Words Without Borders: New Writing from Japan

Haven't posted in a while so here's something I'm currently checking out at Words Without Borders:

"This month and next we're showcasing writing from Japan. In the wake of the events of March 11, 2011, the boundaries between real and unreal, solid and fluid, seem to have shifted; guest editor Michael Emmerich has selected pieces that resonate with the country's new mood. The pieces in this first part have the texture of a dream, unstable, fleeting, fantastic. In tales of shape-shifting, Jin Keita finds new life in a different form, and Kawakami Hiromi pursues a girl who turns into a pearl. Kurahashi Yumiko takes flower arranging to a new level. Akutagawa Prize winner EnJoe Toh spins a yarn about an oddly familiar galaxy. Nakai Hideo follows an illusionist and finds himself part of the act.  Medoruma Shun receives voice mail from the beyond. Poet Yotsumoto Yasuhiro plays with rhyme and rhythm. And Furukawa Hideo's young office worker stumbles upon a new world only steps away. The issue is produced in partnership with the British Centre for Literary Translation. We thank the BCLT, and David Karashima and the Nippon Foundation, for their generous support. Elsewhere, we present three views of the current Greek crisis from Amanda Michalopoulou, Petros Markaris, and Auguste Corteau."

Ryukyuan Languages

I fell into the youtube rabbit hole and stumbled upon some videos uploaded by user wadoku2008 and wadoku2012. In the video below, Byron Fija, a native of Okinawa born to an American father and Okinawan mother, discusses the different languages of the Ryukyu Islands in the Uchinaaguchi language. There are some Japanese words interspersed and the grammar seems very Japanese, but the sound and intonation of it is very different. There are glottal stops in strange places (coming at it from a Japanese language point of view) and sometimes it almost sounds like Korean. I don't know much about the historical roots of languages of the islands of Japan, but this has made me more interested in getting a deeper understanding of it.

Translation Exercise: 「ご主人は、私よ」

「ご主人は、私よ」, from 『女のセリフ１２０』 by 伊藤雅子 ( 未来社, 1995)

"I'm my own master!"

Even among the younger generation, there are still many people who use the word "master" (shujin) to mean "husband." I often hear of people who say they don't call their own husband "master" but end up using the term for other people's husbands (goshujin). 

The female historian Yamazaki Akiko told me that when she is asked "And what about your master? (Goshujin ha?)" she answers, "I am the master of myself." A firm and sound reply.

I recently heard this from a newlywed friend: "When a new friend asks me something like, 'How is your goshujin today?' and I answer, 'I'm my own master!' they say, 'Oh, you're right!'"

This friend has a husband who is still a student. In their household, she is the "breadwinner." The meaning of the word "master" rings all the more true in her mock-rebellious reply when asked this kind of question by someone who knows this background information.

The following words have been heard in the mouths of my single friends.

"You have to be careful when hanging out with a married woman."

That is, it seems that when meeting with someone who does not earn their own money, whether it's for dinner or a short trip, one must take care to note that person's personal limits.*

"Going out with someone who works is fine, but I end up hesitating when it comes to people who use their 'master's' money. It's partly because of the so-called 'housewife money sense'. So what I always do is have them decide ahead of time, and then just go off of that."

I wonder what these married women would think to know that they're being seen this way by their own friends.

*「自分自身の稼ぎを暮らしていない人とつき合うとき、[略]　どれくらいのランクがその人の許容範囲なのか気を遣うのだそうだ。」

"Why Do Girls Talk Like This?"

It seems like whenever you people complain about modern speech patterns or vocabulary, they're complaining about the way girls talk. I'm not sure why that is, although I think I do recall reading an article about how girls are the trendsetters for language. They start (or at least spread) the 'fads' that become normal fixtures of a generation's language (before the trends change again).

Before I go any further, let me Google that.

Here it is - Young Women Often Trendsetters in Vocal Patterns, from the New York Times.

That said, it does sound pretty crazy. Or as my co-worker says, "That's cray cray!"

Going to Iwaki, Fukushima

I've recently found out where I'll be working in Japan: Iwaki city, in the infamous Fukushima Prefecture. Iwaki is around 30 miles from the nuclear plant affected by last year's tsunami.

From the information I can find on Iwaki's site, the radiation levels aren't elevated higher than normal background radiation. But what think you? If you're a current resident of Japan, what are the kinds of things have you been hearing about the area? Would you live there or visit there yourself? If you're outside of Japan, could you see yourself moving to Fukushima prefecture?

I've made up my mind to accept, but I'll be doing more research in the meantime. If you know of any credible sources, send them my way!

ディスる and subs2srs

ディスる
On Sundays I watch the show on the top of the variety feed, whatever it is. If I didn't I'd end up watching the same shows every week. Sometimes it isn't very interesting, since it's all entertainment and the main object is to either shock you or get a laugh out of you. But sometimes you learn some interesting things. For example, I learned the word ディスる while watching スクール革命. It comes from the English "diss", of course. Now I can talk about people dissing other people in Japanese. Although does anyone use "diss" in English that often nowadays?

subs2srs

I came across this on /r/languagelearning.

