There are many, many things that I am not good at. Basketball. Painting. Putting down books and DS games when it's time to go to bed. Not deciphering things that turn out to be human language. One thing I am particularly awful at is not Googling interesting people. I understand that this provides a lot of entertainment for the blogosphere when I do it to celebrities -- speaking of which, have a picture of Robert Downey Jr gnawing on Gwyneth Paltrow, and Gwyneth Paltrow being so used to this after three Iron Man films that she basically doesn't notice -- and I try not to tie myself into knots over wanting to know more about people who make art and/or science that I enjoy. Paparazzi photos ick me out, so I stay away from those, and my conscience doesn't bother me. I'm also terrible at not Googling random people I meet face to face. I'm horrible with names, and embarrassingly prosopagnostic out of context, but I have this weird smart-dar that can pick out the oth...
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Finally figured out what the hell that kanji was meant to be. Ryuuichi's using the construct 父親, chichioya , which literally says "father parent". I've never run into it before. He's also using it without the formal o- or any honorific suffixes, when talking to Mitsurugi about Mitsurugi père . No dictionary will tell me definitively what that one means, but he is definitely doing it on purpose -- when explaining to Mayoi in the office, he drops back and uses otousan , as she has been. The oya part is also used in other constructs for people who are seen as parental figures, like oyakata (親方), a "coach" in martial arts, or oyabun (親分), "Boss" of a gang, or the don of a crime family, in a very tightly-knit sense. The implication is that this is someone you look to for guidance. The character is also used with a different pronunciation in a collection of adjectives and expressions that describe intimate relationships, with overtones of gre...
Finally gotten to Case 1-4 in Gyakuten Saiban . You know, the interesting case. Lotta's name in Japanese is Natsumi, mercifully in katakana. She has one of the heaviest Kansai-ben accents I've ever tripped across. If you've ever seen Meitantei Conan in Japanese -- she's worse than Hattori, who is hamming it up at least half the time. It's not incomprehensible, but I'm guessing at a lot of slang based on context and vague impressions. Manfred von Karma is Karuma Goh. He is equally creepy. His speech is distinctive. It's common in Japanese to double up on imitative noises and non-word sorts of descriptions; a heartbeat, for instance, is dokidoki , and zuruzuru, zuruzuru is the equivalent of "dilly-dally". Karuma uses a lot of them, especially with -o endings, which in Japanese tend to be considered evocative of rolling or booming noises. (The "Goron" in Zelda games is from gorogoro , the noise of an avalanche or rock fall.) A lot of ...
Still happily playing through GyakuSai games in Japanese. I only get to do these things in fits and starts, and can't play games and fix my lingerie at the same time, sadly. I only have so many hands. Two, to be precise. Although I do tend to cache pins and needles in my mouth when those are insufficient -- you clamp the pin in place using the bottom edge of your top incisors, pushing up with the tip of your tongue and letting the part outside your mouth push against your bottom lip, but apparently if you don't sew you don't know this. The cringing the first time David saw me do it was rather funny. The middle two cases in the first game, the ones that are Ryuuichi vs Mitsurugi, are enlightening. There's a noticeable sliding scale in the way Edgeworth speaks in English, going from "delivering opening statement to the Judge" to "hammering on the desk demanding that the witness give their name and profession for the third time", but the difference i...
Further random cultural notes: I would like to point out that the yobisute style of speaking occurs in languages other than Japanese, although it's most explicit there. It had a prominent place in English up until, oh, fifty years ago or so. The BBC's Sherlock plays with it in the modernization; the protagonists call each other 'Sherlock' and 'John' in the modern day, because this is the appropriate localization (...chronolization?) of the two of them calling one another 'Holmes' and 'Watson' a century prior. Strangers address them both with titles, as 'Mr Holmes' and 'Dr Watson', to pay them the proper respect. First names are only for family and lovers -- the Holmes brothers, note, call one another 'Sherlock' and 'Mycroft' -- but the precise relationship of the detective and his doctor is more in the nature of a close friendship than anything involving professional distance. Hence, dropped titles as a sign ...
The language teachers I've had are among both the best and the worst I've ever run into. The Japanese instructor at NAU was one of my favorites -- she made it a point to answer virtually any question you asked, even if she had to double-check the hallway and shut all the classroom doors first, in case someone responsible was walking by. My German instructors were also excellent, particularly Frau Doktor, who was once asked what pirates yelled in auf Deutsch , and ran upstairs to her office so she could retrieve a children's book which translated "Arrrrrr!" as "Tjaaaaaa!" Some of the others have not worked so well. You may have noticed that I have a tendency to creatively mangle whatever language I'm using at any given time, and occasionally even switch out to another one if the main one doesn't have the exact word I need. It's not a matter of doing it wrong ; it's a matter of intentionally applying a different pattern to something, sp...
