Category Archives: Japanese

arigatou/obrigado

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No Sword has an interesting post on the etymology of the Japanese arigatou. Matt adds that the notion the word is from the Portuguese word obrigado is “wrong, wrong, wrong.”

Arigatou is the Western Japanese way of saying arigataku, the adverbial form (more or less) of arigatai. The basic rule is replacing ku with u, but in this case that produced au, which becomes ou († a lengthened o) through the magic of sound change. This also happened to omedetou († (o)medetai) and ohayou († (o)hayai). (It is not a coincidence that despite the Tokyo version getting “Standard Japanese” status, the standard politeness terms were imported from the old Imperial capital!)

source: Sorry, Portugal, No Sword, February 3, 2006

online course material from MIT

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The Massachusetts Institute of Technology’s OpenCourseWare makes available selections from the teaching materials for more than one thousand MIT courses. Some of these, such as those in linguistics, may be of particular interest to readers of Pinyin News.

MIT also makes available much of the material from its classes on languages, including those for Mandarin:

and Japanese:

Many of these sections include audio and even video.

source: link spotted in Forumosa’s “learning Chinese” forum.

ominous katakana?

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In Japan, an eleven-day-old baby was kidnapped from his mother’s side.

According to police, a note in which the suspects demanded a ransom was handwritten in kanji and katakana. Katakana has an ominous aspect as if to mask the identity of the writer. Perhaps the suspect thought that hiragana would show the peculiarities of his handwriting.

“Ominous” katakana? Are these the equations?
angles (katakana) = scary
curves (hiragana) = individual but not scary
Hmm.

Fortunately, the story has a happy ending. The bad guys were caught, though not through graphology, and the child is back with its parents.

Interesting that handwriting in hiragana would be seen as more revealing of individuality than handwriting in kanji. I wonder what the calligraphers of Japan — and those of China and Taiwan, too! — would have to say about that.

In another strange twist, the kidnapper appears to have used techniques from a mystery novel, 99% no Yukai (99 percent abduction), by Futari Okajima, which was initially published in 1988 and reprinted in 2004. The use of katakana in the ransom note is one of the parallels between the book and the recent crime.

A ray of light as baby is recovered unharmed, Asahi Shimbun, January 10, 2006

Firefox extensions for Mandarin Chinese texts

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Although my favorite Web browser remains Opera (which is now free), I recognize that Firefox (which has always been free) has some nice things going for it, especially its wide range of extensions.

At least two of these extensions might be of special interest to readers of this site: Translate, which will translate a Web page from Mandarin Chinese (as well as lots of other languages) into English (more or less), and the Adso GreaseMonkey Script, which provides Pinyin and English annotation for Chinese characters.

First, Translate, which is the cat’s pajamas. I don’t know how I survived without it.

  • Using Firefox, Install Translate. (If that link has expired, find the installation through the home page of Gravelog.)
    • Firefox will likely block your installation at first, which is a good thing. (Safety first.)
    • Look for this message in a bar near the top of your browser window: “To protect your computer, Firefox prevented this site (ctomer.com) from installing software on your computer.”
    • Click on the “Edit Options” button in the same bar (near the top right of your screen).
    • A pop-up box will appear. Click on “Allow” and then “Close”.
  • Restart Firefox.

    • Try out the extension by going to a Web page with text in Chinese characters.

    From the Firefox menu, choose Tools --> Translate --> Translate from Chinese-simp[lified] (or Tools --> Translate --> Translate from Chinese-trad[itional], as appropriate). The translated Web page will appear in a few moments.

    If you want to translate just a portion of the text on a Web page, or if Babel Fish chokes on the text of the entire Web page and you need an alternate approach, simply use your mouse to select the text you’re interested in. Next, right click and select Translate --> From Chinese-simp (or Translate --> From Chinese-trad , as appropriate). Note: The translation will appear in a new tab, so don’t sit around waiting for the translation to appear in the same tab you’ve been working in.

    Translate also handles Japanese, Korean, French, German, Spanish, Italian, Dutch, Portuguese, Greek, and Russian.

    A related but less effective extension is gtranslate, which handles limited amounts of text in simplified but not traditional characters.

    Now let’s examine the Adso GreaseMonkey Script.