"subs2srs allows you to create import files for Anki or other Spaced Repetition Systems (SRS) based on your favorite foreign language movies and TV shows to aid in the language learning process.
This utility will parse through subtitle files, extract the dialog and timing information and then use that information to generate audio clips, snapshots and video clips for each line of dialog."

 Although you can do the same kind of thing on LWT, this is less time-intensive. If you have both the English and Japanese subtitles, they can be matched and processed at the same time into one card. Pretty cool!

Japanese Lenition

Ugh, insomnia. I have to wake up at 7, brain! Go to sleep!

But I guess now is the time to look up a bit more of this very interesting lenition stuff I initially saw in a post on reddit: Why do /k/ and /g/ go to /i/ in Japanese? For example, /kak + ta/ (stem write + past) -> kaita. What is the motivation for turning a velar into a vowel? 

According to Wiki lenition is "a kind of sound change that alters consonants, making them "weaker" in some way. The word lenition itself means "softening" or "weakening" (from Latin lenis = weak)." So it's similar to what happens in American English, with all those ɾ's getting up in the t's circumference without regard to lexicography. 


I remember thinking up something kind of like this (and by that I mean not really anything like this at all) when I learned passive conjugations. I didn't think about one kind of verb taking  られる　and the others taking あれる; I just stuck あれる on the end of any "plain" verb and imagined the う in between eroding away. So たべる＋あれる＝たべるあれる⇒たべられる and かく＋あれる＝かくあれる⇒かかれる. Actually now that I write that out it seems a lot more complicated than just remembering る⇒られる、う⇒あれる. 


Anyway, the top comment by limetom is very enlightening, so now I'm looking through the preview of the book they cited ("A History of the Japanese Language" by Bjarke Frellesvig) on Google. Yeah! Making can't-sleep-time into learn-something-time is the greaɾest!

I Don't Know What to Do with Myself - Careers

Well, now that a new Mayan calendar has been discovered and we know that the world won't end in 2012, my brain must turn once again to careers, as it periodically does, this time without the relief that knowing I will die and be spared the usually everlasting hunt for my niche. Because I have no idea what my niche is. I have an ideal of it, I think (does that make sense?) but there is a wide gulf in between that and its realization, and I lack the tools. I must have left them somewhere, or lost them.

Part of it is my way of thinking. I always feel like I'm playing catch-up and I'm way behind the eight-ball. My victories don't seem like much - they seem late and insubstantial, so the distance I have yet to travel seems even wider than it is.

I've often thought about working with languages in the government - like becoming a language specialist, translating and etc. But I really wanted to learn Japanese, which isn't that high on the list of "languages the government wants you to learn." I'm a little late to the party (see what I mean) because I only have two languages, English is my L1, I am not quite fluent (maybe a 2+ to 3) in my L2, and my L2 isn't a high need language. And then what else do I need? I have to have some kind of political knowledge, a large amount of cultural knowledge, and probably familiarity of a technical field of some kind. But which? And how? What kind of opportunities should I seek out? What would be best? How can I ensure that I'm closer to being ready in 4 or 5 years, once I've paid off my foolish student loans and practiced my languages a bit more?  I guess these are the kinds of things that people who haven't found their niche think about a lot.

*insert wilhelm scream*

 Have you ever thought about being a linguist with the FBI? Or are you one? What kind of background do you have? What kind of skills do you think you need? There's a dozen or so articles (mostly older) about FBI linguists here that answer some questions.

Return to Translation Exercise: 「すぐ、女は幸せにされてしまうから」

"Hey, there hasn't been a translation exercise in a long while. She's probably doing them but not posting them."

No... No... I've just... I've just been not doing them at all...

your reaction

I'M SORRY! I'M SORRY! 

ごめんなさい！

 I'll start again! LIKE RIGHT NOW!

 「すぐ、女は幸せにされてしまうから」, from 『女のセリフ１２０』 by 伊藤雅子 ( 未来社, 1995)

"Women are made happy."

I heard these words more than ten years ago at a colloquium I headed. The theme was "My Issues as a Woman." The notes from that discussion were published afterward in the book "The Housewife and The Woman."

25 housewives looking deeply into themselves, delving into their problems. It was a painful, earnest kind of discussion. Truths spilled out like sighs, but among them all this utterance is one of the few that I cannot forget.  The words did not have to be pressed free - they rushed out, and the speaker seemed completely oblivious to the fact that she had said something important. 

One often hears that women are constantly deceived about the things happening right before their eyes; that women are easily pigeon-holed into the mold cast by this common idea of "a Woman's Happiness"; that women are always made happy by someone, instead of making their own lives with their own hands. The sentiment has ample occasion to be said.

During the discussion, I was often struck by the perceptive self-reflections amongst the women's innocent revelations:

"It's so easy since I had a kid. I guess because I don't have time to think about myself anymore."

"I'm alone with my child all day everyday -- I can only speak baby-talk now."

The self-portraits that the women drew with their words that day were not painted in the brightest colors, but I would like to believe that this self-reflection is the starting point for something more. 

Intonation and Foreign Accents

I came across this video on Reddit the other day (it was posted by the user Arrow2Face).

