flemmings | Entries tagged with language

Fandom_wank wanders off into issues of Elizabethan orthography that glads my heart.

1. There's a long list of everyday stuff that I hate doing, for no good reason but that I do, and in spite of the fact that when it's done the pleasure is out of all proportion to the minor expenditure of energy.

a. Pumping the bicycle tires.
b. Cooking stir fry. (All the dreary chopping, like taping and priming before you're allowed to paint.)
c. Washing dishes. Every day. No *end* to it.
d. Flossing my bridge. Flossing my teeth I've at last turned into a reflex, but the bridge requires more psychic energy than I have.
e. Vacuuming. I put this down to the decrepit state of the vacuum machine; something shiny and new, with attachments that come off easily, might remove the wanhope of the exercise.

I shall note that I did the first three last night, go me.
( Moar )

1) My mother and her twin sister, if they were alive, would be 99 today. This seems very odd. I don't feel nearly old enough to have a parent born a century ago. Never mind 'How terribly strange to be seventy.' Boomers find it strange enough to be 60.

My mother died decades ago but my aunt lived a few weeks after her 89th birthday, hale and healthy, until felled by a sudden massive heart attack. So Happy Birthday anyway, Mom and Aunt Helen.
( Read more... )

Hardboiled Wonderland is a marvellous marvellous book. And I'm so grateful I didn't have to read it in Japanese, because I can barely understand it in English.

Still think Kafka is my fave Murakami to date.

(I am old, Father William moment: someone referring to epaulets as 'shoulder pads'.)

Ahh, long weekend, stuck inside waiting for the Water Meter Man to move my water meter. ('Our first available morning appointment is July 30' because it's the Saturday of a long weekend, a fact that didn't occur to me back in mid-June.) No matter. I have The Rivers of London and 100 Demons 20, which arrived yesterday a week ahead of expectation: thank you Escargot Canada and not-yet-o-Bon-ified Japan PO.

100 Demons feels strangely like an artifact from another lifetime ie last November when I was, evidently, someone else. Have had a small anxiety lately about whether I can still read Japanese (literally, can I read it; and psychically, will I understand it even if I do?) Yes, it seems, I can, though I'm getting resigned to the 'use it or lose it'-ness of Japanese, and the need for constant visual reinforcement to stop kanji and vocab that I've known for decades from vanishing from the memory banks. Also that certain sentences in Ima Ichiko will make no sense at all on a first, second or even third reading-- but that's a given of Ima Ichiko's.
( The aging brane )

My happy-making thing of the day, courtesy the FFL. The Fisher King, right? Crops up everywhere. Grail Legend and all its progeny, Lewis' That Hideous Strength, Eliot's Wasteland:

While I was fishing in the dull canal
On a winter evening round behind the gashouse
Musing upon the king my brother's wreck
And on the king my father's death before him.

The wounded king, keeper of the holy grail, whose obscure hurt, punishment for some obscure transgression, cannot be healed, and who spends his time fishing in the river outside his castle. I always loved that last detail-- strange, resonant, inexplicable. A king who fishes.
( Prepare for disappointment )

Sudden satori, courtesy google. The last line of 'I shot the sheriff' which I'd always heard as 'Every day the buck goes round the world/ Some day the bottom will drop out' turns out to be

Ev'ry day the bucket a-go-a well
One day the bottom a-go drop out.

Less a warning against indifferent buck-passing and more a 14th century (as it turns out) proverb about pitchers going to the well once too often. To be precise: Zuo longe geth thet pot to the wetere: thet hit comth to-broke hom from Joyce's darling, Ayenbite of lnwit (The Prick of Conscience, which opens up its own possibilities).( Cut for Middle English maundering )

After Damn You Auto Correct, we have Google voice mails.

When Google transcribes voicemails, it doesn't always get it right. This is a collection of its attempts to transcribe readings of the Percy Shelley poem 'Ozymandias'.

