The English-speaking reader is liable to look at such a translation and think, What is a "Tokyo Dome?" How big is it, and why should I care?

I suppose that homely comparisons help our us wrap our poor monkey brains around really big numbers, but when you get down to it, even "Tokyo Dome" is meaningless as a measurement. If we can't grasp the actual size being talked about, then "112 Tokyo Domes" isn't much more use than saying, "It's, like, really, really big, OK?"

And while these kinds of comparisons might make for more interesting writing, they play havoc with translations. If you're writing to be translated, I advise looking out for and avoiding these kinds of references, or at least replacing them with something more neutral, like "soccer fields."

A similar phenomenon is happening in the world of English-language journalism, when talking about computer storage sizes. They used to talk about how many "songs" or "movies" a given storage medium would hold, but as sizes have gotten larger, journalists are talking about how many "Libraries of Congress" the medium will hold.

Like Tokyo Domes, who knows how big the Library of Congress is? All that a figure like "seven Libraries of Congress" tells you is that it's a whole lot of storage space. I think that giving a real number, like "100 terabytes," will at least help us compare to other figures; like, "That's 100 times the size of my hard drive." And it will make translation a lot easier.

I recently bought the book いいまちがい (Japanese Made Funny), a bilingual collection of funny errors made by foreigners speaking Japanese.

One of my favorites was a guy who wanted a hamburger with no ketchup or other condiments. He calls up his Japanese friend, and asks him how to say "plain" in Japanese. The friend tells him it's 飛行機 (hikoki; "airplane"), and the guy proceeds to go to McDonald's and ask for a 飛行機のハンバーガー ("airplane" burger).

In this spirit, I'll share what I think is my funniest Japanese blunder. I had just come to Japan for the first time, as an exchange student. I had also just been married about four months before that.

I went to the neighborhood drug store to buy some condoms. I looked all over the store, but couldn't find them. Finally, I saw the store owner watching me, so I asked him. I didn't know the word for "condom" in Japanese, but I knew that in Spanish it's "condón," so I guessed and asked for コンドン (kondon — where the right word was コンドーム; kondoomu).

For some reason, the store owner thought I must be looking for cold medicine. He started going around and asking the customers, "Have you ever heard of a cold medicine called 'kondon'? This man is looking for 'kondon'." As a crowd started to gather round, I found it harder and harder to let the store owner know what I was really looking for; especially since it would probably have involved some rather expressive gestures.

Instead, I told him that I'd go home and look up the word I wanted in the dictionary, and high-tailed it out of there, leaving a bemused crowd of Japanese people behind me. After that, I avoided the store, but some time later I went in with my wife and bought some condoms — and saw the owner have an "aha" moment.

But I think that those calling for dying languages to be "rescued" are overly optimistic at best, and patronizing at worst. They talk about people being "forced" to give up their minority languages, but the reality is usually different. The typical scenario for language death is that the young people in a minority-language group start heading to the cities in search of work. In the cities, they may speak the minority language among themselves. Their children may grow up reasonably fluent in the minority language, but speak the majority language among themselves, and more importantly to their children. Meanwhile, back on the land, only the elderly remain, and they have no one to teach the minority language to. Thus in two, or maybe three generations, the minority language is extinct.

You could say that those people were "forced" to give up the minority language, but it was economic necessity rather than the barrel of a gun that forced them. In order to rescue the minority language, you'd have to make staying on the land economically viable. And that's something that nobody can seem to manage: the Earth's population is rapidly and inexorably urbanizing.

My wife's family is a case in point. They're from Hatoma, a small island in the Yaeyama archipelago of Japan's Okinawa prefecture.

View Larger Map

Today, Hatoma has about 60 residents, most of whom are elderly. The young people left long ago in search of work. People have tried several times to make viable economic models there, including farming boutique crops and eco-tourism, but nothing worked.

The language spoken on Hatoma (and the other dialects of the region) is of great linguistic interest, because it retains features of archaic Japanese dating back 1,300 years or more. My wife can understand the language of Hatoma fairly well, but she doesn't speak it. I'd estimate that there are maybe ten people in the world below the age of 40 who still do so fluently. Surely, this language will be dead in one or two generations.

This is a terrible loss, and the people who grew up on the island are sad that their language is dying, but the people left the island in search of jobs and opportunity (including the chance for their children to attend high school). To them, it was a no-brainer to trade that for a language they had been taught was inferior (when my stepfather was in school, the "Japanese" teachers used to make him wear a sign around his neck every time they caught him speaking "dialect").

Prognosis

I imagine that the facts on the ground are much the same in most places where languages are dying. Most of them probably don't even consider the consequences to their language's future when they move off the land and to the cities, but even if they considered it, they'd think it a good trade. "Rescuing" these languages would mean (a) making it economically viable to stay on the land, and (b) dispelling the widely held beliefs that minority languages are inferior. That would be a wonderful achievement, but my unfortunate prediction is that it ain't gonna happen in time.