The narrator is Chinese. He is definitely speaking in Chinese-accented non-American English, but I, being an uninformed American, was unsure whether it's British or Australian English. Some commentators on the comment thread believe it's Australian. So I guess you'd call it Chinese-accented Australian English? Chinese-accented Australian-accented English?

Anyway, I honestly don't think his pronunciation is that bad. He says something like /ɑndə/ or /ɑnə/ for 'and', and he definitely has a kind of stereotypical Chinese accent when it comes to vowels, but I can understand the words he uses if I listen closely. No, his pronunciation isn't what makes this announcer so difficult to understand. It's his intonation. As others in the thread say, it's almost like he's reading blindly from a phonetic script. His intonation is all over the place, muddling up my native perception of word boundaries. The intonation is what makes this narration so strange. It doesn't even sound like your catch-all Chinese accent anymore. Some of my favorite comments are

"Some times he nails it. Other times he's just a wee bit off. This guy is like the uncanny valley of voiceovers. "

 and

" its like scandinavian cockney"

 and the following thread, which you can click to see more clearly

What made me so interested in the affect of intonation in this video is that I'm currently working on my Japanese intonation while reading aloud. Let me tell you, pitch accent is difficult work. When in doubt, just stay flat! is my suggestion to you, as suggested to me by Mr. Masamune. How do you pronounce 不潔（ふけつ）ではないです? The accent is on the で, so it's something like fuketsudeha naidesu, not fuketsudeha naidesu, as I pronounced it originally. Although to my ears it sounds like fuketsudeha naidesu, as if the accent is rising to meet the high accent. Or something. Because flat accents aren't really flat? Or... I might have messed it all up again. Damn my native intonation, slipping insidiously into my foreign language just as my hard t's and k's do! For all I know, when I speak in Japanese I'm only a little better than Mr. Knife announcer.

You can use this dictionary to look up the pitch accents of words you don't know or are unsure of. A number next to the entry will tell you which syllable has the high pitch. 0 is flat pitch, and on. (Read the description for this numbering system here in Japanese here, in section 4.) Not all words in the dictionary have pitch information.

HOWEVER -- pitch accent of a word can change based on the pitch accent of surrounding words (so, when you put the words together into a sentence). So the best thing to do is listen and learn. Don't sweat intonation TOO much. Practice it, but don't let it get you speak-shy (that's like pee-shy, except with speaking, I guess). If you care too much about intonation you'll end up saying nothing at all, and what's the point of that?

This site, Shiawase, has some more information and interesting links.  There's also the wikipedia article on Japanese pitch accent.
 

Japanese Subtitles + Learning With Texts = Productive Drama Watching (?)

Hey fellow Japanese drama watchers who are also studying Japanese. Wouldn't you like to watch Japanese dramas and study at the same time? Sure, you can delude yourself into believing that simply enjoying what you can and glazing over what you can't understand is helpful, but we'll get nowhere like that! Then again, pausing every time an unknown word comes on so you can notate and decode it kills the fun of drama-watching. Kills it dead. Like, with a rock... or something. Like, with a stone...

Yeah! Kung Pow reference!

Well, if you get some Japanese subtitles (or better yet, the script) and put it into Learning With Texts, you can simply follow along as you go. With regular subtitles, you have to pause and look up kanji. Boring! With subtitles+LWT, you'll get minimal pausing time! The word is right there, and with a click you can get its definition and save it for later perusal. (Imagine the previous paragraph in an infomercial guy voice.)

Yeah! Learning!

You can get Japanese subs here. You can get Japanese dramas using something like Keyhole TV or whatever floats your boat.

I Go "La la la la la" - the Quotative "Go"

Maybe this is an early indication of my soon-to-be-discovered linguistic genius (yeah right, ha ha ha ha), but as a kid I often puzzled over the use of 'go' as a quotative. Obviously it wasn't considered 'proper'. Sure, they put it in songs and things, but you wouldn't write 'goes' instead of 'says' or 'said' in an essay. But I couldn't think of how to better convey that I was about to say what someone else said without sounding too literary and 'fake'.

Besides, half the time I wasn't saying just what someone was 'saying' -- it felt like it was something more than just 'saying', and just using 'say' to convey whatever that was felt strange. "And he said, Whoooaaaa, duuuude, is that a Charizard?" It just didn't sound right. For some reason 'go' sounded much better, but that wasn't proper, right? Maybe I should just say what they said/how they acted without using either...Well, that seemed weird, too.

I never really came to a conclusion, either because I lacked the mental fortitude or because the many horse figurines that I owned were whinnying for me to play with them (probably the latter, because PONIES). But later, as 'like' came into more use, I began to think about the same kind of things. 'Like' seemed kind of inelegant, but what else really (besides go) was so completely convenient? And it seemed so apt! I mean, if I had never actually said 'God, I'm about to up and die of boredom' aloud, why would I use 'say'? Or even 'go', for that matter?

Then yesterday I started reading David Crystal's blog. I don't know why it never occurred to me that he might have a blog, but I just discovered it the other day while looking up the difference between 'three-story' and 'three stories', or 'three-year-old' and 'three years old'. He has an entry from March on using 'go' as a quotative.

