Seriously, are there any games where the character has to pay taxes? Like Colleagues and Cubicles?
Anyhoo, here's the column
Seriously, are there any games where the character has to pay taxes? Like Colleagues and Cubicles?
Anyhoo, here's the column
Another interesting language to study might be Hebrew. Although the original language is thousands of years old, it was "modernized" in the 20th century. Although they did come up with some inspired Hebrew words for modern inventions (like "chashmal" -> "electricity", which is used in the Prophets to refer to some kind of spiritual light, or "machshev" -> "computer", a variant of "thinker"), probably a third of the words in a complete Hebrew-English dictionary are pure transliterations of English words.
The Role-Playing Jew - 'Tis me blog!
It always seems to me that a lot of writers consider using regular Japanese (i.e. hiragana/kanji) in a situation that could call for it to be slightly boring. There's a sort of sliding scale where characters who use more and more loanwords while replacing regular Japanese go from "normal" to "mysterious" to "downright weird". Tales of Vesperia's Jaeger (Who uses German in the English dub to similar effect) goes as far as replacing words like "watashi" with "me" (ミー) and uses "you" (ユー) and "my friends" (マイフレンズ) to refer to the party.
befriend (v.): to use mecha-class beam weaponry to inflict grievous bodily harm on a target in the process of proving the validity of your belief system.
Using "mii" and "yuu" as pronouns is a common method of showing that a character is a foreigner, on the assumption that all foreigners speak English. Heck, Rasputin in the Devil Summoner Raidou games talked like that too. It's become a standard caricature.
The Japanese are far worse on this front than any other nationality. They love to borrow words. Experts on this topic contend all English words are borrowed, but as a native English speaker I can't appreciate it.
I once saw a post on a language learning forum that said two things:
1) Japanese is full of meaning
2) How do you say teamwork in Japanese?
Cue chiding the guy: the best way to say teamwork in Japanese boils down basically to "teamwork." Yep, full of meaning.
I think Japanese takes advantage of double meanings far more often than English. I am into Idolmaster now. One of the songs is Ai LIKE Hamburger. The first meaning is "I like hamburger" and the second is "love is like a hamburger" because ai (pronounced "I") means love in Japanese. The words of the song suggest both meanings, so I'm sure it's intentional.
When characters speak English in anime, it is sometimes subtitled. I am surprised when this happens because I myself understand it perfectly well.There's a sort of sliding scale where characters who use more and more loanwords while replacing regular Japanese go from "normal" to "mysterious" to "downright weird".
Last edited by flamethrower; 09-09-2011 at 05:04 PM.
as is often seaid english doesn't borrow from other languages, it drags them into alley beats them up and rifles through their pockets for loose adjectives.
Seriously though, heroes phantasia I will add it to the list of cool crossover games that will never come out here due to licensing issues.
The amusing thing about English is that not only does it borrow words from other languages, it is even willing to do it twice.
Take, for example, the words "skirt" and "shirt". These words mean different things in English now, but both come from the exact same early germanic/scandinavian root. The difference is that one was part of English from before it was really English, and the other was borrowed from Scandinavians after English had already broken off into its own thing. So, in other words, English stole vocabulary it already had from its own linguistic sibling.
English isn't the only one to do that. At some point, French borrowed back the English word "cauldron" even though it still used the original version. Can't quite recall what happened after that point. It was part of a linguistics article I read back in 2002.
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