picked up a Japanese Reader a few weeks back. Been very happy with it overall. One of the exercises deals with the various rules for loan words. Nothing new here, but at minimum it's good practice.
but
among the stuff you'd expect (New York; motor boat; France) are what feel like incredibly weird choices: musical show, hormone, love scene, alpinist, alpine yodel, producer, part-time job salon.
My favorite line about this is English does not borrow from other languages; English follows other languages down dark alleys, knocks them out, and goes through their pockets for loose grammar.
after some cross-referencing, I ended up at the World Loanword Database (wold.clld.org) which claims that the percentage of loan words in
- English is 42%
- Japanese is 36%
my searches turned up a number of different percentages, so grain of salt and all that.
(Mandarin Chinese apparently has the least, at 2%. I've seen that number multiple times)
Starting this weekend, I'm going to start actively trying to learn Tagalog again. I fell off that wagon hard during the wedding preparation period, but with the most recent trip, I'm feeling like I need to extend the effort and get better.
Also, Fanatical just threw Learn Japanese To Survive - Hiragana Battle at me for free.
Not sure, really. There's something on the home page about 'vocabularies' and contributors, so maybe it's looking at, like, a representative sample set?
- is there a rule for reading the radicals in a kanji? I know that when I see 火-as-radical, the kanji has something do with fire. Taking a random example, 畑, I could go "ah, that's fire+rice field" but is that what I should be doing? (cf my post about sushi a few weeks ago)
- are there rules for reading compound kanji? Not the ON vs. KUN readings, I think I more or less understand that part, but how to merge them. Some seem straight forward: 銀行 (gin + kō) and 映画館 (ei + ga + kan). Others seem to obey different rules: 雑誌 (zatsu + shi) somehow becomes zasshi. The best I can come up with is 'the TSU here was demoted, sorta, to っ', but that feels pretty hacky. Both 建物 (tateru + mono) and 学校 (gaku + kō) seem to work a third way. I can treat the first like a verb and take the stem, and that kinda works for the second (though I may have to add a っ, depending). Lastly we have 日本 (nichi + hon). Naturally I know it's nihon, but I'm not seeing any way to get there from the component parts.
writing that out, it looks like I could condense the last three cases to something like 'drop the last mora and, where appropriate, add a っ', but again, hacky. Is there a better rule?
That Chinese list of English loan words is definitely incomplete. Off the top of my head, hambaobao>hamburger, yingtewang>internet, jiyin>gene.
I wonder how they establish their list.
漢堡 is a Taiwanese Mandarin loanword but we say 網路 (net-road) for Internet, so there’s a good chance look contributors may be using different dialects, assuming it’s not just an incomplete list to begin with.
- is there a rule for reading the radicals in a kanji? I know that when I see 火-as-radical, the kanji has something do with fire. Taking a random example, 畑, I could go "ah, that's fire+rice field" but is that what I should be doing? (cf my post about sushi a few weeks ago)
- are there rules for reading compound kanji? Not the ON vs. KUN readings, I think I more or less understand that part, but how to merge them. Some seem straight forward: 銀行 (gin + kō) and 映画館 (ei + ga + kan). Others seem to obey different rules: 雑誌 (zatsu + shi) somehow becomes zasshi. The best I can come up with is 'the TSU here was demoted, sorta, to っ', but that feels pretty hacky. Both 建物 (tateru + mono) and 学校 (gaku + kō) seem to work a third way. I can treat the first like a verb and take the stem, and that kinda works for the second (though I may have to add a っ, depending). Lastly we have 日本 (nichi + hon). Naturally I know it's nihon, but I'm not seeing any way to get there from the component parts.
writing that out, it looks like I could condense the last three cases to something like 'drop the last mora and, where appropriate, add a っ', but again, hacky. Is there a better rule?
Short answer, “no” with an “and”, long answer, “yes” with a “but”. There are like six different “etymological” categories for kanji (yep, six). Some are straight up pictographs, some incorporate radicals to give pronunciation clues, some are compounds that combine meanings (fire-field!), some are characters that have been repurposed for any number of reasons (why does 来る mean “to come” when the Chinese character it’s based on 麥 means “wheat”!?). According to the Wikipedia article, 90% of modern Japanese characters are of the “part of the radical is a pronunciation hint, and the rest is related to the meaning” variety, but in practice I remember it being kind of a crap shoot which words in a given sentence might follow any of the 6 rules.
For pronunciation, yes, there are conventions for how compounds work together, but they are different across the various dialects. Generally you are always going to drop whatever -う endings of a verb when it’s in a 漢語, and when you have a duplicated consonant, it will typically cause the vowel in between to get dropped, creating the “long consonant”, xっx situation. As far as I k
now, NiHon is a transliteration of the Chinese pronunciation of these two characters, ㄖ。ㄅㄣ, /ʐ bən/, which is why it looks weird: even though “Ni” is not strictly a Kun or an On reading. Due to the large amount of borrowing from Chinese, older words are not going to follow standardized rules very consistently, primarily because they predate the standardization itself.
