So, I won the Listserve and my mail went live today. The Listserve is a very interesting mailing list. When you subscribe to it, you enter a daily lottery to write a mail to the listserve. Thus it has very varied content and at least for me the mails are rarely uninteresting. I really recommend you to join it. But here now the content of the mail for you to read, too. The mail is also mirrored here.

Tid Bits about Japanese

You know what is really hard? Cursing in Japanese. There are not a lot of bad words in Japanese. If you want to insult someone, you do it completely by using the wrong politeness levels. Japanese has different levels of politeness built-in and you can measure the social status between people just by listening to them (and even what their status is compared to another person they are talking about). So when you want to insult someone, you use higher status vocabulary for yourself and lower for the other person. You use different words for “I” and “You” and if you are Yakuza-style all the words start to end in “eeeee” ;)

Japanese has two syllable-alphabets and uses Chinese characters (Kanji) as well. Until 2010 the standard set of Kanji to be used in official documents, newspapers etc (the so-called “daily used characters”) were 1945. In 2010 they increased that number by 196 new characters (and removed 5) because all the people are using computers and cell phones to communicate nowadays, thus writing by hand is not so important anymore and adding more characters is therefore not that much of a problem. What reading Japanese makes hard is that one Kanji in Japanese can have up to 12 ways readings - depending on the word it is used in or which syllables follow. In Chinese one character has one reading. The reason is that for one Chinese and Japanese are very different languages with Chinese being a tonal one and Japanese being a language that isn’t tonal, thus characters got several usages. In addition there were several phases words got imported from China and each time another Chinese dialect was the base for the final Japanese reading. The consequence is that its hard to learn to read Japanese. And when you need to use paper dictionaries, you use two dictionaries usually. One character-dictionary and another one which is more like a traditional one. With experience you get pretty good in guessing the readings, but its always a lot of searching if the searched combination of characters isn’t already in the character dictionary.

The origins of Japanese are unclear but it is probably an Altaic language with relations to Turkish and Mongolian. The language closest to Japanese is Korean. You can easily translate one language into the other. What is most interesting is that they are grammatically very similar but the lexic (the words) is totally different. I.e. the word “to eat” is “taberu” but “meogda” in Korean. But when you get to words loan from Chinese, someone who knows Japanese can get a lot of knowing Kanji (Hanja in Korean) and what the Korean reading for the character is. Korean also uses only one reading for a Hanja. But nowadays Hanja are rarely used in Korean. But Korean has with Hangeul the best “alphabet” ever. It’s easier to learn to read and write than any other I’ve seen. Thanks to a king in the 15th century who ordered scientists to develop an alphabet that is easy to learn for increasing alphabetism. In the past there were times when people tried to get rid of Chinese characters in Japanese but it never worked out. There was even a daily newspaper completely in one of the Japanese syllable alphabets. I can understand why. Japanese is far easier to skim when you have Kanji in there. Unfortunately it takes some time to recognize this. That’s enough about Japanese. If you want to talk about Japanese, Japan (especially politics or economics) or old video games (8-/16-bit), drop me a mail.