"First, the historical point. This use of go has been around for quite a while. The online OED has a draft addition which reflects its recent increase in frequency, but the earliest recorded instances are over 150 years old. It defines it thus: 'to utter (the noise indicated) with direct speech... now often in the historic present'..."

 Hey! And what's more, just as my younger self intuited, 'go' "offers a dramatic alternative to say. Say is used when the language is more factual; go when the speaker in the narrative is more involved in the action." It's also often used when "direct speech begins with an interjection or similar vocal effect."

" In one study, it was found that 76 percent of uses of quotative go occurred with a following vocal effect, often with accompanying gestures or facial expressions. The function is sometimes described as 'mimetic' - the speaker is trying to recreate exactly the audio-visual character of the discourse being reported."

 Like is even more broad, and can encompass 'unspoken' areas of expression like thoughts or emotions.

So now I won't feel so bad when I use 'go' or 'like' and can't think of how properly express myself otherwise without becoming verbose. Yeah! I do what I want!

"Learning with Texts" (or, another way to study that I will probably slack off on once again)

Looking up and flashcard-izing kanji in your Japanese reading passages just became loads easier, but probably not easy enough for me to spend time doing it. I need that time to stare pointlessly into space and the depths of the internet, damn it!

I jest, I jest. I've just started using this Learning with Texts thing and it looks pretty cool so far. Honestly, all the instructions for setting it up kind of had me grumbling, but despite all the unzipping and file renaming (we learn to do that in middle school anyway, right, my generation?) it actually wasn't that daunting. Here's the set up...

Yes, I'm watching a show called Rooftop Prince. Don't judge me!

And here's what it looks like when you use it to edit sentences:

As you can see I've just added one of those passages from Asymptote. When you see a word you don't know, you can click on it, tell the program where it ends, and get the definition in the next window. I set my dictionaries for Denshi Jisho and Yahoo Jisho. All I have to do is put the info I want into the top right hand box (the translation, etc). You can also set whether you know or are learning the word. All of this information can later be exported into Anki decks (Right? I haven't done it yet myself).

It's like what I strive to do over two days in two clicks!

Sweeeeeeeeeeeeet.

EDIT:

Here's how I set up my Japanese preferences...

And if you're using the EasyPHP method, you might have trouble if you use the link to 127.0.0.1:8887 that's on the site. I had to get to it through the EasyPHP program itself like so:

open it in your notification area (it's the little e down there)...

click on the icon on the left of the window and select 'Local Web' from the drop-down menu...

and voila! Your LWT home page should pop up in your browser!

今は足を洗いました

So I'm watching the show　鍵のかかった部屋 and in the second episode there's one scene where a man reveals that he used to be a burglar.

Super glad I found 字幕 because let me tell you,  the speed and vocab is outside my 聞き取れble zone

The detective (who recently had a prized collection of watches stolen by a burglar) is taken aback, so the guy quickly says, "はい。いや。でも今は足を洗いました。"

I'd never heard the phrase before but due to context and its similarity to an English phrase with similar context, I guessed it meant something like 'I've washed my hands of that'.

But why feet? When you do something you usually do it with your hands, don't you? You 'get your hands dirty', right? I typed 足を洗う由来 into Google and got this little blurb from the go-gen allguide, which I'll translate here:

"From Buddhism. When a monk returned to the temple after walking barefoot as per his ascetic practice, washing the mud from his feet symbolized washing away the worldly desires of the secular world and purifying oneself to enter work as a Buddhist. As such the phrase meant "to quit one's evil deeds". The meaning has shifted in recent times to mean "to quit an occupation", whether that occupation is immoral or not. There is a theory that that phrase refers to Jesus Christ, who washed his disciples' feet and said "Wash one another's feet and trust one another like a brother" 「互いに足を洗うことで、信頼関係を結びなさい」. However meanings vary greatly and the association is not generally accepted."

Of course it's said that the origin of "wash one's hands of X" is also biblical and refers to Pontius Pilate's disassociating himself with the crucifixion of Christ. 


Looking at the two phrases now, they actually seem not as similar as I immediately thought. 足を洗った (in the case of something bad) makes it sound like you've done something wrong, but you no longer do it. "Wash my hand's of" sounds like you've continuously struggled to stop the said wrong, but have since given up and want no part of it. Or something.


I'm gonna get back to watching the show because I'm just confusing myself.

＊＊EDIT＊＊

OK, here's another interesting phrase: お前とは経験値が違う 　（おまえとはけいけん・ちがちがう, where 経験値 = "experience point (in an RPG, etc.); exp"

I want to use this in real life.

Can You Speak a Foreign Language Perfectly if You Have an Accent?

I saw a post titled "perfect, but accented" at John Wells' Phonetic Blog. In it he wonders about the affect of accent on one's perception of what is 'perfect English'. He says: 

"Writing about yesterday’s proceedings at the Leveson inquiry into phone hacking, the Guardian’s reporter Michael White describes the Russian owner of the London Evening Standard and the Independent, Evgeny Lebedev, as ‘speaking perfect, accented English’.