My daughter's been learning mandarin at school lately and she's been getting pretty good. Her favorite phrase lately, which I've picked up both the spoken and written word, is bu hǎo píngguǒ or 不好苹果.
Funny kid.
DisruptedCapitalist on
"Simple, real stupidity beats artificial intelligence every time." -Mustrum Ridcully in Terry Pratchett's Hogfather p. 142 (HarperPrism 1996)
That Chinese list of English loan words is definitely incomplete. Off the top of my head, hambaobao>hamburger, yingtewang>internet, jiyin>gene.
I wonder how they establish their list.
漢堡 is a Taiwanese Mandarin loanword but we say 網路 (net-road) for Internet, so there’s a good chance look contributors may be using different dialects, assuming it’s not just an incomplete list to begin with.
Motherfucker
I've been saying wangluo for years and net road never occurred to me
Speaking of Kanji study, I decided to play the new Pokémon Sword in Japanese and it’s been quite the slog. I’ve got about 3 hours of “playtime” and 140 new vocabulary cards in my Anki deck and I haven’t captured my first wild Pokémon yet. This is the mental equivalent of going back to the gym after being lazy for 5 years.
I have a mix of decks. For basic vocab, I do Japanese prompts, type-in-English response answers. For Kanji, I do basic front/back, but I turn on the scratchpad and draw the kanji from memory then flip the card to check my work.
I try to avoid shared decks for the most part though: Part of helping my memory is entering the data myself, so if I just take someone's deck then I don't have the initial memory of processing and recording it initially into card form.
I'm at work now, but I can do some screenshots if I remember when I get home tonight.
I copy sentences straight out of the dictionary examples, or from the source I found it in (if I have a translation or am sure of my own). So if my target word is 存在 (existence) then I’ll write: もし水がないなら、地上に生物は__しないだろう。If not for water, life would not exist on earth.
On the back of the card I’ll have the sentence completed and the pronunciations of the other kanji.
Edit: I should probably give credit to the www.AllJapaneseAllTheTime.com website which is the method I’m following. I wouldn’t say it’s the best method, but I like it well enough and I haven’t put in the effort of looking up others.
AnkiApp is extremely useful and quite flexible and I recommend it to all my students.
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Lord_AsmodeusgoeticSobriquet:Here is your magical cryptic riddle-tumour: I AM A TIME MACHINERegistered Userregular
Trying to speak English without loanwords seems like it would be functionally impossible.
Capital is only the fruit of labor, and could never have existed if Labor had not first existed. Labor is superior to capital, and deserves much the higher consideration. - Lincoln
Oh ho ho. You should check out Anglish. Its an attempt to do just that. Its quite cool how understandable it is even when reading wholly new words. https://youtube.com/watch?v=IIo-17SIkws
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Lord_AsmodeusgoeticSobriquet:Here is your magical cryptic riddle-tumour: I AM A TIME MACHINERegistered Userregular
That is very cool, but I hope I'm not the only one who sort of cringed at the potential implications of a 'Germanically pure English'
Capital is only the fruit of labor, and could never have existed if Labor had not first existed. Labor is superior to capital, and deserves much the higher consideration. - Lincoln
"Germanic" in the sense that it is a part of the Germanic family of languages, of which the German language is only a part.
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Lord_AsmodeusgoeticSobriquet:Here is your magical cryptic riddle-tumour: I AM A TIME MACHINERegistered Userregular
I know the reasoning and the background, but it still makes me feel vaguely uncomfortable. Not their fault, just you know, unfortunate coincidence.
Capital is only the fruit of labor, and could never have existed if Labor had not first existed. Labor is superior to capital, and deserves much the higher consideration. - Lincoln
The primary bits of language being removed are latin, greek and french.
I guess it could be an attack on the upperclass? There is a difference in words used in informal/lower class sentences and formal/scientific/upper class sentences.
Damn Japanese sentence structure is so fucking weird. I decided to try out a little amateur translation for a web comic and even the introduction is nearly beyond me.
了 is the protagonist and 凪沙（なぎさ）the love interest, but if I didn’t read ahead I’d have no idea how to parse the sentence. As it is I’m still a little iffy. “So then Ryou quietly reunites with Nagasa, but how come this place is a cosplay cafe that Nagasa secretly works at!?”
Also the title is a pun that I don’t think is possible to translate directly.
That Chinese list of English loan words is definitely incomplete. Off the top of my head, hambaobao>hamburger, yingtewang>internet, jiyin>gene.
I wonder how they establish their list.
