Rich and Strange Aeons

I was trying to pick up my Japanese studies again, and turning to Google Translate as a way to get some daily phrases. "A bowl of rice" was given the plausible characters 米のボウル, but transliterated as "Amerika no booru". Cooked rice (kome) and America do share a kanji, but you wouldn't read it that way!

I shared with my friend in Japan, who laughed, then said you wouldn't read it as "Amerika" even when talking about America.

Also that "kome no booru" was like a bowl made out of rice (plant) or something, and not something you'd say; instead you'd use "ichizen", ichi-zen, zen being an oddly specific counter for bowls of rice or pairs of chopsticks.

So, multiple levels of machine translation fail!

My phone (Android 4, CM 11) swipe input is weird when it comes to profanity. So, there are three levels: its first guess for your word, two alternates to the side, and then a list you can bring up. 'suck', 'sucking', 'shit', and 'dick' will never appear in the first two levels, even if I go slowly and letter by letter -- 'shi' turns into 'shot', with 'shirt' and 'shoot' as alternates. Peter thinks it's a probability weight thing; I figure it's hardwired, with a short list of words being simply barred from your being able to input them too quickly (i.e. accidentally.)

But 'fuck', 'fucking', and 'fucker' I can enter quite easily. 'cunt' too. And 'pussy', with a bit of care (it's hard to swipe a double letter.)

Peter thinks it's also probabilities weighted by how you've used the phone, but I use 'suck' and 'sucking' in texts far more than any of the others... I've probably never tried to swipe 'cunt' before.

My thought for a while was that maybe fuck* weren't in the dictionary at all, until I added them, so wouldn't be barred, but I checked my personal word list and nope, they're not there.

So I dunno. Maybe it's more of an "accidentally unprofessional" filter, like words on the edge of acceptability are barred so you don't tell your boss how much something sucks, but the designers figured if you want to go full vulgar you knew what you were doing. Not how I'd do things.... and no, I don't see a profanity filter I might have turned off.

Wait, I'm wrong! I just checked again, and yes, Android Keyboard has a "block offensive words" option which is off, so I probably did that at some point... and I'm *still* not getting 'suck' or 'shit' as choices above the third level.

***

Totally unrelatedly, I finally have Japanese input working on my laptop! 日本語よ! I'd tried UIM a while back, per the Arch Linux default recommendation, but it didn't work. Then I tried SCIM a few days ago, and it seemed to not work either, but later I found myself typing in Japanese suddenly. Ctrl-Space turns it on, Ctrl-Shift cycles through modes (Anthy [Japanese], Unicode, English/European [which doesn't seem to do anything]. I should look into configuring that, because I need Ctrl-Shift-C and -V to copy and past from/to my Terminator terminal, so there's an annoying conflict there. Still, woo!

Is this more than a toy, given my weak Japanese skills? Slightly: online dictionaries tend to work best with Japanese input, not romaji, so now I can actually use them. And I've started studying it again, so that helps.

One thing I've become fascinated by in Japanese in the use of honorifics to convey degrees of intimacy and relationship. I don't think English was ever quite so developed, and modern society has lost much of the nuance we had (e.g. Miss Bennett vs. Miss Elizabeth.) Which may be just as well for social equality, but still, interesting subject. Two examples weigh on my mind.

First is the Nanoha franchise, and the many names of Fate Testarossa (given name, family name), especially in the first two series, where she's a 9 to 10 year old girl.

* 'Fate-chan' to Nanoha and many others. This is the default state of a little girl, almost anyone can -chan them on minimal acquaintance.
* 'Fate' to her mother and her familiar. This is really intimate, but those are the people you'd expect that from. If it has shades of being condescending, too... well, her mother's not very nice.
* 'Fate-kun' while speaking to 'Admiral' Graham, as a probationary member of magical Starfleet. -kun is sort of the -chan for boys, but it's also used for junior employees, including female ones. So this fits.
* 'Fate-san' to Lindy, who also uses it for mundane girls like Arisu and Suzuka. I like my interpretation, wherein Lindy believes in treating everyone with dignity and respect, even 9 year old girls, and even 9 year old girls who can't defeat her in single combat (which Fate quite possibly could). But it's odd seeing a conversation wherein Chrono or Amy refers to Fate-chan and Lindy uses Fate-san, in adjacent lines.
* 'Testarossa' to Signum, an antagonist and old warrior. Seems to fit, standard brusque 'hey, lastname!'
* 'Testarossa-chan' to Shamal, Signum's softer and more motherly colleague. Interesting blend of "little girl that I am not on first name basis with especially as she's an enemy." Logical, but funny.
* 'Testarossa-san', the default combination, does not exist until maybe StrikerS, the more adult series.

