Josh McNeill

Tag: japanese

Japanonomatopoeia.

August 14, 2013 / / 0 Comments

Sometimes I wonder if the Japanese language is has so much onomatopoeia because the phonological structure leads to it or whether their interest in onomatopoeia lead to phonological structures reminiscent of it. Here’s one of the most difficult words to say that I know in Japanese:

暖かくなかった (Kanji)
あたたかくなかった (Hiragana)
atatakakunakatta (Rōmaji)
/atatakɯnakatta/ (IPA)

This is an adjective meaning it wasn’t warm outside. Because of the length and the very regular CV syllable pattern, this is a tongue twister for me and sounds like onomatopoeia for attacking. Of course, my (incorrect) interpretation is clearly influenced by the English word attack having a similar phonological structure (/ətæk/), but this repetition fits words that are accepted as Japanese onomatopoeia as well:

じろじろ見る (Kanji)
じろじろみる (Hiragana)
jirojiromiru (Rōmaji)
/dʑiɾodʑiɾomiɾɯ/ (IPA)

This means to stare (or, more literally, to look staringly). Although I’m sure this word goes back further than the invention of lasers, that’s what I think of when I hear the initial sound: lasers coming out of someone’s eyes.

Regardless of whether the chicken or the egg won this battle, I’m glad the battle happened as it gives me something to write (and chuckle) about.

When you QQ, I confuse morphograms with pictograms.

July 15, 2013 / / 0 Comments

I am a nerd. As such, I have an huge inventory of acronyms which are basically useless in the real world. Still, the following threw me off today (as I was wasting time I don’t have indulging said nerdiness):

One female human thief in LLK of TC in EB of WvW, from Guild [PinK] of SOS servers.

https://forum-en.guildwars2.com/forum/wuv/wuv/A-Thief-in-TC-LLK-in-WvW

In normal person speak, this says: “Someone was in the Tarnished Coast game server’s Lowland Keep in the Eternal Battlegrounds Player versus Player game zone. They were in a guild named Pink that plays on the Sea of Sorrows game server.”

In fact, that’s not really normal person speak as I’m sure almost nobody who doesn’t play the game understands the translation. It would have to be parsed even further to make sense to people who don’t play video games, let alone Guild Wars 2. Maybe it would be something like this: “Someone playing an online video game against other players was in an enemy player’s base in an area where players fight eachother. They were a member of a group of players that often play together and call their group Pink.”

Of course, this loses all specificity (and makes awkwardly heavy use of the play morpheme). I’m not sure there’s actually a way to translate the original sentence to someone who has no familiarity with the subject at all without going into enormous amounts of explanation, which probably fits well into Language Log’s concept of nerdview.

But what really caught me was the orthography here, not the semantics. The original sentence was difficult to parse on the first reading even for myself. There are six acronyms (PinK, as all guild tags in the game are, is actually an acronym) which all require significant familiarity with the game. MMOs thrive on this sort of thing because so much conversation is typed while performing various other actions. Shorthand becomes essential for efficiency so that your character doesn’t die. Hell, even MMO is sort of for efficiency. It stands for massively multiplayer online… game. It used to be, more commonly, MMORPG (massively multiplayer online role playing game), then it got shortened because even the acronym was too much. Sometimes you’ll still see MMOG (massively multiplayer online game) but I’ve only really come across this being used by people who don’t play these games. This reminds me once again of the debate over Japanese orthography. Kanji are essentially serving the same function as acronyms in MMOs and the difficulty in understanding them for the uninitiated is often outweighed by the benefits they offer for the initiated.

This also reminds me of one of my favorite MMO shorthands: QQ. This isn’t actually an acronym–it’s not even a morphogram like kanji–it’s a pictogram. It’s literally supposed to look like two eyes with tears coming out. It means cry. I was confused by this for the longest time while playing Dark Age of Camelot, where (if you can call a game a place) it was invented because I kept wanting to read it as an acronym. Actually, I guess this wasn’t done for efficiency since there’s literally a one character difference. Maybe it’s for the semantic effect: I don’t believe you can use QQ to show sympathy for someone; it’s always used to mock. Hence one of the advantages, inherent in languages written in multiple ways like Japanese: intonation in writing.

And if you don’t understand what I’m talking about, QQ more newb.

Smudged pencil.

May 18, 2013 / / 0 Comments

image

Sometimes my notebook is metaphorical. I write down a bunch of words that are barely understandable, hoping to build up a meaningful list, but I forget some things and others simply vanish as the adjacent pages rub together, filtering down to a few leftover segments.

I like that 歌 (uta or /ɯtɐ/) stuck around. It means song.

Or maybe I just need to buy better notebooks.

The Japanese writing system is difficult.

December 28, 2012 / / 4 Comments

At least one person, at some point, on Facebook, expressed interest in the research papers I was working on for my classes at Tulane University. Here’s one:

Efficiency Through Inefficiency

One of my classes was The History of Writing. It was all about writing systems and, since I was concurrently learning Japanese, I figured it’d be a great opportunity to create some synergy in my studies and research the Japanese writing system (I initially wanted to do something on the orthography of death metal logos but after a few days of digging I was able to find all of one paragraph that mentioned anything useful on the subject [if anyone can point me to some actual research, I would still like to do this]).

In particular, I’m very interested in the pros and cons of the Japanese writing system and the debate over reforms. I think a lot of this was spurred on by posts on Language Log by Victor Mair, who is an expert on Chinese. He posts about problems with the Chinese writing system fairly often, such as here, here, and here, and they tend to cross-over with Japanese. I sorta got into some arguments in the comments of the last two, the latter with Professor Mair himself who, in my opinion, seems strangely ethnocentric when it comes to this topic.

The paper I wrote ended up focusing on reforms from the Meiji Era (roughly the late 19th century) as reforms in all aspects of society was a big issue during that time. Much of the attempts at reforms then give insight into the debates that still go on today in that area.

And if you’re wondering about the title, because I don’t think I explained it explicitly in the paper, it’s a reference to the difference between the needs of the learner and the user. Japanese writing is monumentally difficult for someone still learning it but extremely efficient and expressive for those who already know it. This plays out a lot in reform debates.

Also, this isn’t meant to be particularly scholarly, as I was just learning myself as I went along, but I think it’s a good overview on the topic.

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