Want to see what a Japanese textbook looked like in the late 1800s?
Take a gander at Yokohama Dialect, a pamphlet published in 1879 and find examples like these:
Have you any tea? Oh char arimas?
Difficult Moods cashey.
The author's use of the roman alphabet to represent Japanese is non-standard and amusing but if you say, for example, "moods cashey" and run the words together it isn't a bad approximation of むつかしい／mutsukashii. My favourite has to be this gem:
It is twenty dollars. Knee jew dora
Look a bit further and the translations get stranger. The verb "to hasten" is given as "jiggy jig". And the sentence "Unfortunately they were purchased by a party of tourists from San Francisco" becomes simple "Arimasen".
Have you caught on yet?
The book is a joke, a parody. Just look to the "Notices by the native press to the second edition":
"Since Hepburn's Dictionary in which the continuity of the narrative is dislocated by Chinese characters - we have seen nothing so well calculated to show foreigners how little Japanese we speak to them" - Shisshin Kibun
Even the name of the reference is dodgy - Shisshin Kibun not only is a play on "something-or-other Shinbun (newspaper)" but kibun （気分） means feeling, and shisshin can be translated as either 失神 (a dead faint) or 湿疹 (eczema).
The book takes pot shots at ignorant ex-pats and I wouldn't be surprised if it was used in all seriousness by a few dupes, much to the delight of the linguists who published it. And I can't claim credit for recognising the joke behind the pamphlet - though I thought it somewhat unusual and mocking it was the brains trust on the Honyaku list who confirmed the pamplet's true nature.
Now go and read the rest of Yokohama Dialect and have yourself a good chuckle.
(You can also download zip files of the scans via this page.)
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