But a Language Shouldn't Change That Fast

Abstract

The only excuse for this article in the English Journal is the fact that in teaching language many people need anecdotes about problems in intercultural communication and the rapidity of language change. My wife is sensitive about audience and when she read a rough draft of this, she declared, It'll never make the English Journal unless you tie it somehow to English teacher activity. If you don't make the connection, it's just an ego trip for you. All right, then. The foregoing is the connection. The rest of it is an ego trip. It was an ego trip last summer when I was-at 60-the oldest person involved in an exchange program at Showa University in Fujiyoshida, Japan. (In Japan, most people retire at 55 so in many situations I was the senior person present. When I went to Japan 40 years ago at the age of 19, I was usually the youngest. You can imagine my surprise when in a mixed group of Japanese and Americans I was called upon to describe life in Japan in 1945.) One of the first communication problems between Gaijin (Westerners) and the Japanese came in 1549 when the Portuguese missionary, Saint Francis Xavier, came from India to Kagoshima. Realizing that Japanese had no word quite equivalent to the Portuguese theos for the concept of the Christian God, St. Francis determined to introduce both the concept and a new word at a huge outdoor gathering. Even at that time, the Japanese had a surprisingly high literacy rate, so the sainted missionary hired a sign painter to produce a banner bearing kanji symbols for the new word. He intended, at the appropriate moment, to signal acolytes to raise the banner and thus reinforce the sound of the