serinemolecule

[serinemolecule]

hmm, how come they have Gon say "jan, ken, pon" in Hunter×Hunter then?

That's how you count down the rock paper scissors in Japanese. The name of the game is Janken, you usually count down with Jan Ken Pon, and the three moves are Guu, Paa, and Choki.

Here's Japanese Wikipedia, translated to English by me:

Theories of the etymology of the word Janken include: from 両拳 (ryanken) meaning two fists, from 鋏拳 (jaachuan) meaning scissors fists, from 石拳 (jakuken) meaning stone fist, from 蛇拳 (jaken) meaning snake fist, from the Cantonese 猜拳 (chaikyun) meaning guess fist, or that it's a Lepcha word. Many more theories exist, and it's very unclear which is true.

There are several theories about the etymology of "jan ken pon". It may come from the Buddhist term 料間法意 (ryakenhoui), or it may have come from Chinese people in Nagasaki as 様拳元宝 (yankenenpou), but these are both doubtful because of the number of different ways to count down. Since "hoi" is a common way to call out (like "heave-ho" in English), it could also just be a corruption of "janken" + "hoi". In 1929, the National Janken Countdown Collection had collected 135 different countdowns, adding over 100 since then.

and where does "ro, sham, bo" come from?

Here's Wikipedia:

The name Roshambo or Rochambeau has been claimed to refer to Count Rochambeau, who allegedly played the game during the American Revolutionary War. The legend that he played the game is apocryphal, as all evidence points to the game being brought to the United States later than 1910; if this name has anything to do with him it is for some other reason. It is unclear why this name became associated with the game, with hypotheses ranging from a slight phonetic similarity with the Japanese name jan-ken-pon, to the presence of a statue of Rochambeau in a neighborhood of Washington, DC.

Rock Paper Scissors was invented in China, supposedly during the Han Dynasty which is 200ish BC to AD 200ish, by which I mean it was probably invented in AD 1600ish [1]. A lot of different sets of three things beating each other were tried, but it eventually settled into Rock, Scissors, Cloth.

(Cloth makes so much more sense than paper. You can imagine a cloth bag sturdy enough to hold a rock.)

Rock, Scissors, Cloth spread throughout all of Asia under that name, but when it got to Japan, Japan decided to rename it to Rock, Scissors, Paper. My best guess was that “paper” was easier to say than “cloth” and everyone knew what you meant, anyway.

Europe and the rest of the world got Rock Paper Scissors from Japan sometime in the 1900s, so that’s why we’re stuck with Paper.

[1] The problem with ancient Chinese history (really, with ancient history in general) is that you have to rely on ancient historians, and ancient historians are not great about separating facts from rumors. [2]

[2] Do you ever write a blog post solely so you can cite it in the footnotes of another post? And then the footnote post explodes because @argumate reblogged it, before you even publish the post that cites it as a footnote? Because that totally happened to me today.

[serinemolecule]

Update: Japanese Wikipedia is now very sure that Rock Paper Scissors originated in Japan and spread to the rest of Asia from there. The other Wikipedias still have consensus on it coming from China.

Speaking of Japanese, while other languages use words that mean "rock", "paper/cloth", and "scissors", the Japanese words for the three options:

guu (rock), paa (paper), choki (scissors)

are sound effects (choki is a snip-snip sound effect, and guu/paa are kind of like pow or wham)

Rock Paper Scissors was invented in China, supposedly during the Han Dynasty which is 200ish BC to AD 200ish, by which I mean it was probably invented in AD 1600ish [1]. A lot of different sets of three things beating each other were tried, but it eventually settled into Rock, Scissors, Cloth.

(Cloth makes so much more sense than paper. You can imagine a cloth bag sturdy enough to hold a rock.)

Rock, Scissors, Cloth spread throughout all of Asia under that name, but when it got to Japan, Japan decided to rename it to Rock, Scissors, Paper. My best guess was that “paper” was easier to say than “cloth” and everyone knew what you meant, anyway.

Europe and the rest of the world got Rock Paper Scissors from Japan sometime in the 1900s, so that’s why we’re stuck with Paper.

[1] The problem with ancient Chinese history (really, with ancient history in general) is that you have to rely on ancient historians, and ancient historians are not great about separating facts from rumors. [2]

[2] Do you ever write a blog post solely so you can cite it in the footnotes of another post? And then the footnote post explodes because @argumate reblogged it, before you even publish the post that cites it as a footnote? Because that totally happened to me today.

[serinemolecule]

Hey, I will not have you insult my beloved Aero Glass in this way.

Aero Glass didn't get walked back in disgrace, it was widely beloved and Microsoft just jumped on Metro flat design because they wanted to be cool and different. Metro was popular on the Zune but it was widely hated on Windows, and even now it doesn't exactly have lots of fans.

And Apple's new Liquid Glass is much worse than Aero Glass. Aero Glass cared a lot about contrast. Look at this:

Not only are the edges very clearly defined, but see the faint white glow behind the text. That's good contrast. It also was basically never used for any text smaller than this. I never had trouble reading things in Aero Glass.

It doesn't deserve to be lumped in with what Apple's doing:

Why why does every UX designer eventually contract the brain parasite which makes them think frosted glass is a good idea in computer interfaces. It always looks sexy in the demo videos (which the designer controls completely) and then is a friggin mess in the real world where any kind of chaotic text or images could be right behind the glass, making the UI elements unreadable.