漢堡 is a Taiwanese Mandarin loanword but we say 網路 (net-road) for Internet, so there’s a good chance look contributors may be using different dialects, assuming it’s not just an incomplete list to begin with.
Motherfucker
I've been saying wangluo for years and net road never occurred to me
網路 (traditional taiwan/hk) and 网络 ( Simplified China) refers to the same thing but 路lu and 络luo have similar but different meaning, it's something like "road" and "net-like,winding"
Mandarin man
Also I googled and this chinese oracle bone script of the character 网net/web is very fun lol
The primary bits of language being removed are latin, greek and french.
I guess it could be an attack on the upperclass? There is a difference in words used in informal/lower class sentences and formal/scientific/upper class sentences.
Traditionally white supremacists don’t much care for Italians. or those from the southern Mediterranean, presumably due to its proximity and various means of exchange with Northern Africa.
Not sure if we’re considered “white enough” these days, I haven’t really kept up with what's fashionable with garbagepeople.
I guess. But Anglish is mostly theoretical and any real attempts to make English less romantic have been focused on making the language less redundant and upper class. It seems a bit silly to get worked up on what racists might do when there's many things they are doing.
I guess. But Anglish is mostly theoretical and any real attempts to make English less romantic have been focused on making the language less redundant and upper class. It seems a bit silly to get worked up on what racists might do when there's many things they are doing.
The valuations of “less redundant and upper class” already sound uncomfortably close to being racist to me and reducing the variety of ways to express oneself sounds Orwellian to me, so even if it’s an innocent thought experiment I’m still giving it the side-eye.
Why worry about a language that is almost purely hypothetical and has less people speaking it than Elvish, or Kingon, or Dothraki, or that one that got made up for Eragon?
Why worry about a language that is almost purely hypothetical and has less people speaking it than Elvish, or Kingon, or Dothraki, or that one that got made up for Eragon?
Because I am a language nerd and must have an opinion and be unnecessarily aggressive about it or else I might spiral into an existential crisis?
Like, just eat your fucking vegetables, Jimmy, goddamn.
Real talk, sentence structure is killing me. Besides general lack of vocabulary trying to parce out the english equivalents of sentences is tough. I assume that's how it is in just about every language, though so usual stuff, I guess.
Why worry about a language that is almost purely hypothetical and has less people speaking it than Elvish, or Kingon, or Dothraki, or that one that got made up for Eragon?
Because I am a language nerd and must have an opinion and be unnecessarily aggressive about it or else I might spiral into an existential crisis?
Like, just eat your fucking vegetables, Jimmy, goddamn.
Real talk, sentence structure is killing me. Besides general lack of vocabulary trying to parce out the english equivalents of sentences is tough. I assume that's how it is in just about every language, though so usual stuff, I guess.
That’s usually how it starts, yeah.
I know it doesn’t feel like it right now, but on the bright side, there is a huge amount of transferable English to French skill that will come out more as you study more.
I don’t remember if I told this story before, but I was in college, reading Ladefoged, and I made a mistake on my phonetics homework accidentally elongating the “m” in roommate. The professor made me say roommate over and over again in class to see if I’d picked up some kind of gemination from living with Japanese roommates. I think he wrote a paper on it.
So being unnecessarily opinionated and aggressive is a feature not a bug?
Posts
but
among the stuff you'd expect (New York; motor boat; France) are what feel like incredibly weird choices: musical show, hormone, love scene, alpinist, alpine yodel, producer, part-time job salon.
It's a toss up which has taken more English or Japanese?
I am confident saying English given that the vast majority of English vocabulary is either French, Latin, or Greek.
English does not borrow from other languages; English follows other languages down dark alleys, knocks them out, and goes through their pockets for loose grammar.
after some cross-referencing, I ended up at the World Loanword Database (wold.clld.org) which claims that the percentage of loan words in
- English is 42%
- Japanese is 36%
my searches turned up a number of different percentages, so grain of salt and all that.
(Mandarin Chinese apparently has the least, at 2%. I've seen that number multiple times)
Also, Fanatical just threw Learn Japanese To Survive - Hiragana Battle at me for free.
I wonder how they establish their list.
- is there a rule for reading the radicals in a kanji? I know that when I see 火-as-radical, the kanji has something do with fire. Taking a random example, 畑, I could go "ah, that's fire+rice field" but is that what I should be doing? (cf my post about sushi a few weeks ago)
- are there rules for reading compound kanji? Not the ON vs. KUN readings, I think I more or less understand that part, but how to merge them. Some seem straight forward: 銀行 (gin + kō) and 映画館 (ei + ga + kan). Others seem to obey different rules: 雑誌 (zatsu + shi) somehow becomes zasshi. The best I can come up with is 'the TSU here was demoted, sorta, to っ', but that feels pretty hacky. Both 建物 (tateru + mono) and 学校 (gaku + kō) seem to work a third way. I can treat the first like a verb and take the stem, and that kinda works for the second (though I may have to add a っ, depending). Lastly we have 日本 (nichi + hon). Naturally I know it's nihon, but I'm not seeing any way to get there from the component parts.
writing that out, it looks like I could condense the last three cases to something like 'drop the last mora and, where appropriate, add a っ', but again, hacky. Is there a better rule?