Even my friend W eventually granted that the diversity in Fate's case was a bit much.

We could get really geeky and consider who's actually Japanese or speaking it. The franchise chickens out of considering any language or translation issues; the simplest explanation seems to be to assume that the non-Earthlings are mostly using translation programs through their Devices. Fate's family isn't Earthling, so it could be that her mother and familiar are simply using her name. Lindy is a Japanophile -- she's got a thing that goes doink in her starship office -- and thus could plausibly be learning Japanese on her own, so maybe she's using -san as many foreigners do, to not mess up. Signum and Shamal are outsiders but must have had Japanese downloaded into them before they booted up this time around.

***

Then there's a more recent one, Akagami no Shirayukihime ("Snow White with the Red Hair"). The star's given name is Shirayuki, family name unknown. Age also unknown to me, but I'd say somewhere between 15 and 25, probably 18-20. It's set in a Disney-like "fantasy" quasi-European world: no magic or fantastic elements yet, but a weird anachronistic stew of gas or electric lighting, big glass greenhouses, leaf spring carriage wheels, essays on cyanobacteria, and no guns. My subtitles here, unlike the Nanoha ones, try to translate ("Miss Shirayuki") rather than copy honorifics, which I'll grudgingly grant is maybe appropriate for the setting, but I listen for the honorifics in the spoken Japanese anyway. There do seem to be a lot fewer of them, and a lot more use of simple (given name), but they are there.

To give the list:

* Shirayuki-chan to old people back home
* Shirayuki to the prince/boyfriend
* Shirayuki-kun to the chief herbalist, after she's become junior herbalist
* Shirayuki-san to a more senior yet younger herbalist
* Shirayuki-dono to the palace guards
* Shirayuki-sama as an official guest to another kingdom

One particularly interesting one is -dono, which is even more divergent in use than -kun. One use is to address a social superior, but someone not as superior as -sama implies. Another use is for superiors to address each other, sort of granting "you are *someone's* superior and I respect that, though of course you aren't *my* superior."

So, when I was re-watching and paying attention for this stuff, I caught the palace guards of Clarines addressing the heroine as Shirayuki-dono. Who is she to them? At one level, she's a town girl from another kingdom, with no inherent social status whatsoever, definitely not a -sama. At another level, she's the prince's friend (or, they might imagine, mistress) with his personal invitation to visit the palace, and who addresses *him* with his given name, no honorific, which AIUI is kind of more intimate than actually having sex. So more than the default -san. -dono fits perfectly.

Later, another prince visits, and the princes address each other as Raji-dono and Izana-dono, which fits: equal social superiors acknowledging each other's superiority.

More surprising: a recent flashback revealed that Prince Zen's bodyguards initially used -dono with each other. I don't know their background; given their clothing and their job as his permanent companions, it's plausible that they're members of the minor nobility. In the current time they're on unadorned given name basis with each other, Prince Zen, and I think Shirayuki.

Obi, a later guard/attendant, who's some lower class ninja scum, got to be "Obi-dono" recently while accompanying the heroine on a semi-state visit. I imagine that was "you're the personal attendant of this girl who isn't a princess but is kind of being treated like one, and you're dressed up, -dono seems safe, won't insult any -samas who overhear and you won't kill me if it turns out you really are a -sama yourself." For his own part he may still use honorifics with the other two guards (I'm not sure, I haven't paid *that* close attention), and definitely refers to Shira with respect; if not an actual honorific, then certainly a lot of "oujo" (lady/princess), especially when talking about her.

As mentioned, Shirayuki normally addresses the star prince as simply Zen, which must be shocking and provocative for those who overhear. Usually he's either Denka or Zen-denka to people. The chief herbalist used "Zen-sama" in talking to him about how he could abuse his position, but I couldn't parse it more than that. When Shira said goodbye to him recently, while surrounded by lots of people, she used Zen-ouji (another suffix for 'prince'), I assume to cater to appearances for once. She also addressed his older brother as Izana-ouji. Why ouji vs. denka? I have no idea. I've seen 'denka' translated as "highness" while 'ouji' is literally "king-boy", but I don't know the relative status.