This made me think. Would it be possible to claim that someone spoke perfect, grammatically flawed, English? I don’t think so. Could you describe someone as speaking perfect English with inaccuracies in vocabulary? Again, I don’t think so.

How, then, is it that someone can speak perfect English, but with mistakes in pronunciation?

Why is it that ‘perfection’ tolerates L1 interference in phonetics, but not in grammar or vocabulary?"

The accented English in question (Mr. Lebedev's) can be heard in this video from The Guardian.

First to talk about the broader question: "Why is it that ‘perfection’ tolerates L1 interference in phonetics, but not in grammar or vocabulary?"

I'm not sure what constitutes the idea of 'perfect', but my thought is that it isn't something 'special' about phonetics that allows us to tolerate missteps like foreign accent in our view of perfection but not grammar/vocabulary missteps. I see it as a system of compensation. 

Even a native speaker isn't completely perfect. The other day I was watching a documentary about dyslexia and Erin Brokovich used the word 'disregard' when I'm pretty sure she meant to say 'regard' - technically she said the exact opposite of what she was trying to say, and she's a native speaker. Just the other day I discovered the hiccough is pronounced like hiccup. I am 22 years old and I have always thought that hiccough was pronounced hik-off and that maybe that was how they said hiccup in Britain. I don't think anyone would say that we speak imperfect English, though. 

Maybe it's because our accents are within the realm of 'acceptable native English accents' and because our grammar is pretty spot on. We can afford to misread or misspeak or misunderstand vocabulary once in a while. The overall strength of our phonetic and grammatical aspects or what have you overcome the slip-ups that we make in areas like vocabulary. 

So my theory is that what is judged as 'perfect' or 'native' English is a system of balances between strengths in things like 'lack of L1 interference in L2 phonetics' or 'robust lexicon' or 'comprehensive grammatical knowledge'. You can have a few points taken off one if you can make them up with the other aspects. This extends to things like reading, too. I can read something in Japanese and answer questions well enough despite a less than robust lexicon and a very dire lack of kanji reading ability. This is because my grammar is fairly sound, my ability to recognize the meaning of kanji (don't ask me about 音読み or 訓読み though) and my ability to draw from context is strong. That was actually probably a bad example because I'm definitely nowhere near native reading fluency, but you get the idea.

Returning to the specific accent in question... I'm American so his English is already 'accented' to my ears. On top of that I really only heard the faintest of accents. I would consider his English perfect.

There are some interesting comments by other readers, too, about the perception of certain accents and how that affects your perception of that person's fluency  (a Russian-accented English 'sounds better/more fluent/more intelligent' than a Chinese-accented English, etc).

Kid Is Disgustingly Good at Languages

Ugh, god, why can't I be a "Teenage Polyglot"? (Besides the fact that I'm old and lazy.)

 From the New York Times article last month:

"Timothy Doner, 16, is not one of those people. In the fall of 2009, after studying for his bar mitzvah, he decided he wanted to learn modern Hebrew, so he continued with his tutor, engaging in long dialogues about Israeli politics. Then he felt drawn to learn Arabic, so after eighth grade he attended a summer program for college students at Brigham Young University. It took him four days to learn the alphabet, he said, a week to read fluidly.

Then he dived into Russian, Italian, Persian, Swahili, Indonesian, Hindi, Ojibwe, Pashto, Turkish, Hausa, Kurdish, Yiddish, Dutch, Croatian and German, teaching himself mostly from grammar books and flash card applications on his iPhone. This in addition to a more formal study of French, Latin and Mandarin at the Dalton School, where he is a sophomore."

 Elsewhere he is said to be fluent in 23 languages. I doubt that, but the fact that he's studied so many languages is impressive.

I'm gonna go curl up in a ball and cry about how talentless I am now.

Junbungaku: "April Issue of Asymptote Has a Lot of J-Lit"

So I was reading the Japanese literary news site Junbungaku (which you guys should check out, by the way) and he mentioned that the April issue of the journal Asymptote has some translations of Japanese works. If you're interested in Japanese literature that in itself is cool - yay for free internet journals! But guess what? This is Japanese language study fodder, too. How, you ask? I will let Junbungaku's Will E. tell you:

"What I love about Asymptote is that it also has the original Japanese text online for your reading enjoyment, and sometimes there’s even an audio recording of someone reading the original Japanese text as well."

 

It's for real, guys! 

Check it out! I gotta head to work.

Accents of the Doctor

A bunch of clips from the "Fires of Pompeii" episode of Doctor Who. The Doctor and Donna go to Ancient Rome and due to the translation prowess of the Tardis, everyone seems to speak in English. The funny thing is that when either Donna or the Doctor says something in Latin, it sounds like Welsh or Celtic to the Romans.

