The AI research community has committed a spectacular blunder. For decades, we have measured the "intelligence" of language models using evaluation criteria that systematically penalize half the world's languages. Japanese, Chinese, Korean, and dozens of other topic-prominent languages have been forced onto a Procrustean Bed designed for English—stretched, amputated, and mutilated to fit a framework that was never built for them. This paper exposes this scandal.The received wisdom claims that Japanese is "ambiguous," "high-context," and "illogical." This is not merely wrong—it is the precise inversion of linguistic reality. Japanese explicitly marks grammatical relationships through case particles (ga, wo, ni, de, to) with a precision that Modern English lost during the Middle English period. When we claim Japanese is "implicit," we reveal only that we are measuring it against a language that has degraded in its relational encoding capacity.Drawing on Li Kittler et al., 2011), this paper advances three theses:The Inversion Thesis: It is English, not Japanese, that is the "constrained" language. The loss of Old English case inflection created a language dependent on implicit word-order conventions rather than explicit morphological marking.The Procrustean Bed Argument: Current LLM evaluation treats subject-prominent structure as the only valid grammar, systematically disadvantaging 3+ billion speakers of topic-prominent languages through tokenization, benchmarks, and evaluation tasks designed by and for English speakers.The Ritual Language Hypothesis: The "rigor" of Classical Japanese grammar developed for kotodama-based ritual precision, not logical thinking—a function parallel to Latin in Catholic liturgy, not a measure of cognitive capacity.Those who seek to create superintelligence through language must first understand language itself. No superintelligence will emerge from the careless manipulation of a language whose expressive power has been systematically misunderstood. The Logic Trap—the assumption that English grammatical categories represent universal logical structures—must be escaped before genuine progress in multilingual AI is possible.
Ryuhei ISHIBASHI (Wed,) studied this question.