"Steak the First"

If there’s something like a Murphy’s Law for syntax, the name of this restaurant near my school is a pretty good example of it. Reading “Steak The First,” it always makes me wonder how these three words came to be aligned in just that order. “The first steak,” “first the steak,” “the steak first” — all of these seem safe for consumption. But “steak the first”?

In order to understand what’s going on here, we need to appreciate the very specific way the little word “the” is used in Japanese, where it is normally pronounced ザ (za). Note that the reading may change to ジ (ji) when the following word starts with a vowel, as in the name of the invincible Japanese rock band The Alfee, which officially reads ジ・アルフィー (ji arufī).

But since Japanese is a language that normally gets along perfectly well without articles, it’s a bit challenging to understand what use it can make of ザ in the first place. Even more puzzling is that, more often than not, ザ shows up in places where English syntax wouldn’t want you to put an article at all.

Take the police campaign slogan ストップ・ザ・交通事故 (sutoppu za kōtsū jiko), which best translates as “Stop traffic accidents,” rather than “Stop ‘the’ traffic accidents.” So what exactly is ザ doing here?

ザ specialist Ayako Kajiwara, a linguist at Nagoya University, has collected a larger number of ザ expressions to flesh out the underlying rules of usage. One of the chief functions she identifies for ザ is to spotlight some sort of prototypicality in the word it is paired up with.

Take the phrase ザ・月曜日 (za getsuyōbi, “the” Monday). When someone says this to you, they do not simply want to inform you about the day of the week. What this means is it’s one of those miserable, most Monday-like Monday mornings that really have it in for you. Think sick kids, torrential rainfalls, train delays, etc.

Another example, from my own collection of ザ cases: A Japanese friend who had just changed jobs complained to me that the new work environment was really ザ・会社 (za kaisha, “the” company). Which was to say it was full of red tape, opaque procedures, cemented hierarchies and everything else one commonly associates with the unpleasant aspects of corporate life.

The stereotyping capacities of ザ also come to the fore when pigeonholing people. ザ・お嬢様 (Za o-jōsama, “The” Miss Princess), for instance, can be used to characterize someone who’s perceived as excessively posh, and ザ・サラリーマン (za sararīman, “the” salaryman) is for people who are, well, extraordinarily ordinarily salaryman-like.

But ザ also does a great job in extracting positive stereotypes. Two examples from Kajiwara’s data are ザ・トマト (za tomato, “the” tomato) and ザ・和食 (za washoku, “the” Japanese cuisine). The first one designates a particularly “tomatoic” specimen of the fruit, in terms of color, taste, juiciness, what have you, while the second evokes a textbook example of a classic Japanese meal. The washoku that out-washokus all others.

ザ’s power to highlight positive attributes may also be a factor in its frequent occurrence in commercial contexts, where we find (mostly romanized) phrases like “The Bargain” or “The Price Down.” And ザ also goes with adjectives, as in “The Strong,” which is a sparkling water brand, or “The Main,” referring to the central part of a well-known hotel complex in inner-city Tokyo. Seen in this light, our “Steak The First” from the opening now starts to make some sense, too.

Strange as it may seem, these ways of using ザ are not wholly a “made in Japan” thing. If we think of phrases like “play ‘the’ harp” (which one?) or “feed ‘the’ pigeons” (all of them?), we can see that the definite article in English often does remotely similar things. The resemblances become even stronger when we add denominations for people, such as “the” Celts or “the” Kardashians, and utterances like “How’s the wife?” or, quoting a former U.S. president, “It’s usually fun being The Donald.”

This goes to show that in English, too, the article can be manipulated to some extent. After all, the Beatles are technically just “Beatles” but who in their right mind would ever refer to them without a “the” in front. And what the Beatles can do, The Alfee can, too.

What “the” Japanese did, then, when importing the article, was not inventing something entirely new, but stripping it down to one or two of a greater number of tasks that the word normally does in English. We know this process of semantic narrowing, as it is called, from tons of imports of lexical items, such as ライス (raisu, rice), which refers only to cooked rice on flat plates, and ミルク (miruku, milk), normally meaning condensed milk only.

The difference, and what perhaps makes this all a bit more difficult to swallow, is that in the case of ザ, we are witnessing the semantic narrowing of an expression originally from the domain of grammar, and thus somewhat closer to the heart. But there’s nothing the Japanese language can’t swallow when eating its way through the English language. Not even the “the.”