lĩŋgwəˈfɪliə
For the life of me I will never understand Japanese. Let me tell you about kawari ni. It’s a conjunction that could variously be translated into English as “instead of,” “to make for,” and “in exchange for.” Still with me? So if we have
A kawari ni B
that could mean “Instead of A, B” or “To make up for A, B” or “In exchange for A, B.” Let me further illustrate how I’ve decided this conjunction is so clear that it’s not at all. Let’s take a concrete example from my homework. I’ll put underscores where I was supposed to put my own answer.
あのレストランはとても安い代わりに________________
ano RESUTORAN wa totemo yasui kawari ni ____________
”[kawari ni] that restaurant being very cheap, __________”
I think totemo ’very’ being there narrows it down a little, so for the purposes of my point let’s pretend it’s not there. So what I’ve been provided is “that restaurant is cheap [conjunction]”…and that one conjunction could either mean the restaurant is cheap or isn’t cheap. As long as the sentence I fill in the blank with is about the restaurant in some way, how the hell then could there be a wrong answer??
I could say the restaurant is/does something instead of being cheap, meaning it’s not cheap. I could say it is/does something to make up for being cheap, meaning it’s cheap and is/does something good (presumably). I could say it is/does something in exchange for being cheap, meaning it’s cheap and (most probably) is/does something bad.
It turns out my RA’s immediate interpretation of the sentence prompted me to interpret it in the latter way, so I ended up writing “In exchange for being very cheap, the restaurant has bad food.” Keep in mind though, that’s tempered by the presence of “very.” Without “very” though, I could have put:
- X: Instead of being cheap, that restaurant is in fact quite expensive.
- Y: To make for being cheap, that restaurant makes a big effort to serve quality food.
- etc.
Again, this is all in a context without “very.” Kawari ni could imply A being true or not (X), having good food (Y) or bad food (the answer I put). Sound like the whole gamut? Right.
Clear as mud.
German guy confused by the meaning of “Party Pooper”.
(via blackmormon)
English word order.
(via cuntakinte)
The history of negative expressions in various languages makes us witness the following curious fluctuation: the original negative adverb is first weakened, then found insufficient and therefore strengthened, generally through some additional word, and this in turn may be felt as the negative proper and may then in the course of time be subject to the same development as the original word.
—Otto Jespersen, Negation in English and Other Languages
There is evidence across a variety of language families that the evolution of negation over time follows a particular pattern. The development in this pattern is divided into three stages.
In stage 1, a language uses a pre-verbal marker for negation.
- O.E. Ic ne seah, word-for-word “I no saw” or “I did not see”
- O.F. Jeo ne dis, word-for-word “I no say” or “I do not say”
In stage 2, a second element becomes obligatory for negation. It doesn’t matter whether this goes after the verb, but it’s during stage 2 that a language requires two elements for proper negation. Jespersen postulated this was due to the original element “weaken[ing],” but this isn’t clear. It could be a case of double negation for emphasis becoming mandatory.
- Mid.E. I ne saugh nawiht, word-for-word “I no saw nothing” or “I didn’t see (anything)”
- Standard French Je ne dis pas, word-for-word “I no say not” or “I do not say”
Stage 3 is when the second element begins to carry the load of negation and the original negating element is dropped optionally or even obligatorily.
- Early M.E. I saw not, “I did not see”
- Colloquial French Je dis pas, word-for-word “I say not” or “I don’t say”
The second negating element that develops might be negative, like in Germanic languages where English not, German nicht, and Dutch niet developed from the word for “nothing.” For these languages, the intermediate stage between the first and second negating words was a case of double negation, c.f. Mid.E. I ne saugh nawiht, which might more naturally be rendered in Modern English as “I didn’t see nothing,” or for funsies “I did not see naught.” In many cases, however, the second negating particle may not develop from a word that is negative per se. The French pas came from Latin passus ”step” and so originally meant, when added to a negated verb “not a step” or “not a bit.” Researchers at Stanford (who also have examples of multiple Jespersen cycles in Greek) support the hypothesis that Jespersen’s cycle occurs not through phonological weakening as Jespersen originally postulated but through weakening of the emphatic negative such that it becomes the new plain negative. This seems to be a commonly supported hypothesis.
It seems Jespersen’s cycle is little studied outside European languages, although it is attested in dialects of Arabic.
My new project will be seeing how well Japanese fits into this framework, if at all.