You know the one- 'I met a traveller from an antique land/ Who said, Two vast and trunkless legs of stone/ Stand in the desert; near them, on the sand' etc etc. Which inspires such lovely things as:

I love traveling from in San Diego and who's that, tool that and from flagstone, and in the desert.
Yes, I'm on the Sand, has found I shacker this inside most out.

Am not a James Joyce fan, have no desire to read Finnegan's Wake, but love things that sound like Joyce wrote them. So I also love the name of the blog- My Name is All Day Monday.

Got Oo-Oku 2 in English from the library. Err, yes, as

summer_queen said, a bad Renn Faire day-- or more likely, SCA. It's not howlingly *wrong*, is the problem. Either the translator or the editor had read some period literature; no 'I wouldst' or 'he hast' cringe-worthies here. But it's a patchwork of archaicisms from different periods. I have a vague feeling it's mostly Shakespearean comedy with some anachronistic admixtures from both Chaucer and umm Congreve, maybe? And where on earth 'pardy' came from I don't want to think. I mean, probably a nice try-- way better than what Madara came up with, for sure-- but, well, it's an exercise probably better not undertaken.

Also went to see Kuroneko, a Japanese ghost story. Which is pretty good, yes, in its Ugetsu-like sensuality. Maybe it's the memory of Ugetsu that made me raise my eyebrows at the ending. No Mizoguchi woman would do something like that. Mothers are sacred in Japanese popular culture-- patient, self-sacrificing, Giving Tree saints. Kuroneko is quite heretical that way.

My father had a theory, based on personal experience, that all clockmakers go mad, or at least intensely strange. My papyrology professor said that all papyrologists go mad, or at least intensely strange, and this may or may not happen before they go blind. In both cases I assume the strangeness (and in papyrologists, the blindness) comes from constant attention to tiny finicky details. After reading this article on the passive, I wonder if the same isn't true of grammarians.

Don't get me wrong. It's a useful article. It's just not phrased in layman's language, the sort that might convince people that 'he is running' is in fact *not* a passive. Maybe I'm just fuzzy today, but when I sat down for a nice exposition on the passive and was at once presented with "English has a contrast between kinds of clause in which one kind has the standard mapping between grammatical subject and semantic role and the other switches those roles around," my mind went on stall. I shall keep it bookmarked in case my brain unstalls at some point, but I'm not sanguine.

Otherwise, a fast romp through FMA 17-21 (In English; it would not have been a fast romp in Japanese) leaves me, yes, jonesing for more. Library has 23&24. Were it not windy and snow squalling outside, and were my knees and shoulder not yelling at me for walking home over the ice floes yesterday (the bitty steps needed to negotiate corrugated ice lead to a lot of twinge twinge stab stab), I'd go buy 22 and get the next two volumes from Spadina. Patience, patience. My love affair with Olivier Armstrong can wait till next week.

Someone cruelly got my hopes up by declaring that the Etruscan god of wine was called Flufluns. Sadly, the rest of the internet seems to think it's Fufluns, which is still pretty cool. "Little godling Fufluns running through the vineyards, picking up the wine jars and bopping them on his head." A further list of Etruscan gods'n'heroes makes fascinating reading. Not Indo-European no, not by a long shot. Achvizr, Achuvesr, Achuvizr, Achviztr, 'or something that sounds like that.'

"Thetlvmth-- Unknown deity of the Piacenza Liver, which is not a picture bilingual." Fantasy writers never give us people with names like Thetlvmth, Culsans, Malavisch, Tuntle, Veiove, or Mlacuch. I wonder why not?

Oh, and did you know that the word catamite is Ganymede run through the Babelfish of Etruscan? Me neither. The Etruscan version is Catmite, which is something else these days, usually involving mineral oil and cotton balls.

