Philology and Hieroglossy

Abstract

The author first presents the broad outlines of the phenomenon he called "hieroglossia," that is, the relationships historically established between several languages, in which religions play, initially at least, a predominant role. In the most common situation, a dominant culture in a region transmits its language, its writings, its system of thought to a people who are placed in a state of subordination either for political reasons or due to the lack of an indigenous written culture. One can find such cultural configurations all across Eurasia.

            While Japan has remained politically independent of China, Japanese culture has, on the other hand, been irrigated by continental civilization throughout its history. However, it responded to this cultural impregnation with an original linguistic strategy, stated from the first historical texts, directly linking the Japanese language to the local deities of the archipelago, the very process of transmission from one language to another thus being invested with a numinous aura.

To illustrate this idea, three episodes are presented here in which supernatural figures miraculously resolve reading problems from Chinese characters into Japanese words, while the texts involved do not even have a religious character; only the process of oral translation into Japanese of a text written in Chinese characters is invested with a numinous aura. Paradoxically, the episodes demonstrate the sacred character of the target language, i.e. Japanese, which is thus brought to the level of the ever prestigious written Chinese.

These examples illustrate the singularity of Japanese hieroglossia while inviting us to rethink Eurasian language relations using an approach that fully takes into account the revelatory ("apocalyptic") nature of linguistic transfer.