Shira herself as apprentice court herbalist is Shirayuki-kun to the Chief Herbalist (that employer-employee thing against), Shirayuki-san to Ryu, who is her herbal senior but her junior in age, and Shirayuki-chan way back in the first episode to the old people she'd grown up among.

I'm trying to recall if anyone addressed Prince Raji, who's a sleazy scummy chump, as Raji-kun to be insulting.

So there are various philosophies of translation, how literal or high level you should be, how much to preserve meaning vs. experience. For example, samurai daimyo and ninja could be translated as knight lord and assassin. This would make them seem more familiar to European cultures and preserving or 'translating' the experience -- after all, samurai isn't exotic to Japanese people -- at the potential cost of shades of meaning, and the exoticness that might be why someone wants to read the translation in the first place.

One specific disagreement I've seen is over Japanese honorifics: -san, -chan, -kun, etc. Pro translators seem to pride themselves on full naturalization, turning -san into Mister and relatives, -chan into endearments if anything, and such. Anime/manga fans generally prefer preserving them, and that has taken over professional manga translations, which now usually have an honorifics guide in the front. I prefer that myself, as I can easily see uses of honorifics that would be hard to translate without contortion[1], and it's not much work to have learned them.

But I realized, part of it may be due to the difference in intended audience. Pro novel translators probably assume that theirs may be the only novel from that language read by many of the readers, and aim to minimize the work expected of the readers. Anime/manga fans generally read or watch many such works, often trying to learn Japanese for real themselves, so for us, the not very large amount of work in learning is amortized among many works.

[1] One example: it seems easy to translate Gingko-san as Mister Gingko, or Hayate-san as Miss Hayate. But what if someone's gender is unknown or non-binary? You've got a choice problem in English that simply doesn't exist in Japanese, where -san can apply to anyone or anything.

Webcomics: I started looking at The Midlands, some weird alt-dim urban-fantasy with elves comic I've been seeing people recommend. Interesting, though I'm still not sure what's going on. At the same time I read Casey and Andy, kind of like another Sluggy Freelance -- a couple of mad scientists and supporting cast; lots of gag strips, some story arcs, some cheesecake. Fun stuff. The same author has moved on to Cheshire Crossing, an Alice Wendy Dorothy Mary Poppins comic, updated as he finishes each issue. Interesting start.

I re-read The Scar. It held up.

My kanji study linked up with shogi, the Japanese version of chess. I've never gotten to play the game, but it looks, um, interesting. Using that word a lot. A 9x9 board, so more space then chess, and most of the pieces are puny -- knights can only go forward, generals move like kings but with fewer options, there's one rook and one bishop. OTOH captured pieces can be dropped in on your own side, so the game's actually a lot more complex. A silver general on the board has 5 moves; in the hand, it has 40. Even a unblocked queen in the middle of a chessboard has 27 options, I think. And it doesn't matter how many moves queens have if they self-destruct, but that doesn't happen in shogi.

But that's not the point. The point is that you "should" (though it took me years) be wondering why a Japanese piece is called a bishop. Japan doesn't have bishops, except for the <1% who have wandered into Catholic religions. So why call it a bishop? Well, it moves like one, unlimited diagonal movement -- that's a good reason. Still, I started wondering what they actually call the thing, and fortunately the Web quickly provided. Apparently they call it an angle goer, and it, along with the Western bishop, descend separately from the Indian "elephant" piece, which probably moved by jumping two squares diagonally. All the old pieces sucked -- except for the 'rook' (Persian rukh, chariot), aka chariot, which always had its unlimited horizontal movement. And in shogi is called the flying chariot.

That site also shows the two-character form of the various pieces, which I got to look up, or reverse lookup, on JDIC. Yay for some of the characters making sense. Though the lance looks like "incense chariot" and the "honorable horse" (aka knight) looks like "cinnamon tree horse". And the "king" is called the jade general -- but the characters for king and jade are the same, and the Chinese Heavenly King is the Jade Emperor. There's a connection there!

It might even be correct. Transliteration:

Ruuku, watashi ga anata no otousan desu.

Yeah, I'm a geek. It was prompted by the study group leader showing us his katakana for "lightsaber". I'm not sure if otousan should have the 'u', or be 'chichi' instead in this usage, or if 'anata no' is the best way of saying 'your'. Or if it'd have the same emotional impact as the original.