amarillo of kerria

ライティング練習。ブラウザがChromeなら画面を右クリックからも翻訳できるよ。

漫画「寄生獣」と日本語

In the comic "Kiseijū," fictional, intelligent parasitic creatures are depicted. Those creatures learn human languages incredibly quickly. The parasitic creatures in the comic which can variously morph their own appearances and functions at their will speak Japanese very fluently.


One of what I was very much interested in as to this comic was this fluency of the Japanese language of these freaky creatures.


How do they conceive of Japanese? How do they feel of each word of Japanese and every tweak made on it according to context?


If you put a kind of Turing test for humans and those strange creatures in terms of the fluency of Japanese, those non-humans will pass the test easily. You cannot discern the alien creatures from humans with this means.


They are extraterrestrial ... but they thoroughly comply with the grammatical rules of Japanese. But, still, at least historically, even if not biologically, the Japanese language is not theirs.


It arouses a queer feeling to see they communicate with humans with the language. The language is not theirs but they understand it perfectly, or as much as we human native Japanese speakers do.


Probably the question I have in mind is this: is there any fundamental mental difference behind these two different groups despite their using the same language? Do they see, at all, the Japanese language from a different standpoint than that of us?


The point is that they have our language but don't have theirs. They inherently appear as eternal outsiders placed inside the circle of humans.


If those parasitic creatures have their own system of language, they are bilinguals, we feel. In this case, we wouldn't feel something strange at their speaking Japanese. It is because we take it that their Japanese is something like a subpart of their own language we don't use. That is, we take it that their speaking Japanese is not indeed so. We take it that they are, in reality, using their language despite the external appearance of Japanese. We think that their being able to use the Japanese language is by virtue of their original ability of their own language, which is not our language.


But in this case, Japanese is their native tongue. That is, in many cases, for those parasitic creatures, the language is Japanese alone.


Those parasitic creatures have biologically extremely different appearances from humans. Therefore we naturally imagine that their inner would be different from ours accordingly. And it gives rise to such questions as above.


But we cannot see another's mind. To know another's mind is by imagination and inference.


If parasitic creatures have similar mental experiences to humans in using the Japanese language, our strange feeling as to their using Japanese language turns out a prejudice all brought by mere appearances. But there is no way of proving whether.


Furthermore, reflectively on humans, the following insight could be revealed. We naturally assume others who use the same language as yours use the language with the same sense and feeling with it as yours to have. But this is undemonstrable too.


Others may have in fact very much different subjective experiences when they use the same language as yours. We essentially cannot see how others actually see the world from each perspective. That's the meaning of being subjective.


But humans, as a species, have largely biologically similar appearances. So we assume others have similar subjective mental constitution and experiences to your own. But it is not certain. They may have utterly different world than you have. (This might have been a theme of the comic too ... or might not.)


A language is a tool of communication shared by different minds. This mystery of invisible world of others' minds could be a hidden source of your being intrigued by others' speaking words. The comic "Kiseijū" might have presented me with the extreme case which implies this.