quirky language facts
http://www.glowingfaceman.com/blog/surpr…
Eleven Surprising Things about the Japanese Language
1. Raccoons are Bears
Japanese people consider raccoons to be small bears …They call them “araiguma”, which means “bear who washes”, a reference to how raccoons are always washing things in rivers.
Interesting.
9. Different Types of Rice
I’d say that Japanese are the Eskimos of rice, except that the old “100 words for snow” thing is a total urban myth. Anyway, to a Japanese person, rice growing in a field, rice sitting in a bag, and rice cooked in a bowl, are three completely distinct things (albeit closely related in a natural way, but still distinct).
This concept isn’t so foreign.
Pig -> pork
Cow -> steak
Calf -> veal
etc.
December 23rd, 2009 at 3:05 am
re: the name for raccoon: It’s not just Japanese. Check your nearest German/English dictionary for raccoon and you’ll find the word “Waschbar” (don’t know how to get an umlaut in this interface, so imagine there’s an umlaut over the final “a” there.)
December 23rd, 2009 at 7:01 am
I like to leave a bar of soap next to the bird bath for the little buggers.
December 23rd, 2009 at 8:49 am
I like the German word for “squirrel”, which a German cow-orker tells me transliterates (NOTE: TRANSLITERATES) as “little oak rodent”, Eichhörnchen.
December 23rd, 2009 at 9:08 am
Seeing as how Japanese has different words for numbers, depending on the shape of the thing being counted, it is not surprising to learn Japanese has different words for “rice”, depending on how it is being stored.
December 23rd, 2009 at 12:09 pm
But you know the story about pig/pork, cow/beef, calf/veal, right? It’s from the Norman Conquest.
When those Francophones conquered the English, the English serfs working in the stables kept the English words for the animals they tended (cow, pig, calf, sheep); when the animals were served to the French-speaking nobility at the table, they used the French words for them (boeuf, porc, veau, mouton).
I guess what we can learn from this is that chicken was not considered fine dining back then…
December 23rd, 2009 at 2:45 pm
I’m surprised that glowing face man only listed 11 surprising things. Japanese is a strange language when all you know is English. So much of it can’t be directly translated and when you do, all the nuance is lost.
re:raccoons – they’re not the only bears in Japan, there is also the “hole” bear (amaguma) or what we call a badger. Makes sense if a red panda is also a bear. The real strange animal over there is the “tanuki” or what we call the “raccoon dog” and the way they are incorporated into folk tales with their kintama (golden balls).
December 23rd, 2009 at 11:55 pm
I liked this one:
4. Hoping and Wishing
ESL students from Japan have a lot of difficulty learning when to say “hope” and when to say “wish”. This is because in Japanese, they don’t really distinguish between the two concepts. Actually, the same remark goes for Spanish and probably all the romance languages. Hoping vs. wishing seems to be an uncommon distinction. Kind of changes the way you look at a lot of U.S. political slogans.
Indeed. Indeed it does.
December 24th, 2009 at 7:25 am
[quote comment="229310"]But you know the story about pig/pork, cow/beef, calf/veal, right? It’s from the Norman Conquest.
[/quote]
Yep.
I also like that our legal system still uses paired words: “kith and kin”, etc. That way both the nobleborn and the English peasants will be able to understand.
December 25th, 2009 at 5:18 pm
The Raccoon Bear is washing bear in Finnish as well. Probably the germans are at fault. Anteater is a bear in german as well, the antbear. So bär is probably just an common noun for any mammals, that they don’t have in Germany.
December 25th, 2009 at 5:24 pm
I understand that there is a difference between a hope and a wish, but is there a difference between hoping and wishing?
English is not my first language
March 26th, 2010 at 5:19 pm
French for ‘raccoon’ is raton laveur, ‘washer big-rat’.
I wonder what nzc means by emphasizing a misuse of ‘transliterate’.
March 29th, 2010 at 1:27 pm
well… I was misunderstanding “transliterate”, or rather assuming I understood what it meant. (hangs head in shame)
What I should have said, I was “translates literally”. I think I was imagining that that was what “transliterate” meant. :-(
March 29th, 2010 at 4:36 pm
Let’s say you coined a portmanteau, and got a hash-collision.
March 29th, 2010 at 7:24 pm
[quote comment="232578"]Let’s say you coined a portmanteau, and got a hash-collision.[/quote]
Ha!