Noncompositional

It’s been a very dreary new year so far - I think the sun’s been out twice over the past two weeks. For those who like to see the sun from time to time, it’s been rather drab. I move that we should celebrate the new year when spring comes around. Then we could make use of the Japanese words 迎春 and 新春, meaning ‘greet (the) spring’ and ‘new spring,’ which they still use over there to talk about the new year, even though most people recognize the turning of the calendar on January 1st.

As for resolutions: I’ve got just the one - use the dictionary more. In case some linguists didn’t know, those lexicographers know a lot about language, and some new discoveries you’ve made might actually be recorded in one of them big books. Amazing! For instance, I’ve recently been reading a series of epic fantasy books by George R. R. Martin called A song of ice and fire. It’s set in a period reminiscent of medieval Europe, and in particular is said to resemble the War of the Roses (though with dragons, demons, and other more modern inventions). This means we get some fun “old-sounding” English throughout the dialogue. One such example is the use of as as a sort of relativizing subordinator, as in The king is like to exact revenge on those lords as allow the rebels to make camp in their own domains.

Curious as to when (and where) this use of as was in use, I checked the OED and lo, all was revealed unto me.

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(Welcome to those searchers who have come in search of “Samurai Shampoo.” If you were looking for information on the anime, I hope this page if useful.)

I was recently introduced to a Japanese anime called Samurai Champloo サムライチャンプルー. A product of Watanabe Shinichiro (of Cowboy Bebop fame), it’s a period film in the Edo period. It centers around (as far as I can tell, since I’ve only seen two episodes) three people - two masterless swordsmen and a waitress and their antics as they go on quests and such (I can’t really say what the arc of the first season is yet, obviously - check websites if you really care).

When I first heard the name, I thought, “what the heck is (a) champloo?” It sounded like shampoo, basically, but I thought that couldn’t be right. It turns out that champloo is a type of dish native to Ryukyu. You basically take a bunch of vegetables and tofu, mix ‘em up and fry ‘em, and you’ve got it. There’s some interesting talk on the Japanese Wikipedia page for the food. It reads

Additionally, the word champloo also exists in Indonesian and Malaysian (languages), where it means the same thing as Japanese chanpo (’mix,’ ‘mixed food’). Further, Korean also has a word of the same meaning, chanpon. It is thought that each of these words has a common origin, though there are various theories on the exact source. One theory is that it is from the Fujian greeting 吃飯 or 吃飯了 (’have you eaten?’, ‘hello’), or possibly from the word meaning ‘to mix’ from the same language （In the Beijing dialect there is a character with a reading of chān which means ‘mix’）. Or it may be from the Portuguese or Dutch word for ‘mix,’ champon.

Well, the etymology is…interesting… but in any case, this still didn’t tell me why the show is called what it is. Clue number one: one of the characters is from Ryukyu. Then I went to the official Japanese site, where it says that this character, Mugen, practices a highly idiosyncratic style of swordfighting called, surprisingly, チャンプルー剣法 (champloo sword-technique), which basically means that he has a whole bunch of mixed up techniques combined into one (that looks vaguely like capoeira, according to some). So there you go. I also prefer to think that the getting together of these three main characters also constitutes a type of champloo dish. Yum. And no shampoo in sight. It’s a period piece, after all.

Just a short one here. While doing research on the light verb suru in Japanese, I found a paper by a Hiroyuki Ura. He has a paper published in the Journal of Japanese Linguistics in 1993, which has to have one of the most unfortunate titles I’ve ever seen:

Extraction of Doo and its implications

Ouch. Okay, actually it should be The extraction of Doo and its implications, so that everyone knows that the “doo” is the adverb written どう, ‘how.’ But still, the first time I saw it cited the typeface distinction wasn’t made, so I had some trouble figuring out just what was going on.

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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[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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In a recent post at languagehat, entitled The Chinese Babel, an NYT article detailing some of the more extreme cases of linguistic diversity in China is presented. This seems like a good time to mention some of the more interesting points in a book I’ve been reading recently, The Languages of China by S. Robert Ramsey. This is an overview of the many Chinese languages spoken on the mainland (including mini-grammars), as well as the many non-Sinitic languages spoken within the nation’s borders. A history of the Chinese language and its study is also given a large chapter, as well as recent history regarding the rise of 普通话 as a national standard.

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