Tiphon ”violent storm, whirlwind, tornado,” 1550s, from Gk. typhon ”whirlwind,” personified as a giant, father of the winds, perhaps from typhein ”to smoke” (cf. typhus). The meaning “cyclone, violent hurricane of India or the China Seas” (1580s) is first recorded in T. Hickock’s translation of an account in Italian of a voyage to the East Indies by Caesar Frederick, a merchant of Venice:
concerning which Touffon ye are to vnderstand, that in the East Indies often times, there are not stormes as in other countreys; but euery 10. or 12. yeeres there are such tempests and stormes, that it is a thing incredible, but to those that haue seene it, neither do they know certainly what yeere they wil come. [“The voyage and trauell of M. Caesar Fredericke, Marchant of Venice, into the East India, and beyond the Indies”]
This sense of the word, in reference to titanic storms in the East Indies, first appears in Europe in Portuguese in the mid-16th century. It aparently is from tufan, a word in Arabic, Persian, and Hindi meaning “big cyclonic storm.” Yule [“Hobson-Jobson,” London, 1903] writes that “the probability is that Vasco [da Gama] and his followers got the tufao … direct from the Arab pilots.” The Arabic word sometimes is said to be from Gk. typhon, but other sources consider it purely Semitic, though the Greek word might have influenced the form of the word in English. Al-tufan occurs several times in the Koran for “a flood or storm” and also for Noah’s Flood. Chinese (Cantonese) tai fung ”a great wind” also might have influenced the form or sense of the word in English, and that term and the Indian one may have had some mutual influence; toofan still means “big storm” in India.
Some Japanese girls asked for help in figuring out when to use “it” and when to use “this” or “that.” As a native speaker, of course I’ve never really had to consciously think about it, and now that I do, I can’t think of a good rule. It doesn’t help that I had to try to explain in Japanese. Beyond the unambiguous dummy “it” (as in “it is raining”), I couldn’t think of a steadfast rule. Obviously “this” and “that” are demonstratives, so I tried to explain the difference between them and “it,” but the truth is that the three are usually interchangeable with only a change in nuance/feeling/specific implication.
If your friend came up and had you try a new food, you could say all three:
“I like this.”
“I like that.”
“I like it.”
Can anyone help me out? Do you have a better explanation than merely pointing out the use of demonstratives? Google could not have been less helpful.
“I think that that that can do that is pretty awesome.”
It’s really late and I need to go to bed, but this is grammatical, right? I love all the thats. K, going to bed.
If it makes you any less cross, I think it probably comes from Russian. I mean, I dunno why that would make it better other than that it’s a fun fact. But in ‘A clockwork orange’ the slang is all based on Russian vocab but spelt Englishy, and eyes are ‘glazzies’. The Russian word is glaz (can’t do the Cyrillic script). Still no need for the ‘sz’ combo though, as it doesn’t reflect the Russian pronunciation.
That’s interesting. At least if it were spelled “glaz” I could rest assured that it were an attested word somewhere. But I can’t get behind the pointlessly deviant “sz,” I just can’t. And I still think hazel is a perfectly adequate word. Of course, I love subcultures developing their own terms and idiolects, but when I’ve encountered this word, it’s been presented in writing that the authors, I’m quite sure, think is legitimate writing up to par with standardized English.
I’m glad to hear glasz could have a coherent origin though, thanks for that.
Fan fiction is a guilty pleasure of mine. (I mean, I am on tumblr.) I can’t stand to read terrible writing, though. But I think that’s one of the qualities of tumblr I find so alluring; I can follow specific people and be a part of a community that circulates good writing and has an open dialogue with the authors. It’s certainly different from more common ways of consuming fan fiction.
But anyway. I hate it when certain circles of fan fiction writers—or even the entire genre of fan fiction itself—either make up a new, albeit useful, word or overuse or misuse a preexisting word and that word shoots through the community like wildfire. Every fic ends up including it. Every writer ends up misusing it.
It’s not only frustrating but actively confusing to be reading anything, really, that uses a word in such an inappropriate way that it could almost be comical. I’ve read a lot of fics that use the verb keen in this way. I got confused when I first encountered it, so I remember looking it up just to be sure, and yep:
1a : to make a loud and long cry of sorrow : to lament with a keen
b : to make a sound suggestive of a loud cry of sorrow <a keening siren>
2: to lament, mourn, or complain loudly
I am not sure why or how someone originally thought this verb was appropriate to use when describing the sound someone makes during sex, but they did. And for some reason beyond me, it has been reproduced by enough fan fiction writers that I encounter it in at least 10% of the fics I read (that contain sex). Why? Please, God, someone tell me why.
Another one of my bugbears is glasz. As this word doesn’t even follow standard English orthography, you’d hardly be surprised to hear I had no idea what this word could have specifically meant. I knew it was describing eyes, and I knew the word looked like “glass,” but beyond that I was lost. I looked it up on Urban Dictionary, of all places, and here is the eloquent nugget I found:
The most beautiful and magical color ever. It’s a mix between blue, green, gray and a hint of yellow. When you know someone with Glasz eyes, their eyes seem to change colors from green, to blue, to gray.
Not only does this not sound like a common enough eye color to warrant its own word, and besides the fact that I’m 95% sure hazel covers this, the only definition I could find through a simple Google search was on Urban Dictionary. Which, I mean, I’m not one to assign much authority to dictionaries, but it says something about the word’s prevalence.
It’s just that, for the life of me I cannot fathom where this word comes from, and I don’t even particularly care to try to research it or dig around the internet to find out, because, again, I’m fairly certain that’s just hazel eyes. Why are you all using it in your fics? Do you realize it’s an unattested word? You have to! It has a sz for God’s sake. This just reminds me of how often readers were reminded Edward had topaz eyes.
