I always thought there is no nationalism in language. Any saying like “our language is the best” can only be a low-level “masturbation”, a perfect example of short visions. Therefore, I felt really disguised when reading a book titled “Japanese is the world’s most beautiful language”. There are so many languages in the world. It’s impossible to compare their semantics word by word. Who can pick the “most beautiful” one?  

JapaneseI also often heard of people saying Chinese is the best language. That’s equally wrong.

Let’s make an imagination, where a Chinese lady who doesn’t understand English at all is going down in an elevator. A English man enters the same lift from a lower level. It is normal for him to point down with a finger and say, “going down?”

I am sure the lady would be offended and raise hell about what she just heard. The pronunciation of “going down” in English match that for “quite lewd” in Chinese exactly. The point I try to make here is, there is no such thing called “best” in language, since two languages can produce a same sound but a spontaneous conversion of meanings between them doesn’t even exist.

A discount flight ticket agent in England, Skyscanner, recently listed the most indecent Airport names in the world, among which “Fukui Airport” was ranked number one. Reason? Fukui sounds too close to “fuck it”. Panasonic has another official name, spelled  “Matsushita” but sounding like “Ma-Tsu-Shit-a”. It’s somehow dumbfounding to see word “shit” appears in the name of a world class company.

There are many other embarrassing words in Japanese. If you ask a guy from Kiryu, Japan a simple question, “where are you from?” Most likely, he will say “kill you”.

How about the code for Fukuoka International Airport in Japan?

FUK.