    • Install Firefox or upgrade to version 1.5.
    • Using Firefox, install Greasemonkey (If that link has expired, find the installation through the main Greasemonkey page.)
      • Firefox will likely block your installation at first, which is a good thing. (Safety first.)
      • Look for this message in a bar near the top of your browser window: “To protect your computer, Firefox prevented this site (greasemonkey.mozdev.org) from installing software on your computer.”
      • Click on the “Edit Options” button in the same bar (near the top right of your screen).
      • A pop-up box will appear. Click on “Allow” and then “Close”.
    • Restart Firefox.
    • Install the Adso GreaseMonkey Script.
      • Look for this message in a bar near the top of your browser window: “This is a Greasemonkey user script. Click Install to start using it.”
      • Click the “Install” button in the same bar (near the top right of your screen).

    Try it out by going to a Web page with text in Chinese characters.

    To activate the script, press “a”.
    Click on or highlight the script you’re interested in seeing the Pinyin for.
    Move your mouse over the Chinese characters in the pop-up box; the Pinyin will appear.
    screenshot of how this popup looks

    To deactivate the script, press any other key.

    For more information, see the Firefox Plugin: Chinese text annotation thread on Chinese-forums.com.

    Of related interest is the Rikai Web page converter.

    names, ethnicity, and colonialism

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    Joel at Far Outliers has an interesting post on how Koreans chose Japanese names during the Japanese colonial period. (Spotted on Language Hat.)

    Regarding name frequency in Taiwan, I once did some checking of an old version of Chih-Hao Tsai’s invaluable list of Chinese names (in Taiwan) and ended up with the top ten names covering 50 percent of the population. Now that he’s got an improved name-list online, I should check again.

    Also here in Taiwan, few aborigines have taken the trouble to change their official names, now that they finally have an alternative to the sinicized versions that had been forced upon them by Taiwan’s officialdom. It will be interesting to see how the situation changes, if at all, now that new national ID cards are finally being issued. For more on this, see Romanization to be allowed on some Taiwan ID cards, including the link in the note.

    Japan’s year of love

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    The Kanji Aptitude Testing Foundation has announced Japan’s kanji of the year.

    爱

    This is used to write the Japanese word for “love.”

    With 4,109 of the total of 85,322 votes, 爱 beat out the character in second place, 改 (reform), by nearly two to one.

    I’ve always particularly enjoyed the first part of the etymology of this character:

    The top was once 旡 jì ‘belch’, for obscure reasons; it has become 爫 (zhǎo) ‘hand’ plus 冖 (mì) ‘cover’. Below are 心 (xīn) ‘heart’ and 夂 (zhǐ) ‘walk slowly’ (a foot pointing down).

    (Please remember not to confuse the etymology of a Chinese character with the etymology of the word its used to represent; they’re not the same thing.)

    Some opponents of simplified characters are particularly annoyed that the simplified form of this character, 爱, omits the “heart” element and inserts “friend” (友 / yǒu) as the base. But as far as I know, no one has objected lately to the removal of “belch.”

    traditional vs. simplified:

    愛 爱

    source: ２００５年「今年の漢字」応募集計結果発表, December 13, 2005.

    mobile phone with hiragana menus

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    NTT Do Co Mo is releasing a mobile phone aimed at the children’s market. One of the phone’s features is that users will be able to switch its screen-menu system from kanji to hiragana.

    子どもが簡単に操作できるよう、メニューやガイドの難しい漢字をひらがなで表示することができます。

    I wonder if similar features can be found on other electronic items in Japan. (Matt, any ideas?)

    The phone is model SA800i.

    English edging out Japanese in science — even in Japan

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    A recent article in a Japanese newspaper discusses the dominance of English in the world of science, specifically in Japan. It contains this telling anecdote:

    Earlier this year, the Japan Society for Bioscience, Biotechnology and Agrochemistry revised the rules governing submission of papers to its Japanese-language journal, Kagaku to Seibutsu (Chemistry and Biology), as follows: “Papers should be those whose contents cannot be explained properly in languages other than Japanese, or those that are of particular interest to Japanese readers.”

    Akinori Ota, 57, a professor at the University of Tokyo’s Graduate School of Agricultural and Life Sciences who participated in making the revision, says papers likely to draw attention from around the world should be submitted to its English journal, Bioscience, Biotechnology and Biochemistry.

    “It isn’t that we don’t encourage researchers to write papers in Japanese. However, papers written in Japanese are not widely read overseas,” Ota says. The society has already returned some papers to their authors together with advice to write them in English. No papers that would be appropriate for publication in Japanese have been received.

    (Emphasis added.)

    source: Japanese scientists use English or get the silent treatment, Asahi Shimbun, November 5, 2005.