Ah, I would give a lot not to have to go out in what's happening outside the windows. I mean, all that's happening is a lot of cold and a toddler who wants to be with her Mom while her Mom has to plan lectures; but the first means I can't take the second out for a walk to distract her from the fact that I WANT MUMMY!!! and MUMMY WON'T PLAY WITH ME!! Is going to be a long afternoon. Could have fobbed the gig off on someone else but native resolution said You cannot ask a Sri Lankan to come out in -20C temperatures and spend ninety minutes getting here on non-existent Sunday transit when it's a mere fifteen minute walk for you. Play the man, Master Ridley.
( Current reading and American usage )

Ganked from

daegaer

In Estonian nouns and pronouns do not have grammatical gender, but nouns and adjectives decline in fourteen cases

(swoons from rapture)

'illative, inessive, elative, allative, adessive, ablative, translative, terminative, essive, abessive, and comitative' ought to be a Tom Lehrer song. It scans if you pronounce the words as if they were Japanese.
( Cut for medieval legal Latin )

Mind, that webpage is misleading. The entry on Japanese grammar is very short and says "The good news is that Japanese has none of the following: gender, declensions or plurals. Nouns never conjugate and almost all verbs are regular." The bad news is that there can be two, three or four different verbs or verb forms for the same activity, depending on who you're talking to, and you have to grow up there to know which one to use.

ETA Which then segues into Complaints Choirs on Youtube.
( Cut for a litany of complaints )

I'm a fan of off English, whether intended (John Lennon) or not (the Hong Kong subtitle factory.) Or this spam, as reported by John Crowley.

Don't know Russian so can't guess if that's the original language, but I thought I detected some French idiotismes in there.

Day 07 - Which Japanese words do you use in English? (hanami, shinkansen, etc.)

Futon, tofu, sushi, kotatsu, samurai...
( Yeah, well )

Have been spending my time virtuously disentangling Japanese words for promontory 岬, cape 崎, mountain pass 峠, gorge 峡, the various kinds of valley (谷　峪渓) and other topographic features of that rather mountainous buncha islands. In a classic case of Flow, following some googling as to the difference between the words Holland and Netherlands, I come across a web page that does the same for forest, grove, holt, hanger, and hill, how and hurst, and other topographical features of the rather wooded and hilly English landscape. ('Ware popup at bottom.)

Must go back to disentangling the varying Japanese words for ditches and caves- 溝, 堀,洞, 窟-- and that annoying one that I can't recall-- means a dip in a surface, is always used in BL to refer to the dip at the base of the throat (I think: unless it's the declivity above the collarbones) and isn't read the way I thought it was.

Ohh! The cut sublime! The cut infernal!

The cut sublime, is to admire the top of King’s College Chapel, or the beauty of the passing clouds, till (the obnoxious person you wish to avoid) is out of sight. The cut infernal, is to analyze the arrangement of your shoe-strings, for the same purpose.

It doesn't work if the OP doesn't recognize it, of course; and who recognizes the cut direct these days? They come up and talk to you anyway.

(PS- I too was sorry that 'fan language' wasm't the other kind of fan.)

Today I learn a new word- epicaricacy. Close to a neologism, brother to the better-known schadenfreude. The trilogy is completed by that familiar feeling, nemesetikos, defined as "disposed to indignation at anyone's undeserved good or ill fortune." Indignation (or even better, umbrage) may well be the default fannish emotion. (Personally I think Nemesetikos sounds like an Egyptian god as filtered through Herodotus, but don't mind me.)

Anent this post and its interesting side convo about applying fannish reflexes to historical fiction.

(The other trouble with DW is that you can't apply style=mine if you don't have an account.)

That 'Japanese the Japanese Don't Know' manga has a Finnish student introducing himself. 'The Japanese think a lot of Finnish names sound weird' he says good naturedly. I thought the mangaka was being funny, but no- googling reveals that Minna and Henna are common female names, and Aho and Pantsu are actual surnames, alas. Dunno about Minna Aho, but Henna Pantsu is a real person.

Othrwise, just made the best veg soup ever, for certain definitions of ever.
( Quite serendipitiously )

My 'Japanese that the Japanese don't know 2' arrived yesterday. Informs me that there's a French word, tatamiser, defined by wictionary as 'S’imprégner de culture japonaise.'
( Thoughts on acculturation )

I'm not thinking of trying JLPT ikkyuu this year, of course I'm not. Thrice bitten, forever shy, and it's even harder now than it was ten years back. So if

homasse links to rage-inducing ANN news on youtube, I won't go watch it. No, I'll watch their international news instead, just to see how very bad my ear has become.

