" becomes "To profound
melancholia a victim by falling ended merry monarch," and
the sympathetic hearer weeps first and laughs afterward, when
chronologically he should be doing precisely the opposite.

A like inversion of the natural order of things results from the absence
of temporal conjunctions. In Japanese, though nouns can be added,
actions cannot; you can say "hat and coat," but not "dressed and came."
Conjunctions are used only for space, never for time. Objects that
exist together can be joined in speech, but it is not allowable thus
to connect consecutive events. "Having dressed, came" is the Japanese
idiom. To speak otherwise would be to violate the unities. For a
Japanese sentence is a single rounded whole, not a bunch of facts
loosely tied together. It is as much a unit in its composition as
a novel or a drama is with us. Such artistic periods, however, are
anything but convenient. In their nicely contrived involution they
strikingly resemble those curious nests of Chinese boxes, where
entire shells lie closely packed one within another,--a very marvel
of ingenious and perfectly unnecessary construction. One must be
antipodally comprehensive to entertain the idea; as it is, the idea
entertains us.

On the same general plan, the nouns precede the verbs in the sentence,
and are in every way the more important parts of speech. The consequence
is that in ordinary conversation the verbs come so late in the day that
they not infrequently get left out altogether. For the Japanese are much
given to docking their phrases, a custom the Germans might do well to
adopt. Now, nouns denote facts, while verbs express action, and action,
as considered in human speech, is mostly of human origin. In this
precedence accorded the impersonal element in language over the
personal, we observe again the comparative importance assigned the two.
In Japanese estimation, the first place belongs to nature, the second
only to man.

As if to mark beyond a doubt the insignificance of the part man plays
in their thought, sentences are usually subjectless. Although it is a
common practice to begin a phrase with the central word of the idea,
isolated from what follows by the emphasizing particle "wa" (which
means "as to," the French "quant a"), the word thus singled out for
distinction is far more likely to be the object of the sentence than
its subject. The habit is analogous to the use of our phrase "speaking
of,"--that is, simply an e