Noncompositional

If you’ve spent any time hanging out with those, shall we say, enthusiastic about the Japanese language, especially those who have arrived at this enthusiasm because of (or along with) a fervent interest in popular Japanese visual arts (anime especially, but manga as well), then no doubt you’ve also encountered the occasional insertion of a Japanese word into otherwise English discourse. And among these words, I would bet that nani (何) up there in the high-frequency ones. It’s probably not as frequent as the the SFP ne, nor as common as predicators like sugoi ‘awesome,’ or whole utterances like kakatte koi! temee koroshite yaru ze! ‘Bring it on! I’ll kill you, you f***ing bastard!’ Read more »

A recent discussion revealed to me two Japanese verbs, 褒める (homeru) and 褒め称える (hometataeru), each of which is basically equivalent to praise, but with one crucial difference: the former can only be used by a superior to an inferior (or by one equal to another), whereas the latter is reserved specifically for an inferior praising a superior.　Though no dictionary I could get my hands on (Japanese-English or native Japanese) explicitly mentions this (nor do any of the entries for the words that they use in their definitions　(which include ほめたてる, ほめそやす, and 称賛 – and yes the first two are compounds that contain the basic word homeru), except for one that has さかんにほめる sakan-ni homeru, which means (literally) something like ‘praise vigorously,’ but I think means, along with most of these other words, ‘give congratulations to,’ or ’shower praise upon.’ A lot of the example sentences have to do with gaining public approval or admiration. So I got to thinking: what do we have in English like this?

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[argh, wp, why do this to me? Anyway, seems strings of numbers are out for post names, at least with the permalink structure I'm working with. Sorry about any inconvenience.]

Maybe this should wait for the 47th post, but heck, here goes. Some Wikipedia spelunking this morning led me to the article on Pomona College, which in turn revealed some very interesting facts about the number 47. In particular 47 in Star Trek. It seems Pomona College graduates writing for modern ST shows are responsible. It’s rather incredible.

These days it seems all the rage to write about funky coordinations (the cool kids are calling them WTF coordinations, ’cause only cool kids get to use the fun words). Well, after a fun conversation the other day about what part of speech rather than might be (“separable conjunction,” anyone? For lunch today, (rather than salad) he ate pasta (rather than salad)), this sort of topic was on my mind. And so this morning, something popped into my head: do it, and fast!

Interesting, I thought. And so I ran a search over the BNC for this pattern, which was rather hard-to-specify in terms that are general enough to my liking. So I’m using [N , and|but ADV|ADJ] as a first pass (the search for adjectives is mostly to include mis-tagged adverbs). The results are interesting. For but, the adverbs are:

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[update: Sorry! It seems wordpress doesn't like title-less posts, and since I forgot to add a title the first time, links to the post would have gotten 404 errors. That post hase been deleted, and this one has a title. Those reading this by RSS who got the earlier post with no title will also get an error if they use the link included with the feed. My apologies.]

In a half-hearted attempt to at least keep my Japanese reading ability up to snuff, I’ve started reading 69 sixty-nine by MURAKAMI Ryû (村上龍*). Murakami is a prolific Japanese author, famous for his “subculture” writings, with visceral, emotional, and realistic portrayals of characters who are often depressed, nihilistic, or — as is the case with 69 — adventuresome slackers. The story (which is nicely summarized in this Wikipedia/Japan article) centers around Ken (full name YAZAKI Kensuke 矢崎剣介), a high-school student in the country town of Sasebo, Nagasaki (also the birthplace of the author), who, along with his group of friends, get caught up in the counterculture movements in 1969 Japan, and tangle with topics like Marxism, the Vietnam War, and the nearby US army base with about as much wit and wisdom as obscure-town high school students can muster.

What concerns me here is a particular turn of phrase that the narrator (Ken) has. It relies on the fact that in Japanese, the predicator of any clause is always in final position. What this means is that given a rich enough context (and world-knowledge-driven expectations), the head verb can actually be predicted long before it appears (and in many ads and newspaper headlines, it is often omitted). More than a few times Ken uses this fact to play a little joke on the reader. To wit (my translations follow):

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From boingboing comes an interesting story of a new novel by Chinese author Hu Wenliang. It has five sections, and each section is entirely composed of punctuation. The challenge to readers from the author is to decode his punctuation-only novel into a “touching love story.” Interested? How about after you find out that this is the entire novel:

：？

：！

“‘……’”

（、）·《，》

；——

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From Lauren Squires at polyglot conspiracy comes a link to a comic strip that in no way depicts my daily life. Not at all, I swear.

…no, I really mean it! Most of the language-related conversations I force others into involve me starting with, “Isn’t it interesting how [some famous person] said [some expression]” or “This commercial has the phrase [phrase], but that actually means [unintended meaning] instead of…” and so on.

One class of adjectives are those that, rather than indicating properties of entities, indicate relationships between multiple entities. These are often found in dictionaries with the phrase of or pertaining to (or of or relating to) in the definition. One example of a word with both relational and (say) qualitative meanings is educational. One meaning, according to the American Heritage Dictionary, is ’serving to educate, instructive,’ as in an educational film. The other is ‘of or relating to education,’ as in educational policy. Given the vagueness of “pertain,” it should be expected that some of these “pertinative adjectives,” or “pertainyms,” as they are sometimes called (e.g., WordNet) have a wide range of meanings and can indicate several types of relations (or, if you prefer, denote several classes of objects). As a case study, let’s look at nuclear.

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