Towards a Semantics of Japanese Existential Sentences

要旨

Modern Japanese has a noun sonzai which means existence in general. Ac-cording to Akira Yanafu 1 who has studied many words which were newly cre-ated just after the Meiji Restoration, this noun first appeared as a translation of French étre in Meiji 4 (1860), and became a part of the standard philosophical vocaburary soon after. It is not hard to guess why such a noun was thought necessary; as Yanafu points out, unlike French, German, or English, Japanese had no noun corresponding to the existential verb, which has the two forms, aru and iru. You can well imagine how frustrating it would be if you had to talk about the concept which you could not refer to by a noun. However, when there is a simple and convenient expression to talk about a concept, that might become an obstacle to see the complexity of the real working of the concept. In particular, the nouns can mislead us about the real nature of the corresponding concepts, as Wittgenstein reminds us. We are up against one of the great sources of philosophical bewil-derment: a substantive makes us look for a thing that corresponds

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