information about Reiki that starts with this: Reiki is a Japanese word meaning universal life energy.

What is wrong with that sentence?

First of all, there are no Japanese words. The Japanese language is written in pictograms, not words.

I hear someone saying, “Picky, picky, picky.” And I completely own it. I am picky, picky, picky. But that doesn’t make a pictogram a word, or even a reasonable equivalent. A pictogram is a stylized picture. Even the most florid word is linear compared to a picture. Words define; pictograms suggest. And they can only be understood in context.

The definition above traces back to Hawayo Takata, the Reiki master who, with her Reiki master Chujiro Hayashi, brought Reiki from Japan to Hawaii in the late 1930s.

I want to go on record as having only the most profound admiration and gratitude for Mrs. Takata. But that doesn’t mean we freeze dry everything she said and use it without reflection.

Anyone who heard Mrs. Takata say those words also heard her say more, and likely felt her hands as well. Taking a line from a live event and turning it into the lead of an article doesn’t work. When writing, we have only our words with which to interest people. Make them count.

Use your words to tell people what they want to know about Reiki–how it can help them. If you lead with a definition that tells them nothing, you may not get a chance to elaborate.

BTW, for Miles to be right about the Japanese language not having any words, the following would have to be true:

1. When my maternal grandmother said "Nihongo o hanashimasu," she wasn't using any words. (That's ridiculous.)

2. When she wrote the same statement in the hiragana script, which is phonetically based, she again wasn't using any words. (Again, that's ridiculous.)

3. When my father, who was a professional linguist and who studied Japanese in the later years of his life, referred to "Japanese words," he was wrong about that, just because Miles says so. (Uh, I doubt it.)

Now, even if we look only at kanji, Miles is still wrong. She's apparently ignorant about the phonetic borrowing that occurred in many of the compound Chinese characters before they were adopted by the Japanese.

Here's why it matters. People like you have referred to Miles as a leader in the reiki community. Her statements about the reiki system are likely to be more heavily weighted than those of other practitioners. Her statement about Japanese not having any words could seriously mislead reiki practitioners who don't know any better. And people who aren't familiar with reiki may believe that many reiki practitioners don't even have basic linguistic sense -- so why bother to look further at what those practitioners say. That's what I mean about Miles' statement undermining her own credibility and perhaps that of other practitioners too.

Bruce

Bruce wrote:BTW, for Miles to be right about the Japanese language not having any words, the following would have to be true:

1. When my maternal grandmother said "Nihongo o hanashimasu," she wasn't using any words. (That's ridiculous.)

2. When she wrote the same statement in the hiragana script, which is phonetically based, she again wasn't using any words. (Again, that's ridiculous.)

3. When my father, who was a professional linguist and who studied Japanese in the later years of his life, referred to "Japanese words," he was wrong about that, just because Miles says so. (Uh, I doubt it.)

Now, even if we look only at kanji, Miles is still wrong. She's apparently ignorant about the phonetic borrowing that occurred in many of the compound Chinese characters before they were adopted by the Japanese.

Here's why it matters. People like you have referred to Miles as a leader in the reiki community. Her statements about the reiki system are likely to be more heavily weighted than those of other practitioners. Her statement about Japanese not having any words could seriously mislead reiki practitioners who don't know any better. And people who aren't familiar with reiki may believe that many reiki practitioners don't even have basic linguistic sense -- so why bother to look further at what those practitioners say. That's what I mean about Miles' statement undermining her own credibility and perhaps that of other practitioners too.

Bruce

And yet, Bruce, Linguistically, looking at the "written" language of Japanese, they don't use words. If you look at the language from the perspective of a linguistic scholar, you'll find that they don't use words.

You can fight that, and spout off about that all you want, but just because you say it, and have background with Japanese familial routes, does not make what you say true either.

Thaak wrote:And yet, Bruce, Linguistically, looking at the "written" language of Japanese, they don't use words. If you look at the language from the perspective of a linguistic scholar, you'll find that they don't use words.

You can fight that, and spout off about that all you want, but just because you say it, and have background with Japanese familial routes, does not make what you say true either.