One of the stranger things about the arcane-language-sorcery that makes me think that it's a generalized side effect of pareidolia and not specific to language is that it also works quite well on non-verbals. I go through the same process to interpret those, much of the time: Rather than start from set first principles and work towards a specific interpretation, I often start from the end result (i.e., my reaction) and then sift through the Venn intersection between what I know of human behavior and what I think of this specific human to figure out what, precisely, is going on. It also works on non-human creatures that have communicative capacity. Not too long ago, Moggie was combing through YouTube for videos of adorable fuzzy-wuzzies, and came across clips of pet foxes. Foxes aren't common pets; the favorite varieties seem to be human-bred fennec foxes, and the descendants of a domestication program undertaken in Siberia about fifty years ago, which are sufficiently family-...
Sometimes my weird language sense borders on arcane sorcery even from my point of view. I have a long-running contract job that involves evaluating search engine results in a lot of different languages. I can usually explain why I think a result is wrong because a speaker of X language would not consider that the significant part of the name to be matching -- string matching Portuguese address queries on the basis that the most important bit is the word "Rua", for example, is a really boneheaded idea -- or because our response assumes a typo that's particularly unlikely on a QWERTY/QWERTZ/AZERTY/whatever keyboard layout that language typically uses. Quite often I'll look at something and immediately go 'no, that's not right' and then have to go wikihopping for a bit before I can give reasons more supportable than 'because it sounds wrong'. I recently got one involving a user searching for "Ghazal" in the Roman alphabet from a device who...
Just so all y'all know, I'm a really lazy language student. You may assume that since I'm playing a complicated visual novel thing in Japanese, I'm fluent in it. I'm hilariously not. I know a lot of grammar, I have a mostly-photographic memory, and I have some kind of weird mutant power that lets me take blind stabs at things having to do with natural languages and almost always be right. I can give a pretty exact translation/interpretation, but it requires time, a dictionary, and the irresistible urge to footnote everything, which is why I do document and media translation, not simultaneous spoken. Why any of this magical linguistic jiggery-pokery works, I have no idea. It just does. There's no conscious trigger, and it operates almost as happily on things that have not been presented to me as language, even obfuscated stuff like ciphers. With Japanese, eight or nine times out of ten I will look at a kanji that has no assigned place in my conscious filing ...
One of the many things I love about Takumi Shuu, the guy responsible for the Ace Attorney games is that he is a devout worshipper at the First Universal Church of Chekov's Gun. Nothing ever goes away in these games. If the dialogue draws your attention to it, it'll be important. Maybe not now, but later, and then again when you least expect it. And he has a knack for making it impossible to distinguish between a running joke -- there are several, one of which involves an argument over ladders vs stepladders that Maya and Phoenix have been having for three games now -- and a truly vital piece of evidence until the moment you need it. Some things are both. Pearl's chronic inability to spell is a critical point in not just two separate cases, but two separate games . One of the iconic moments in the games, which has risen to "spoony bard" status among fans, is when Phoenix cracks open a murder case by demanding to cross examine a parrot. For example, in Case 1-1...
Following on the previous post about bludgeoning my way through Gyakuten Saiban in not-English, it occurs to me that most of my audience probably doesn't speak any Japanese. Give it a shot. It's fun, for a certain highly-contrived, lunatic value of fun . I learned it because I wanted to read manga. I also learned French because I have a thing for Dumas ( père and fis ) and for Victorian policiers , of which Maurice Leblanc wrote about a billion, and German because I like math and Michael Ende. It's not so much a matter of whether I can pick up a language, as it is a matter of if I've run into anything I care to read in it, and how far down I am on the list. I touched before on the complexity of formality and respect in the Japanese language. It's worse than you think. There are entirely different sets of pronouns and verbs for different degrees of respectfulness. There are some sets that elevate the person you're speaking to, and some that humble the speak...
I am nothing if not a masochist when it comes to hammering Japanese into my brain, and lately I've needed things to think about that are not related to insurance and paperwork, so I have re-started poking at the Ace Attorney games -- or, more properly, the Gyakuten Saiban games. The DS games are remakes of the GBA games and conveniently also contain an English script if I get too fed up with things, although you can't switch back and forth in the same save file, and the English text in the Japanese release has enough typos to rival some of Taito's classic 'quarity tlansration' efforts, from back in the day. Still. It's interesting. The localizations were done astonishingly well, considering Capcom basically released the first one in the US on a whim. As expressive as the English is, though, there are a lot of things in Japanese that just don't come across, because there simply do not exist any equivalents. One of the most basic ones, and usually very r...
A couple of the blogs I read have recently touched upon the topic of things we don't blog about, things we do blog about, and how you choose where to draw the line. I recognize that here, I write about things that a lot of other essayists wouldn't touch with a ten-foot fountain pen: Appearance, the internal workings of social justice movements, psychiatric disorders, and a lot of others. I do it on purpose. One, this blog is pseudonymous. You could probably find me if you really wanted, but there's no real point in making it easy. I don't care if other people can link this identity with me, the physical person, but I've had a lot of issues with dysfunctional relatives in the past, and I try to at least keep a couple of clicks between Google results on my real name and the name under which I write. I don't think they'd do anything physically or legally scary, but they have a habit of writing me long vicious screeds about the things I say, particularly if I ...