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Polynesian grammar like Chinese grammar requires the verb to come before the word it governs. Not so the Japanese. The verb is rigidly attached to the end of the sentence and marks the conclusion instead of the recommencement of action.
The place of the verb in Japanese is highly unnatural and seems very much opposed to simplicity and good sense. But it is far from being uncommon in languages. The native of Tartary, be he Turk, Mongol or Manchu always pays rigid obedience to the same law. He must by the necessity of his syntax say “The Lama prayers recites,” “the shepherd the flock leads,” “the boy a horse rides.” He cannot alter the position of the nominative or objective noun or of the transitive verb. So it is also in Japanese. For the human mind to resign itself to the control of so inconvenient a law is a decisive proof of intellectual inferiority. It does not belong to the speech of nations with creative genius. There can be no just or well-founded hesitation in calling the Japanese a sister language to the Turkish, Mongol and Manchu when it is remembered that this and similar laws reign in the domain of its syntax.
There is often visible a congruity between the history of nations and the languages they speak. Poets, historians and philosophers have all of them owed not a little to the languages they used. Greatness in literature is impossible to those who have not been born to the use of an elevated language. Hence all the Japanese have attained they owe to the assiduous cultivation of borrowed literature. Unfortunately when they adopted the Chinese writing and books they made no improvement in the native syntax, and after 1600 years the laws of the collocation of words are as objectionable as they were in the infancy of the language. There has been none of that boldness in innovation which might have modified the grammar, shortened the words in the native vocabulary, struck out much of the painfully extensive honorific element, and revolutionized the syntax.
We had in the Anglo Saxon a very good basis for our living English tongue. But before A.D. 1,300 it was
