Noncompositional

This is the result of a train of thought that went like this. The other day I was in the linguistics department and looked at a sign that’s been at the base of a set of stairs for a few years now. It said something like, “Step up your fitness level: take the stairs.” I wondered, for some unknown reason, how this would be expressed in Japanese. Of course I really have no idea (though I’m sure that such a sign is possible, or even probable in Japan…though on the other hand, there are many places where Japanese people use staircases where Americans would use or at least expect an escalator or elevator; well, at least in places where “accessability” is important).

Not really knowing a word for fitness other than kenkoo ‘health,’ I just figured that probably, on signage like this, English was more the way to go: fittonesu reberu. Then there’s the question of raise. There are a few words like ageru which correspond to raise in some contexts. But again, why do that when you can go English: appu!

And then yes, we had reberu appu, or level up. That got me to wondering: how many uses of level up (including the pseudo-exclamative “level up” as well as the verb “(to) level up” in both transitive and intransitive senses) are original to the American gaming community, and how many (if any) are the result of Japanese influence - or are all Japanese uses taken from elsewhere?

At the risk of exposing myself as a video game geek as well as a linguistics geek: I am a fan of the Final Fantasy series of video games, which are console-style role playing games developed by the Japanese company Square Enix (formerly SquareSoft, and at some point involved with Electronic Arts). The series began on the Family Computer System (Famicom) in Japan in 1987, and released for the Nintendo Entertainment System in America in 1990. The basic premise in these games is that you are (or control) some hero (who may be reluctant) who ends up having to save the world from some magical, political, or politico-magical force. The hero is also accompanied by a group of companions who tag along for various reasons, including possibly being heroes themselves.

Without getting into the gruesome details of how the gameplay works, one important aspect is called status effects, or simply status. A status effect is some temporary or curable altering of a character’s normal condition. That is, normally a character is able to take any of the normal commands (attack with equipped weapon, cast spell, execute class-specific action [e.g., steal from opponent]), etc.), and execute them in a timely fashion with the desired effect. Characters also never randomly tire, drop dead, or get second winds, etc. on their own. However, any number of things can change this. A character may be “poisoned,” meaning that they will “die” (go out of commission) as their body is gradually weakened; or they may be “blinded,” and be unable to connect with physical attacks; or they may be “confused” and execute random commands on random targets; and so on. For each status, there is usually a particular way to cure it without waiting for it to stop on its own. To cure poisoning, one can use an antidote; for blindness, eye drops; for confusion, whack them with something.

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A recent PC post on envelope-pushing names in China reminded me of the situation on names in Japan, where there is a government-sanctioned list of Chinese characters (kanji) that can be used in personal names. This doesn’t limit the possible sounds that can go into a name (beyond the phonology of the language), as you can just use hiragana (or katakana?) to indicate the appropriate pronunciation.

The approved list of kanji, the Jinmeiyoo Kanji (’Chinese characters for use in personal names’), consists of 983 kanji that do not appear in the standard 2000-odd standard kanji used in everyday writing, giving parents about 3000 characters to chose from. Excluded from the list are many characters that indicate culturally taboo or offensive concepts, like prostitution, cancer, and various emotional states (resentment, e.g.). Once, there were parents who attempt to give their child a name like ‘demon’ or something similar, and this name was rejected as a form of abuse of parental powers, due to the expected social difficulties that the child would be expected to experience (but, I haven’t heard anything about Japanese parents tying to put symbols in names, like in the Chinese story).

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Recently I was handed an article on the difficulties in Boston of recording various presidential candidates’ names on Chinese ballots. The problem is laid out fairly enough in the article. Basically, all (or nearly all) characters used in Chinese have an attached meaning or set of meanings. This means that when rendering a non-Sinitic name in Chinese, one necessarily presents a string of meanings along with a string of sounds. The result is the sort of thing described in the article: “Barack Obama could be read as ‘Oh Bus Horse.’” No actual Chinese is given, but I expect that the possibility being referred to is 哦巴马 o ba ma.

This would actually not be my first choice in transcribing (I won’t mention the annoying confusion with “translation” exhibited by the article in question) Obama’s name. The first character is pronounced as a short open [o], rather than the [ou] that is actually in his name. And it seems that, although 哦巴马 has some very limited use, “Obama” is commonly written 欧巴马 (ou ba ma; Mainland, Taiwan) or 奧巴馬 (ao ba ma; Hong Kong). The Mainland version seems closest to me; the Hong Kong initial ao is mysterious: maybe it’s just convention to use that character, or maybe in Cantonese it has a different enough pronunciation that it makes sense. So why refer to the minority choice in the article? It seems that the meanings of the other variants are just as amusing: the Mainland character ou has basically been bleached of its native meaning, and mostly just stands for ‘Europe’. The HK variant means ‘mysterious’ or ‘back corner (of a house)’.*

And how about the rest of the name? The article says that The ma part does mean ‘horse’, and that’s spot on. Use of ‘horse’ to stand for ma-type sounds is standard. I’ve never seen ‘mother’, ‘hemp’, ’scold’, ‘[question particle]‘ or any others used. (FYI, the name for Malaysia is 马来西亚 ‘horse-come-west-asia/inferior’). But I’m dubious about translating ba as ‘bus’. It certainly is in the word for bus, namely 巴士 (ba shi) but whether the ba part alone can mean ‘bus’ I’m not sure about.