When I hear the various English accents in Doctor Who I can recognize that there are differences, but I have no context for them regionally/geographically. So I read the comments of this post from Language Log about the 10th Doctor's northern accent with some interest. Besides the comment that made mention of the Doctor Who episode above, I found this one, which I thought was funny:

 And this one, which made me repeat 'pen' and 'pin' to myself until I couldn't even tell if I was speaking English any longer:

I'd heard about the pen/pin merger and come across it most in my mother's speech (her family is from the Texas/Arkansas border and thereabouts). For myself the merge of /ɪ/ and /ɛ/ before the nasal stops ([m], [n], and [ŋ]) doesn't seem to be an established rule. I call my cousin /bɛn/ and I write with a /pɛn/, but I order from a either /mɪnju/ or /mɛnju/ at /wɪndi:z/. It seems like I switch between them. This may be a result of living in very international environment as a child and a pretty diverse area culture/language/accent wise here in south central Texas, or maybe because my father's side of the family has a kind of 'chicano' accent (yes, my grandma pronounces 'chair' kind of like 'Cher').

I don't remember how my friends up in upstate New York pronounced words like 'pen' or 'Wendy's'. The only example of glaringly differing accents I remember is the Reese's episode I had as a freshman. We were in the drama house watching the local improv group and my roommate said, "It smells like Reese's in here!" She pronounced it /ri:si:z/. In the noisy room I misheard her and thought she said, "it smells like feces in here!" I'm sure my reaction puzzled her. (I pronounce it /ri:sɪz/, by the way, like the commercial.)

Up to 2 Years or a 2 Million Yen Fine for Illegal Downloading

I have to stop looking at the internet a good 30 minutes before I have to leave for work, otherwise things like this happen. Now I'm gonna post a little bit about possible Anti-Downloading bills in Japan and end up leaving ten minutes late.

I saw the headline on Rocket News, who got it from the Chuunichi Newspaper. The Rocket News head line is: 違法ダウンロードに罰則を科す法案が10月1日に施行される可能性浮上！　ネットの声「日本終わるの？」 I just skimmed the article but it seems like illegally downloading something could net you up to 2 years in prison or a 2 million yen fine. It hasn't  been implemented or anything yet but has a high chance of passing in the Japanese Diet? I put a question mark because I'll have to read it better later. 

Time for work now, though.

LOLcats... en español y 日本語！

So the Spanish learning site Zambombazo has some "Miáucoles" or Lolcats for your enjoyment. Despite the very little Spanish that remains in my head, I still managed to find them hilarious.

Miáucoles: Lolcats en español: qrs hcr algo?
"Wanna do smthg?" "No." "Me nthr."

Miáucoles: Lolcats en español: Gatiposa
"Look, I'm a Catterfly'

So I got to wondering if they have LOLcats in Japanese, too. I didn't look that hard - I just typed LOLcatって何？ and LOLcat日本語で into Google and found "LOLCATS IN JAPANESE". The images are in English with a translation below.

美しさは罪

I was interested to see how they would translate the "I iz, I can haz" bits, but the translation is pretty straight-forward. In one of the Spanish examples above they use a distorted/abbreviated version of Spanish ("Todos los miáucoles publicamos un lolcat con un texto escrito intencionalmente con una ortografía y sintaxis fuera del español estándar, con verbos extrañamente conjugados y también con abreviaturas SMS en español”), but I don't think any of the Japanese translations are purposefully distorted like LolCat(ese?) is. Actually, they usually have the proper English version along with the Japanese, as you can see above.

I do remember having a なめんなよ免許書 when I was in high school though. It had a yankee-looking cat and his girlfriend with his bike, if I remember correctly. It probably looked a lot like this one:

なめんなよ　免許証2

I couldn't understand much Japanese back then, but it reminds me a little of LOLcats. I wonder what happened to it...

Translation Exercise: 「わたしが殺せないところまで成長した子供よ。ありがとう」

「わたしが殺せないところまで成長した子供よ。ありがとう」, from 『女のセリフ１２０』 by 伊藤雅子 ( 未来社, 1995)

"Thank You, My Child, for Growing So Big I Can't Kill You"

The rest of Hoshiko Kanazawa's poem, "Kisetsu", continues: "To protect you meant that I could kill you - what a weight to bear."

Agata Hikari's short story, "The A-Ha-Ha Expedition", features similar words: "Newborns... seem like they could be smashed to pieces by the slight pressure of an overeager embrace. I shudder to think that death is, in reality, so near at hand - my hand  could bring about such horror."

She continues, "I wonder if I could properly embrace them, if I could hug them without suffocating them."

But Yuriko Oka expresses a different point of view in  "I Am 12 Years Old": "What plagues me most since the death of my son is the thought that I didn't hug him tightly enough."

These words run completely contrary to each other, but both strike a chord in a mother's heart. You fear holding them too tightly, you blame yourself for maybe not embracing them tightly enough. A mother who has devoted herself to the upbringing of her child  is always wavering between these two extremes. 

The weight of the child in my arms is the weight of that life. Or perhaps, for this mother who hangs her own life on that of her child, it is the weight of self-judgement.

Luna Sea: "SHADE" and "TIME IS DEAD" English Translation

Luna Sea is Japanese band that began in the visual kei vein in the late 1980's. They're very influential in that scene, though they'd pretty much moved on from that style by the time they broke up in 2000. They re-formed in 2010 for a world reunion tour, and released their first new single since disbandment just this past March. The members are J (bass) and Inoran (guitar), who were founding members, and Shinya (drums), Sugizo (guitar/violin) and Ryuichi (vocal). They have a facebook and all.