As witness that piece about Clinton (and how I wish she'd kept her name when she married because now I'm never sure which Clinton they mean) criticizing China over its 'turning around and around' (guruguru) problem(s). What kind of problem(s) might that be, one wonders. Oft-recurring? Chronic? Mh, no.

Google.

(At times like this I console myself with Simone de Beauvoir first encountering people enthusing over The Big Windmill (Le Grand Moulin) by an unknown writer, called Alain-Fournier.)

Dear god, zoological taxonomers, what were you smoking? Histrionicus histrionicus is not a fandom drama-llama, it's a duck. Troglodytes troglodytes? Not a bunch of chthonic cave dwellers: yer common or garden variety wren. Puffinus puffinus is a manx shearwater, while ordinary puffins, charmingly, are of the genus fratercula, little brothers, "a reference to the black and white plumage, which resembles monastic robes."

Week passes unremarked while I battle with mice (or possibly mouse) and read a chapter of Mushishi 5 a day. Could draw parallels between mushi and mice, but won't.

Then went and looked up qwerty's Mushishi fic, and was puzzled. Who are these people? Who's Tanyu? Track her back to vol 2 (read in translation, so I'm intensely bothered by not knowing is it Tan'yu or Ta'nyu.) I've heard of this Adashino but have I ever met him? Mh yes, back in 4, not named, in an unmarked scene shift inserted between unmarked flashbacks. Ginko doesn't remark him specially so neither did I. The paleness of the human relations may owe to English reading: the emotional distance of the narration is trebled by the oddness of the English translation. (Note that the translator and editor were the same guy, which I only approve of when the translator is a good writer; and it still didn't stop the lettering guys from breaking up the Japanese names wrong.)
( Long view to the white clouds' rim )

The Song of the Four Locusts!

Have you said in your heart
'My companion is lost forever?'
Yesterday I saw her!
Her heart is still (directed) towards you.
And she commanded me to declare:

She loves you.
Is this not a good thing?
Surely, she loves you.
Therefore you should rejoice!

Third prize winner. Me, I'd rejoice more if they'd just coded the Hebrew (I assume it's Hebrew) and not used a .gif. Granted, the cuneiform ones *need* .gifs...

Beware of the dog signs in many languages. The Japanese sounds off to me, and I'm not sure the Swedish is on the level ("Varning för hunden") given what they did with Australian.

That said, jeez is Faroese Old Englishish or what? Swefan æfter symble and Ansið eftir hundinum.

mvrdrk, your book came! To my experienced eye, it was delayed at the border by customs ie the wrapping paper was slit open. You'd be amazed how many drugs are shipped through under the guise of Christmas presents that look like weighty tomes. (/sarcasm)

Have just spent a pleasant hour working through I won't tell you how few pages of The Book of Poetry section, alternately reading his analysis and looking up unknown hanzi in that dictionary you gave me so long ago. No, I don't know why I do that when there's a webpage that does it for me. Orneriness. Eventually I'll stop and just read the text, though I'm beginning to see what you mean about needing a dictionary even for that. Chiasmatic, anadiplosis, metonymy... dear god. I mean yes, he explains the terms mostly, but still. Fortunately there's another webpage that will do it for you.

Even so, the Shi Jing has its headscratchy moments. The second line of

隰桑有阿
其葉有難

to me reads only as 'its leaves are difficult.' Where people get 'flourishing' or 'lovely' from that is a mystery, though of course I could supply examples of pejorative drift in English that are much more recent than the Odes' Chinese. The Old English selig, meaning holy, that gives us modern-day silly, or (not so far a jump) dysig, foolish, that became dizzy.

I foresee hours of endless fun with this one. Thank you very much!