A curious omission is Sen. Clinton, whose family name is 克林顿 (ke lin dun), overcome-forest-pause. Of course, the ke part is almost always used for foreign names, except perhaps in 克服 ‘overcome’. At least, that’s my impression from reading what Chinese news publications I can understand. I’d be curious to know how native speakers react to seeing the character, e.g., if they expect a foreign name in its vicinity if they see it.

One of the most ridiculous transliterations described is that of current Boston mayor Thomas Menino, whose name could apparently mean “Sun-Moon-Rainbow-Farmer”, “Imbecile” or “Barbarian-Mud-No-Mind-of-His-Own”. Whoa. I don’t even see how the first two versions could exist, since his full name should need at least six characters, and (1) no characters that I’m aware of with meanings “sun” and “moon” have anything like the right pronunciation, and (2) “imbecile” is an unlikely interpretation for an (essentially) random string of six characters. The last option seems more likely for Menino: it probably starts 蒙泥 meng ni, with meng somehow meaning ‘barbarian’ instead of being an abbreviation for ‘Mongolia(n)’. But, again, this would buck the general trend: the mayor is usually referred to as 马尼诺 ma ni nuo ‘horse-nun-promise’ or 梅尼诺 mei ni nuo ‘plum-nun-promise’.

One has to wonder how much of an issue it is. When someone is reading about a candidate, how much do the characters used to represent the name affect judgment? I suppose when you’re a presidential candidate, or a Secretary of State, you probably don’t want to take any risks. The most realistic suggestion reported in the article is for the candidates themselves to suggest how their names should be written down, perhaps taking their cue from what popular Chinese publications are doing. And, I would add, having their names down in Roman letters as well.

*Sometimes I wonder of decisions about which characters to use are motivated by how their pronunciation would end up in pinyin. Using 哦巴马 (the nonstandard variant) gets you o ba ma in pinyin. I’ve seen some other examples like this, where the closest similarity to English (or whatever other language) is not in pronunciation but in pinyin/Roman spelling. But at the moment I can’t recall any of the particular cases.

Someone asked me the other day which was the normal way to talk about meters in Japanese, as in “the plant is over two meters tall.” He wondered if it was meetaa or meetoru. I knew I’d heard (and possibly used) both before, but I wasn’t sure which was more common, so I guessed meetaa. Should have checked the dictionary first.

Consulting with the Daijirin, a large American Heritage-style dictionary (as opposed to the Koujien, which is sort of OED-ish), I found an interesting difference between the two. Both meetoru and meetaa have two senses. Meetoru’s first sense is the unit of measurement, and all related things: meetoru-hoo is the metric system ‘meter law/rule’. Meetaa’s first sense is “measurement device,” as in gasu meetaa ‘gas meter’ and paakingu meetaa ‘parking meter’. Did this bring me back to an earlier post? Yes it did. But this is rather minor, parallel to the pair sutoraiki ‘labor strike’ and sutoraiku ’strike (baseball/bowling)’.

(In fact, the “strike” pair is rather interesting because the final vowel is devoiced; if the two words had meanings similar enough that appeared in the same contexts, people might have some serious issues telling them apart.)

But remember that each of these words had two senses? Well, the second senses of each meetaa and meetoru says, basically, “see [the other word], sense 1.” Great, I thought. But it’s actually not that, uh, “simple,” because while meetaa indeed has both meanings, meetoru is always the unit of length: there is no gasu meetoru, at least according to one person I spoke with.

At least, that seems to be the majority reaction to a book by Paul Benedict called Japanese / Austro-Tai, which claims that Japanese is genetically part of the Austro-Tai family. Note that Austro-Tai is a proposed macro-family consisting of Austronesian (Formosan, Malayo-Polynesian), Austroasiatic (Mon-Khmer, among others), and Tai-Kadai (Thai, among others). So the book has at least as many presuppositions in it as the infamous Japanese and other Altaic Languages by Roy Miller. And it seems to have taken quite a bashing, at least among stauch defenders of an Altaic connection, like Alexander Vovin.