The first song I heard of theirs was the 'never-give-up' ballad "UP TO YOU." It's still my all-time favorite Luna Sea song, but I'll introduce you to some others here.

"SHADE"
By the way (or b-t-dubs, as the young say): do you ever listen to Japanese music and the う's start to sound like French ue's? Almost like い's? I notice it a little in this song, but much more in the next one.

招かれた絶望　エナメルの夜に ガラスの心崩れ落ちて　残ったものは…  壊れた砂時計　悲しみを刻む 冷たく包み込む　あなたのような影  この苦しみを呉れてやる この悲しみを呉れてやる この苦しみを呉れてやる　Ah  Throw a shadow on me

Despair visited me, one black night  My glass heart shattered and all that's left is...  A broken hourglass, marking my sadness  A shadow like you, engulfing me I'll let you taste this bitterness  I'll let you taste this sadness  I'll let you taste this bitterness Ah Throw a shadow on me

"TIME IS DEAD" (the 'reboot' version and the 90's version, which starts about 4:00). I like how they both have the same pose in the thumbnails, ふふふ. The lyrics on the lyric sites are a little different that what he sings at two moments (like for one he isn't saying 仕掛けが, he's saying けりかりくあ or something I dunno I listened to it too many times to care anymore), so I kind of just went with whatever I thought made more sense. I like corrections if you have some.

崩れ行く 現実は 残された 死を選ぶ  思い出せない 歯型の跡に気がふれる  土に帰れば 幸せは来る? 仕掛けが 生れ  月の光を すべてを 引き換えに微笑んでいた  思い出せない 歯型の跡に気がふれる 土に帰れば 幸せは来る?  仕掛けが 続き  雨を降らせる ネ・フ・テ・ュ・ス 毒を降らせる ア・ヌ・ビ・ス  捕らわれた 人々は 禁断の 赤い実を齧じる  思い出せない アダムとイブの誤ちが  歴史のフィルム 終わらせていた  仕掛けが 終わる  その目が閉じる時 ネ・フ・テ・ュ・ス  もう戻れない ア・ヌ・ビ・ス  「月の光の下 終る」

Our crumbling reality chooses death, all that remains  We are all driven mad by these teethmarks that no one can remember  If we return to dust will we be happy?  The game has begun  We laughed in exchange for the moonlight, for everything  We are all driven mad by these teethmarks that no one can remember  If we return to dust will we be happy?  The game continues  Nepthys brings us rain   Anubis brings us poison  The captives nibble at the forbidden red fruit  The sin of Adam and Eve, lost to our memory, ended the reel of history  The game is over  When those eyes close Nepthys  We can't go back Anubis  "It ends beneath the moonlight"

Where does the 丸 in boys' names come from?

I'd noticed that 丸 is attached to some boys' names, or boy animals, or manly object, especially in folklore. I just assumed it was a marker to indicate boydom or something. However, while watching 世界のみんなに聞いてみた today, I learned that the 丸 apparently comes from お丸. Let me paste the definition of お丸 from gogen-allguide.com below for you:

おまるとは、幼児や病人が用いる、持ち運びのできる便器。

 Yes. The　丸 comes from a Japanese word for bedpan or chamber pot. Why on earth would you attach that to your child's name?  Or a really cool sword? Or a beloved dog?

The custom didn't stem from angry parents who bitterly called their babies "Stinky Poo Pot" though. It seems that the act of adding 丸 to your child's name kept him safe from monsters, who apparently, like humans, curl their lips in disgust and turn tail at the thought of chamber pots and the contents within. Not a bad strategy.

"A Picture of Language" by Kitty Burns Florey

A short article about early sentence diagrams, which were invented by S.W. Clark over a hundred and fifty years ago.

Mr. Clark was not the first reformer to identify its problems, but he was the first to solve them by arranging the parts of a sentence into diagrams. He didn’t consider the idea particularly radical. As he notes in his preface, making the abstract rules of language into pictures was like using maps in a geography book or graphs in geometry.

But there are differences. Maps and geometric diagrams are ancient; both go back at least to the Greeks. Geometry, of course, can’t be taught without recourse to geometric figures, and schoolchildren can draw a map of their classroom or their front yard without much instruction from the teacher. But making a picture of the sentences we read and speak every day was a concept with no real history behind it: it was invented not by an ancient on the other side of the world but in Mr. Clark’s study, in his classrooms, on long meditative walks around the town of Homer.

I like sentence diagramming (although I hadn't seen it done like this, just the phrase structure grammar trees you see in Syntax class). It's methodical, which I like. I'm terrible at math but I can get the same feeling out of sentence diagramming. Not that I completely understand what the heck I'm doing with all these X-Bars quite yet.

"The knowledge of a foreign language can improve a writer's sense of the possible"

There was an interesting article in the Atlantic by Ta-Nehisi Coates early this month, about foreign language and its impact on a writer -- and what the writer produces, of course. I really only have competent knowledge of one language (damn you, Spanish! Return unto me!), but as he says in his article, he is early in his French studies and already feels/sees a difference in his creative processes.