Just realized that my way of expressing Hakkai and Tenpou's desu-masu Japanese is to make their English Latinate. UnLatinate the English and they no longer sound like themselves to my ear. Goujun however speaks da-tai (checks: yes, even to Konzen), and I always Latinate *him*. Must unLatinate Goujun forthwith, since 'forthwith' is a word he'd never use.

Err- look, did you just say that Watson is a pink drum? And like the cat, I'm sure you *meant* to say that, but yanno-- as with irony, if anyone has said it seriously in the last 50 years, it's not wit/ irony any more. In this generation of per say and ad nauseum, one must watch one's word play.

There is no hope for me. I'm happy, not because there's Avengers fic, but because there's a writer called Caroline Miniscule.

(Mh. Must donate to wikipedia.)

And 31_days is taking its January themes from the essays of John Locke. Geekly academic, how I love it.

( Cut to save FLs )

Ah hah! Have finally learned to parse inorite as 'i no, rite?' and not 'in or'ite', which I always took to be some British dialect for 'you are absolutely correct.'

Back to considering how much I can have Goujun steal from the end of Hamlet and the dedication to the First Folio without being in your face about it.

It is, as someone else said, 'Talk like a Jewish Pirate Day.' Err... lessee. 'Aaarhh me hearties, L'Shanah Tovah t'ye all! Aarrh, and a happy birthday to

nojojojo as well!'

Yes, well, moving right along here.

My FFL is a source of inspiration. There's an Eid fic community for fanfic about Muslim characters. In my current light-headed state (involuntary fasting puts you in a strange place, truly) I think, maybe I could write a drabble about Zhang He, maybe?
( Equally... )

--and how I am about words. Hence my pleasure at this, since I work among the iqualuit.

The rest of the PM's visit is not so funny.

Thanks to

jonquil on the FFL (whose entry you might want to look at if you don't have access to the NYT, and for background) we have a list of abbreviations from The Anglo-American Telegraphic Code of 1891. Commonly used telegraph phrases reduced to IIRC and IANAL, only not acronymic.
( Cut for length )
Let us at the very least adopt Slank-- sick of the entire matter
( Did I ever tell you about Cardinal Bandini? )

...is happy to read this, even though I hope he means kouhai.

--sleeping with elephants aside, which is not what you think--

but I Am A Suck For A Pun Especially When It's Unintentional, and hence we have Emocrats and Prepublicans.

Myself I wish there were more publicans around. Bartenders don't quite make it.

There's a package in the mailbox when I get home. Ahh, the latest WARD, hotfoot from NY! Ohh, last of the dragon kings! Now to see what Goujun was actually saying--- Only I won't. Because it's not WARD, it's my manga from Japan, sent SAL. Go Jpn PO, and Canuck land surface whatevers too. Six days door to door. Boo US postal service: can't get a parcel to TO from NY in five days.
( Read more... )

Let us snark at German.

Of course IE won't display the original page and one has to look at it in Firefox, but oh well.

(Can you? It's as bad as Nietzsche AFAIC.)

OK, so we all know about furniture porn, yes? Especially the lawn chairs. The lawn chairs fill me with gladness.
( I admit I'm a little odd )

To have it handy-- the Dynasty Warriors cheat sheet aka Who's Who in 3K with off-putting pictures and spoilers galore. No, they're not (all) fat men with beards and yes, once you've plowed through the requisite chapters it's nice to have a summary that will remind you who these guys are, even if it also tells you how they died. Some of these guys, anyway. There are an awful lot of guys in 3K and they mostly spend their time killing each other. Man, if this yawnfest is the Romance, I'd hate to read the History. And this, boise girls, is why I avoid sengoku jidai as well.

PS Possibly I've been biased by

mauvecloud or possibly it's just anvil-heavy obvious that Cao Cao is being shafted by the narrator.