Andy, that's not true. You can spout off about it all you want, but your ipse dixit argument doesn't make it true.

If you want to address the merits of the issue instead of merely insulting me, then what about the phonetic representations that have been incorporated into compound characters?

Bruce
(Edit: BTW, the "perspective of a linguistic scholar" is why I mentioned my father's background as a professional linguist when I spoke of his reference to Japanese words. He was a linguistics professor for about 26 years.)

Here's what one academic communications specialist (who studied under the linguist S.I. Hayakawa) says about differentiating between the Japanese kanji and the Japanese phonetic scripts: "The hiragana and katakana are types of alphabet with 46 sounds representing syllables, not words as with kanji." http://www.time-binding.org/etc/articles/64-4-fiordo.pdf

If you have contrary linguistic authority -- not just your own assertion -- for the position that written Japanese doesn't use words, then could you list it here?

Bruce

Yeah, much better to stick to discussing subject points. That way it remains an intellectually stimulating chat, .

This is just in case somebody really believes the . . . assertion . . . that's sometimes posted about the character-based system of writing consisting of pictographs.

As you know, the Japanese kanji were largely adopted from the Chinese characters (Hanzi).

From Wikipedia (just because it's convenient and explains how characters are actually used):
"Chinese characters evolved over time from earlier forms of hieroglyphs. The idea that all Chinese characters are either pictographs or ideographs is an erroneous one: most characters contain phonetic parts, and are composites of phonetic components and semantic radicals. Only the simplest characters, such as ren 人 (human), ri 日 (sun), shan 山 (mountain), shui 水 (water), may be wholly pictorial in origin. In 100 CE, the famed scholar Xǚ Shèn in the Hàn Dynasty classified characters into six categories, namely pictographs, simple ideographs, compound ideographs, phonetic loans, phonetic compounds and derivative characters. Of these, only 4% were categorized as pictographs, and 80–90% as phonetic complexes consisting of a semantic element that indicates meaning, and a phonetic element that indicates the pronunciation. Generally, the phonetic element is more accurate and more important than the semantic one.[citation needed] There are about 214 radicals recognized in the Kangxi Dictionary."
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Chinese_language

I'm still waiting for somebody to post contrary linguistic authority.

Bruce

More on Chinese Words. I'm addressing Chinese because I know more (though still not lots) about it than Japanese. But the character-based system of writing is what seems to be behind the assertion by some people (Andy?) that the Japanese language doesn't use any words.

Andy? Have you found any credible authority for your assertion?

Bruce

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University of Illinois, Urbana-Champaign
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I just found my copy of John DeFrancis' book The Chinese Language: Fact and Fantasy (University of Hawaii Press 1984). DeFrancis was a professor of Chinese, at the University of Hawaii. On page 144, discussing what he calls "the ideographic myth," he observes that,
"while it is possible for a writing system to have many individual 'ideographs' or 'ideograms,' it is not possible to have a whole writing system based on the ideographic principle. Alphabetic writing requires mastery of several dozen symbols that are needed for phonemic representation. Syllabic writing requires mastery of what may be several hundred or several thousand symbols that are needed for syllabic representation. Ideographic writing, however, requires mastery of the tens of thousands or hundreds of thousands of symbols that would be needed for ideographic representation of words or concepts without regard to sound. A bit of common sense should suggest that unless we supplement our brains with computer implants, ordinary mortals are incapable of such memory feats."

I'm not sure of whether he's right about so many symbols being needed for a syllabic system. But he makes a good point about how many would be needed for an ideographic system.

Bruce

And here's the url for a linguist's Powerpoint presentation on "The Myth of Chinese Characters." www-rohan.sdsu.edu/dept/chinese/aspect/Myth.ppt

The presentation shows how some characters were originally depicted, when they really were pictographs/ideographs. But the presentation alludes to linguistic drift and explains how only a very small part of the language now consists of pictographs (like those to which Miles referred).

Andy, are you still buying into the myth? Or are you reconsidering your statement about the perspective of linguistic scholars?

Bruce

me thinks bruce has a bee in his bonnet about personal issues that run much deeper than his issues with mrs miles linguistics..........