I came across the book as part of a little research project to see what people out there think about the origins of the Japanese people and language. It turns out that the Altaic theory is still pretty strong among linguists and some anthropologists and geneticists, though the possibility of an Austronesian connection is still pretty strong, especially among Eastern scholars. It seems that many of them believe that the origins of the Japanese are best understood as a mixing between northern (Altaic, perhaps) and southern (Austronesian or Austroasiatic, though usually the former) features, at least culturally. Linguistically, the arguments for either a creole or a southern substratum remain, to my eyes, rather unconvincing. Though, I will admit, there are some interesting lexical correspondences between some Ryukyuan, Okinawan, and Kyushuan words for sea navigation, and some proposed Proto-Austronesian words. Okay, there’s really just one really good one, which was presented not by Benedict but by Osamu Sakiyama in a book with a great title: Prehistoric Mongoloid Dispersals. The word is proto-Austronesian *paRi, which is reflected in various languages with meanings related to south, southern winds, the southern cross, and sting rays (what the southern cross looks like). And, apparently in many of the Japonic languages spoken in southwestern Kyushu and beyond, there are words like pae and pai that mean south/southwestern wind. So, the medial loss of r is supposed to have happened in Japanese (though, I think that is arrived at via comparative Altaic data, so…yeah); but the vowels, I think, are supposed to have merged in various ways. Clearly some more work has to be done on this one, but it’s interesting nonetheless.

Anyway, for me the little research project definitely inspired me to become more aware of the (attested) history of Japanese, so it looks like some learning of classical Japanese should be in my future.

Yesterday David Beaver posted about a discussion he’d had with Elane Chun (of UT Austin) regarding probable causes of the outrage stemming from a well-known talk show host miming Chinese using ching chong and similar forms. I think the conclusions are probably near the mark, adding a slight variation on Answer C: possibly a sometimes-assumed compliance among Asian Americans that they will (and perhaps should) be treated as a non-mainstream group, for a variety of reasons (recentness of immigration, recentness of “on-screen” activity in the media, being a “model minority”, and perhaps others). I, at least, am somewhat pleased when I see an Asian American role in a TV show or movie wherein their Asianness is not made special mention of, or even silently included (for instance, in some aspect of costume or set design). This is not to say that such things should not be included, but simply that the inclusion of an Asian in a production should not necessarily entail a lot of extra cultural baggage.

In some ways, I wonder if there is a very slightly analogous issue with sign languages. After decades of persuading everyone that sign languages are true languages, on a par with spoken languages like Russian and Hindi, now there is the need to take a broader look at the differences between signed and spoken languages. Of course this must now be done with some caution, without disturbing the status built up for sign languages. Yes, each ethnicity and nationality, even after moving to a melting pot like the US, retains some (or much) of its cultural items, but nonetheless is still on a par with every other group in the nation. But you could still give up some of that cultural stuff and still have some sense of identity with your ancestor’s culture. But, you might not want to. But, …. and so on, and so on.

[Perhaps you're wondering about the title of this post. Well, I was reminded of an activity that I did in fourth grade, where we students were paired up and then asked to prepare a news broadcast in another language. But most of us were monolingual, and so we were encouraged to mimic the accent and words of our target language. Other members of the class would then have to guess the language. Looking back, this strikes me as a very very strange exercise, and I'm not entirely sure what the goal might have been. But I did learn something significant: to have any effect on the audience, there has to be some common ground. Being the strange sort of lad that I was, I decided to do a Tibetan broadcast. I'll leave it to your imagination what exactly the reaction was. But I have to wonder, what sort of feedback would ching chongs have gotten?]

Though it is currently trendy for Japanese writers to use foreign words in their prose, this was not always the case. In fact, during the Meiji period, Japanese scholars faced the problem of translating a large amount of foreign (Western) literature into Japanese. In order to accomplish this task, they coined many hundreds of new words from Chinese morphemes. In some cases they took previously-existing compounds and assigned them new meanings. Such is the case for 経済 ‘economy’ and 社会 ’society.’ The former is an abbreviation of 経世済民 (or 経世済俗), which means ‘govern the world and save the people.’ The latter, 社会, referred to a religious ceremony held in the spring and autumn during which sacrifices were made to god(s) of the Earth (this is according to this site, assuming I made correct sense of the Chinese). Examples of what I believe are totally new terms include 主義 ‘ideology,’ literally ‘main meaning/significance’ and 抽象 ‘abstraction,’ literally ‘extract image.’)

In their modern meanings, these compounds were born in Japan and then imported by the rest of the sinosphere, including Korea, China, and (occasionally) Vietnam. When I first learned that so many intermediate-level Sino-Japanese words were actually invented in Japan, I was a bit surprised. How many, exactly? I had thought maybe a few dozen, or a hundred tops. Turns out there are quite a few more, at least according to this list on Chinese Wikipedia. You’ve got words like subjective, library, constitution, system, background, necessity, cash, time, space, and absolute. If the list is correct, these were all coined in Japan. Seriously: words that I would have bet were native to Chinese, like 必要, 時間, 空間, and 現金 are there.