ETA: hanzi for the Cast of Thousands.
( Additionally )

I've mentioned the disconnect I feel when I see a Japanese name I knew before I read Japanese and suddenly realize that oh hey Toshiro Mifune's family name is written 三船 three ships, and Akira Kurosawa's sawa, presumed swamp, is the older version 澤 and not the simplified 沢.**

Because I speak Japanese I still think of them as Mifune and Kurosawa ie I don't read the names in English. But I don't speak Chinese, and so am kerblonxed at coming across a Mr. Furry Swamp East in a Japanese text, with enough detail added that I can recognize him as the quondem Red red sun in our hearts. Mao Tse-tung as I grew up knowing him, Mao Zedong as I've come to think of him, Mousie Dung to reference Richard Kliban, or plain old 毛澤東. It's a shock that his family name is the first character in the Japanese word for blanket (毛布).

**And why wouldn't IME work when I tried to enter that character into this entry? The stupid tool (in all senses of the word) gets it into its head that I'm writing English and all the language toolbar clicking won't unconvince it. I have to go to another screen, or the google bar in this case, enter something in Japanese, and *then* I'm allowed to switch back and forth in the entry. Gaaah.

Not a visual person, me. Print is good. Print is my friend. Even in manga I concentrate on the bubbles and often fail to look at the pictures more than cursorily. This is fatal with someone like Ima Ichiko, where the text content is useless until later and the clues are in the graphics, but I can't break the habit. And possibly one reason I don't watch things in English-- aside from the fact that any foreign language per se has a guaranteed fascination and satisfaction of its own-- is that subtitles give me a textual anchor in the film or program, something to *read.*

But it goes beyond that. I approach all films with a dull pervasive anxiety, expecting either horrors (if English) or embarrassment (if anything else) or both.
( And am rarely disappointed )

rasetsunyo associates me with

1. Aestheticism
2. Papuwa/Eroica crossover
3. Classical Studies
4. Classical Chinese poetry
5. Japan

and I natter. ( Natter natter )

For there was never philosopher could resist the power of the KEWT.

Apostrophe Cat for the win!

ETA: metaquotes tells me Everything I wanted to know:

In French and several other languages (including, occasionally, English), the same symbol (= umlaut) is used to mark diæresis: showing that there is a syllable break before the marked vowel and that it does not join with the preceding vowel as a digraph.

And me being me I'm delighted to my toes to discover that someone has the user name

anaisninja.

( Let me count the ways )

I get my Chinese piecemeal, where I find it. Oddly, that seems to work better for me than sitting down with a textbook and vocab lists, or even hanzi books. Give me a word with a context and it is mine for life, or at least the next five minutes. (This is why I *still* have to review my Toyo kanji in Japanese, twenty years after I first started learning them.)

So as I work my way through 千秋一夢 I am so pleased to come across a whole phrase I know: 不可一世, which of course I see all the time on

mauvecloud's icon.
( On reading unknown languages )

Suckitude, suckitude, and all is suckitude, except for a lovely comment on this entry about differing social customs:

A bit like when I used to wander around looking for stuff and murmuring, "Wo? Wo? Wo ist der neugeborne König der Juden?"

Doesn't have the same ring in English, but made me laugh.
( Woxin natter )

Ah. Hm. An interesting point. Here it is (almost) the year of the ox (go me) and I'm not sure what an ox is. Wikipedia says it's a castrated bull. (Wikipedia also tells me what a freemartin is, which is something I'd never heard of. It also says that an aurochs is an extinct kind of cattle, when I'd always assumed it was some sort of deer. Live and learn.)
( Cut for 'satiable curiosity )

veleda_k's comment in an otf_w entry about words:

I consider myself fairly well-read

Ok. I consider myself a purple walrus. ~~goo goo g'joob~~

Tripping over that at 6 in the morning is, ya know, unexpected. But coming after this entry at metaquotes, I begin to have hope for the human race. Even if there's some confusion between baklava and balaclava there that I can't parse.

The correct term for people who append lol to the end of every sentence is 'hyena.'

ETA Oh, return of Itty bitty kitty productions! Also check out 'No one will be spared. Not even the children.' Which shouldn't make me laugh but does.

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