漢堡 is a Taiwanese Mandarin loanword but we say 網路 (net-road) for Internet, so there’s a good chance look contributors may be using different dialects, assuming it’s not just an incomplete list to begin with.
Short answer, “no” with an “and”, long answer, “yes” with a “but”. There are like six different “etymological” categories for kanji (yep, six). Some are straight up pictographs, some incorporate radicals to give pronunciation clues, some are compounds that combine meanings (fire-field!), some are characters that have been repurposed for any number of reasons (why does 来る mean “to come” when the Chinese character it’s based on 麥 means “wheat”!?). According to the Wikipedia article, 90% of modern Japanese characters are of the “part of the radical is a pronunciation hint, and the rest is related to the meaning” variety, but in practice I remember it being kind of a crap shoot which words in a given sentence might follow any of the 6 rules.
For pronunciation, yes, there are conventions for how compounds work together, but they are different across the various dialects. Generally you are always going to drop whatever -う endings of a verb when it’s in a 漢語, and when you have a duplicated consonant, it will typically cause the vowel in between to get dropped, creating the “long consonant”, xっx situation. As far as I k
now, NiHon is a transliteration of the Chinese pronunciation of these two characters, ㄖ。ㄅㄣ, /ʐ bən/, which is why it looks weird: even though “Ni” is not strictly a Kun or an On reading. Due to the large amount of borrowing from Chinese, older words are not going to follow standardized rules very consistently, primarily because they predate the standardization itself.
Funny kid.
Motherfucker
I've been saying wangluo for years and net road never occurred to me
that's pretty cool. How do you have your deck set up? Just basic, or type the answer?
(I'm not sure it'll work with my style, but I'll definitely keep it in mind)
I try to avoid shared decks for the most part though: Part of helping my memory is entering the data myself, so if I just take someone's deck then I don't have the initial memory of processing and recording it initially into card form.
I'm at work now, but I can do some screenshots if I remember when I get home tonight.
On the back of the card I’ll have the sentence completed and the pronunciations of the other kanji.
Edit: I should probably give credit to the www.AllJapaneseAllTheTime.com website which is the method I’m following. I wouldn’t say it’s the best method, but I like it well enough and I haven’t put in the effort of looking up others.
This is a great thought experiment and there is absolutely no way white supremacists don’t immediately cum when they hear this idea.
I guess it could be an attack on the upperclass? There is a difference in words used in informal/lower class sentences and formal/scientific/upper class sentences.
了 is the protagonist and 凪沙（なぎさ）the love interest, but if I didn’t read ahead I’d have no idea how to parse the sentence. As it is I’m still a little iffy. “So then Ryou quietly reunites with Nagasa, but how come this place is a cosplay cafe that Nagasa secretly works at!?”
Also the title is a pun that I don’t think is possible to translate directly.
網路 (traditional taiwan/hk) and 网络 ( Simplified China) refers to the same thing but 路lu and 络luo have similar but different meaning, it's something like "road" and "net-like,winding"
Mandarin man
Also I googled and this chinese oracle bone script of the character 网net/web is very fun lol
This will be here until I receive an apology or Weedlordvegeta get any consequences for being a bully
Traditionally white supremacists don’t much care for Italians. or those from the southern Mediterranean, presumably due to its proximity and various means of exchange with Northern Africa.
Not sure if we’re considered “white enough” these days, I haven’t really kept up with what's fashionable with garbagepeople.
The valuations of “less redundant and upper class” already sound uncomfortably close to being racist to me and reducing the variety of ways to express oneself sounds Orwellian to me, so even if it’s an innocent thought experiment I’m still giving it the side-eye.
Because I am a language nerd and must have an opinion and be unnecessarily aggressive about it or else I might spiral into an existential crisis?
I'm gonna have to go back to reading goddamn Jimmy le petit Lapin that piece of shit rabbit I hate him he is a bastard.
Real talk, sentence structure is killing me. Besides general lack of vocabulary trying to parce out the english equivalents of sentences is tough. I assume that's how it is in just about every language, though so usual stuff, I guess.
As a linguist...
It’s just a take, mang.
That’s usually how it starts, yeah.
I know it doesn’t feel like it right now, but on the bright side, there is a huge amount of transferable English to French skill that will come out more as you study more.
So being unnecessarily opinionated and aggressive is a feature not a bug?