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.