Welcome to my Japanese Page. As many readers of this page will know, I have an on-going interest in Japan, its people and language. This has led to a number of activities bringing together Japanese and my professional activities in computing and telecommunications. I have assembled this set of pages: (a) to provide information about a number of my projects in the area of Japanese computing and dictionaries, (b) to provide links to some of the resources available on the WWW on Japanese matters.

or what-may-come. feel free to ask questions and i'll happily elaborate. it'll get added to over time. if you've found them useful or enjoyed them, consider : my ko-fi https://t.co/05iDahLrqN"

i guess this can be a RANDOM CHINESE LESSON WITH FAN TIME ???????

Poetry is that which is worth translating. For example, this four-line poem, 1200 years old: a moun­tain, a forest, the setting sun illuminating a patch of moss. It is a scrap of literary Chinese, no longer spoken as its writer spoke it. It is a thing, forever itself, inseparable from its lan­guage. And yet something about it has caused it to lead a nomadic life: insinuating itself in the minds of readers, demanding understanding. (but on the reader's own terms), provoking thought, sometimes compelling writing in other languages. Great poetry lives in a state of perpetual transformation, per­petual translation: the poem dies when it has no place to go. The transformations that take shape in print, that take the formal name of "translation, n become their own beings, set out on their own wanderings. Some live long, and some don't: What kind of creatures are they? What happens when a poem, once Chinese and still Chinese, becomes a piece of English, Spanish, French poetry? Here are 19 incarnations of a small poem by Wang Wei (c. 100-161), who was known in,his lifetime as a wealthy Buddhist painter and calligrapher, and to later generations as a master poet in an age of masters, the Tang Dynasty. The quatrain is from a series of twenty poems on various sights near the Wang River (no relation). The poems were written as par of a mas­sive horizontal landscape scroll, a genre invented by Wang. The painting was copied (translated) for centuries. The original is lost; and the earliest surviving copy comes from the 11th century: Wang's landscape after 1000 years of transformation.

If it gets big enough I'll make some attempt to sort it. Do please comment with additional recs, including self-recs! I need nerdier feeds, always.

Hunxi Guilai's linguistics meta, plus some character and culture stuff

I’m noticing a growing trend of people referring to characters from The Untamed by given name only (my theory is this is because of Netflix. Is it because of Netflix?), and while I’m starting to get more used to it and am also actively interrogating my own emotional reactions to it, I do want to provide some of my thoughts on cultural notes regarding naming conventions.

As a translator, I like to normalise the usage of pinyin honorifics and titles the way Japanese honorifics and titles are normalised in anime/manga. If you’re familiar with anime/manga, I’m sure this list is familiar to you: -san -sama -kun -kaasan -niisan -neesan -sensei -senpai -chan -bucho -shacho. I see no reason at all why we can’t do the same with Chinese honorifics except for the easily translated occupational ones.

Since watching ep 3 for the first time (i.e. january), this has been knocking around in my brain. In ep 3, we see JZXuan waltzing into the same inn as the Yunmeng Trio, booting them, and then rejecting “bad tea”. Ever since, I’ve watched a lot of tea being poured in CQL. It got me thinking, what kind of tea would different sects prefer and what would different characters drink?

I don't think any actual productivity is happening today so why not a thread on diminutives in Chinese and maybe something on punny nicknames? Inspired by friend-Ozzie who lamented that English is the LEAST AFFECTIONATE LANGUAGE EVER OMG WHY IT SUCKS.