The point is not that this was an especially great bit of writing. Right now its all just materiel, some of which will come to use, but most of which will either be disregard or remain as subtext--the iceberg under the water. The point is that I had access to new highways. 

I've had this happen a few times over the past couple of months. It's not even just in vocabulary, but in sentence structure. And I have to believe that if I explored languages with more distance from English, I'd see even more interesting things and I would see, not simply highways, but entire flight-paths. 

I'm not one for pronouncements. But it really seems like all writers should learn a second language.

My smattering of Linguistics also has an effect in my writing, especially (I think) in the rhythm of my sentences and in the speech patterns of characters. I'd imagine that anything you are interested in can give you access to "new highways" as long as it forces thinking from another angle or encourages thinking on another plane. Look at something from an architectural point of view, etc. So a foreign language isn't the only way to improve your "sense of the possible."

You should still learn one though.

Translation Exercise: 「女には名前なんていらないんですね」

「女には名前なんていらないんですね」, from 『女のセリフ１２０』 by 伊藤雅子 ( 未来社, 1995)

"Women Don't Need Names, Do They?"

I started listening to older music in high school, and I couldn't stand to think about all of the women of the dynasty whose true names are unknown, who remain for posterity with only descriptors like "General Michitusna's mother."

What reminds me most of this is the heavily underlined obituaries column of the newspaper I read everyday. Most of the names belong to men, but when you do occasionally find a woman she is almost always referred to as "Mother of Mr. X" or, "Mr. X's Wife." Her real name is practically a shadow. And once you come to this realization, you begin to recognize that even while alive women don't have names.

I was left momentarily speechless when a woman told me, "I'm always called "Little X's mother" or "Mr. X's wife," so it makes me happy to hear my own name when I come to the community center." That was almost twenty years ago, but even today women rarely hear their names. On the contrary, women themselves seem to be forgetting that they have names.

I've heard that at the public library, women signing for their library cards had to be asked, "Isn't this your husband's name?" And that women attending a quilting exhibition tried to give the receptionist their husband's names when asked to identify themselves. Women: although they fill the seats at PTA meetings, the names on the attendance roll are all men's; when they buy something and have it delivered home, the package will naturally be addressed to their husbands (no matter if the package contains women's clothes).

Just what do women gain by throwing away their good name?

Reading Phonetic Transcription

I came across a post from John Wells's Phonetic Blog and was happy to see that I could read the transcription.

wən ɪz ʌ. sɪns STRUT əŋ commA ə nɔʔ məədʒd fə mɪj, ɑjd lɑjk tə bɪj ɛjbl tə kəntɪnjɵw tə jɵwz ə sɛprəʔ sɪmbl fə ðə foomə. ɑjd bɪj hapɪj tə mɛjk ɪt ɐ rɑɑðə ðən ʌ. bəʔ dʒɛf dɪsmɪsɪz STRUT əz ə məəkjɵwərɪjəl (məəkjɵɵrɪɪl) ən fəŋkʃən lɑjʔ ɡrɛjl (fə wɪtʃ hɪj wɪnz tədɛjz mɪkst mɛtəfə prɑjz).

Unfortunately, like most of scholarly abilities, my reading skill does not transfer to my production skill. It could take me hours to write a full post in transcription. I'll keep practicing, but in the meantime I'm going to read it over once more. Thanks to phonetics my British accents are getting better all the time.

Translation Exercise: 「私は会社と結婚したのに」

I stopped by the used bookstore today. I found The Cambridge Encyclopedia of Language (1988), A book of short stories by "Japanese Women Writers" translated into Japanese, and a book of 120 short essays by a woman named Masako Itou. Each one is only about two pages. I thought they would make for good translation exercises. Here is the first:

「私は会社と結婚したのに」, from 『女のセリフ１２０』 by 伊藤雅子 ( 未来社, 1995)

"But I'm Married to the Company"

You may think the words above were uttered by a person resolutely sacrificing himself to his work, but these are the words of a wife, upon hearing that her husband, an employee at a top-level company, had decided to quit and open his own business.

The husband smiled wryly. "Well, you're half joking." But whether they are an exaggeration or the truth,  the wife's words very eloquently describe the true form of what we call marriage. I may even say that her words glaringly reveal a misunderstanding common to men.

There are often men who confuse the prestige of their rank with the strength of their character, or who erroneously believe that a good income is equivalent to their dignity as a human being. There are also many, many men who are preoccupied with the belief that they as people are held in high regard, when it is only their titles that are venerated -- it is only their labels that rate highly. This is laughable.

But it cannot be said that this tendency exists only in men. The truth is that there are women who marry themselves to the titles of such men. Brand-obsession is not merely a matter of wristwatches and handbags; through marriage, a woman earns status by buying a 'brand-husband'. This is considered a woman's utmost happiness.

I hear strains of "An Essay Against Marriage" author Hideko Okada*: "Man buys love with money, and woman buys money with love."

There are people who, when they see a wife taking a great deal of trouble over her husband's health, call her shameless. A woman's rank is decided by her husband's company position and economic power. Love, which should be the purest of all things, is prone to distortion when a woman's husband is her livelihood.

*岡田秀子、『反結婚論』