“The Real Japan,” chap. viii.; “Out of the Far East” (Hearn), pp. 85-125; “The Yankees of the East,” chaps. ix., xix.; “An American Missionary in Japan” (Gordon), chap. xv.; “Japan and her People,” vol. i. pp. 178-191; “A Japanese Interior” (Miss Bacon); “Every Day Japan” (Lloyd); and, last and best, Miss Bacon’s “Japanese Girls and Women,” revised edition, illustrated. CHAPTER XIV LANGUAGE AND LITERATURE OUTLINE OF TOPICS: Japanese syllabary; _i-ro-ha_ arrangement; arrangement of fifty-sounds; modern inventions.—Chinese ideographs; _Kata-kana_; _Hira-gana_; _Kana-majiri_ and _Kana-tsuki_; variety in pronunciation.—Japanese elocution.—Japanese syntax; logic in linguistics; a sample sentence; kind of language; topsy-turvy practices.—Ancient literature; poetry; _naga-uta_ and _tanka_; _hokku_; a poem a picture.—Characteristics of Japanese poetry.—Modern literature: newspapers; press laws; English journals; Japanese journals; magazines and periodicals; books; what the Japanese read; their literary taste; foreign books; linguistic reforms, theory and practice.—Bibliography. The Japanese language belongs, philologically, to the Altaic family, and is of the agglutinative type. Practically, it is musical and easy to pronounce, but, on account of its long and involved sentences, difficult to learn. Its alphabet is not phonetic, but syllabic, and very simple and regular. It comprises 73 characters, of which 5 are duplicates of the same sounds, so that there are really only 68 distinct sounds. As many of the sounds, moreover, are only slight modifications of other sounds, they are represented by the same characters, with certain diacritical signs attached (as in the case of _ha_, _ba_, and _pa_). There are, consequently, in common use only 48 distinct characters, which are arranged in such an order as to form a stanza of poetry[131] as follows:— Iro wa nioedo Chirinuru wo— Waga yo tare zo Tsune naran? Ui no oku-yama Kyō koete, Asaki yume miji, Ei mo sezu. Which means, being interpreted by Professor B. H. Chamberlain:— “Though gay in hue, [the blossoms] flutter down, Alas! Who then, in this world of ours, may continue forever? Crossing to-day the uttermost limits of phenomenal existence, I shall see no more fleeting dreams, neither be any longer intoxicated.” In other words, “all is transitory in this fleeting world. Let us escape from its illusions and vanities.” Another arrangement, based on the five vowels and their combination with certain consonants, gives fifty sounds, of which, however, two or three are really duplicates. This table of fifty sounds (_gojū-on_) is as follows:— [132] a ka sa ta na ha ma ya ra wa i ki shi chi ni hi mi _(y)i_ ri (w)i u ku su tsu nu fu mu yu ru _(w)u_ e ke se te ne he me _(y)e_ re (w)e o ko so to no ho mo yo ro wo