flemmings | (no subject)

Oh come on, you great sodding lump. Just finish the damned translation. Seventeen more pages of dialogue you could do in your sleep. Do it. Do it. Do it.

And the Inner Three-Year-Old says No no no. I translate a page of sexual onomatopeia: gupo bikun nuro nuru pikun! zokuzoku zuryu!! and verbal f/x: haa haa n- aa! and then feel it necessary to spend an hour trying to find out if the phrase I remember as meaning 'the spring rain before the rainy season starts' really is written small barley rain. The answer, no thanks to any paper dictionary in my possession including the J-J, is no, it's written barley rain and pronounced bakuu, which almost sounds like sexual onomatopeia.

I go back and do a page of sexual dialogue: Put it in more. My body is becoming strange. The again me only coming is iya. I am so happy to feel Hitoshi's= your heat: and then must spend an hour at a cafe drinking ice coffee and trying to remember what base 4 of a Japanese verb is, since the grammar dictionary mentions them airily without defining them. Do glean the info that right up through early Shouwa people wrote verbs in ari keri nari forms, not desu-masu. Also that imasu was originally the elevating form of a classical verb. Look, this stuff /matters/ to me. Also, know why some long-o sound words that use the kun/ Japanese reading of the kanji are spelled oo (honoo, tooi, tooka) and some ou (otouto, imouto, houmuru)? You use a second o when that syllable was originally ho: honoho, tohoi, tohoka; and a u when it was just a sustained o. How do you know when the classical word used a ho sound? Ahh. Good question. I suppose you develop an instinct for it, just as yobu-yonda kaku-kaita becomes instinctive.

OK. Back to it. Another page. Then I'll go look at Chinese family words.

(Minamoto no Yorimasa in the icon is the one who shot the nue, a nasty thing that shrieks at night. As he was being rewarded a cuckoo called, and the presiding minister made an impromptu poem about it with Yorimasa providing the last couplet.)

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Ganbatte!

Ganbatta. Now to get this baby illo'd and html'd and so to bed.

nuru nuru? Heh!

I'd before only heard that used by a Japanese person to describe the texture of okra or natto (nuru-nuru suru), which produces some odd visuals indeed upon discovering it's also used in the way you mention.

Nuro nuru. Sound of sucking on/ licking someone's neck. Anh- I can see it: stringy sticky stuff, natto is.

Ok, this post was just way over my head.

I WANT to understand! I WISH I could understand! I am INSANELY jelous that you have such knowledge of the Japanese language, while I congratulate myself for knowing what 'baka' and 'gaijin' mean. XD

Understanding sexual onomatopeia requires only knowing hiragana and a supply of BTN yaoi djs. Mh- maybe ability to read handwritten hiragana doesn't hurt, but the djka usually don't *try* to write their sexual sounds illegibly, unlike say their free talks or personal letters. Then you look at the activity and associate sound with action. Essence of simplicity. Gupo IIRC is the sound of finger going into an anus.

The rest of the stuff up there is classical Japanese, and if you don't read Beowulf or Chaucer in the original old and middle English, no need to worry about not reading Genji or Heike Monogatari in the original Japanese either. I just like this stuff because I'm a pedant; and because occasionally the Onmyouji novelist will include a passage from his historical sources in (simplified, I strongly suspect) classical Japanese, and I'd like to know what he's saying.

I just like this stuff because I'm a pedant; and
And here I thought you liked that stuff because it's fun! LOL! I love that stuff too, is why I want to go back to school someday.

I think it's fun because I'm a pedant, basically. Normal people don't go all warm and tingly over archaic verb forms.

Oh, I like your new icon. Where is it from?

Yoshitoshi's (http://www.livejournal.com/users/flemmings/32270.html#cutid1) Hundred Views of the Moon. Full view here (http://home.eol.ca/~basara/eberbach/mn_nuer.jpg). I can't find the whole story online but my recollection of the part in Heike isn't of the nightingale calling, but of some happy 'let's you and him fight' court minister, Fujiwara no Whatever, saying when the Emperor was troubled by the nue's shriek, Oh get Minamoto no Yorimasa to shoot it. Yorimasa stayed out that night with two arrows to his bow and shot the nue with one. When asked what the other was for, he said To shoot Fujiwara no Whatever with in case I missed.