It happened on Windows and it happened on Linux, and both times it had to get walked back in disgrace, but those were both 20 years ago, and they had the excuse that nobody had done it before since GPUs only just became powerful enough, so they couldn't know what a mess it would be in practice. Apple doesn't have that excuse.

[serinemolecule]

A lot of people are saying that the Chinese name of REDnote, 小红书 Xiǎohóngshū, is "Little Red Book" in Chinese.

While technically the individual characters do mean that, Mao's Little Red Book is called 毛主席语录 Máo Zhǔxí Yǔlù "Quotations from Chairman Mao Tse-tung" in Chinese, and the international nickname "Little Red Book" came about because while the name is pretty short in Chinese, it's a mouthful in English.

The book was also called 红宝书 Hóngbǎoshū "Red Treasure Book" during the Cultural Revolution (it's not called that much these days). You may notice that this has "Red" and "Book" in common with "Little Red Book". But please note that:

Red is China's favorite color. Not just country-associated things like with the US's red/white/blue. It's everything - traditional culture, good luck, etc.

Book/Journal is pretty common branding for social media. Have you heard of Facebook? Livejournal?

Anyway. All this is to say that the association between REDnote and Quotations from Chairman Mao Tse-tung is not immediately obvious to a Chinese person, and the Chinese name is not the same at all.

BBC here is simply wrong, as is that Tumblr thread floating around.

By "not immediately obvious", I mean that any Chinese person that has not heard of the English short-name for the Little Red Book is not going to think about it all when seeing the Chinese name for REDnote.

Whether the similarity was intentional is not a question I have the answer to. But here is a Chinese person saying it probably isn't. The founder says the red is for Stanford (where he graduated) and Bain & Company (where he worked).

[serinemolecule]

Does your knowledge of East Asia extend to horticulture? Do people there have terrible problems trying to keep bamboo out of places they don't want it, or do they have some way to deal with it, or are the dynamics different where it's a native rather than an invasive plant?

Sorry, no clue.

I found this mention at the bottom of the Chinese Wikipedia page for bamboo:

雖然竹可以作為盆栽、觀賞用途，但是對於建築物卻有極大的破壞風險。竹的生長速度極快，根莖蔓延得很快，應該避免在花園種植竹類。快速長生的竹會破壞地基、混凝土。而由於竹根深藏於地底，橫向生長，要根除的成本極高，所以一般來說，花園發現竹類會對房價有負面影響。

While bamboo can be used for bonsai, it poses a very large danger to buildings. Bamboo grows extremely quickly, its stem extends very quicky, so you should avoid planting it in gardens. Quicky growing bamboo can harm foundations and concrete. And because bamboo can grow underground and sideways, making it very difficult to exterminate, the discovery of bamboo in a garden will negatively influence property values.

Which seems to confirm your suspicions. BUT the two sources cited are both British:

https://web.archive.org/web/20220601061310/https://www.dailymail.co.uk/sciencetech/article-7772477/British-gardeners-urged-NOT-grow-bamboo.html

https://web.archive.org/web/20220605100918/https://www.rhs.org.uk/plants/types/grasses/bamboo-control

(So my guess is that this was written by some Hong Konger living in the UK.)

That's the only mention I can find of negatives on Wikipedia, though. The English, Japanese, and Chinese articles are otherwise all relentlessly positive and talk about how many uses it has and all its cultural significance in religion and considered one of the Four Gentlemen and considered pure etc etc.

I googled "bamboo weed" in Japanese (protip: if you know both languages, Japanese is better to google in because of the lack of Great Firewall) and got some results about bamboo control but about as many about using bamboo to control other weeds, so that and the Chinese sources being English-language does suggest to me that it sometimes causes trouble but not particularly? One reason might be that, because it's native, building techniques already account for it. But I'm just speculating, I woke up today with zero knowledge of what kinds of trouble people have with bamboo.

[serinemolecule]

For the record, the Japanese word 酒 sake refers to any alcoholic drink. If you're looking for sake specifically, it's called 日本酒 nihonshu in Japanese.

It's kind of like how "allah" is just the Arabic word for "god", or how "salsa" is just the Spanish word for "sauce".

just had a convo with my friend. she mentioned she doesnt like sake cause its sparkling.

“wait, sake is sparkling? what have i been drinking?” i said. because i also dont like sparkling stuff.

i look at the sake bottle ive been drinking from for fun events for the past year. its vinegar.

i’ve been drinking strawberry flavored vinegar.

[serinemolecule]

There's a thread on my dash about how people are wrong about D&D being easier to learn than other games.

This is a thing I've thought a lot about. There's a lot I don't like about D&D. But one thing I really love: there are websites that will teach you the rules. Like d20srd.org or 5e.tools or any of a number of wikis. And then I can just click on things, and read things, and if I don't understand something I can open it in a new tab, or just click around and use the back button, and keep reading until I understand how something works.

Most other RPGs, my DM will give me like a 200-page PDF. And then scrolling through it will be really laggy and will involve going back and forth and up and down a lot, or maybe zooming really far out if I want to see the whole page at once, and if I want to look at something else I will have to lose my position or do something even more complicated. And there will be no links or anything like that.

I have one of the fastest PDF readers, I can flip dozens of pages in seconds, but that's still nothing compared to just clicking on a link to go straight to the thing I'm looking for.

Or worse, sometimes it's multiple PDFs. I can't even Ctrl+F for the stuff I want! Not that Ctrl+F will find where any given thing is explained, it'll just give me a million pages where the word was used.

And that's on desktop. On a phone? Completely hopeless.

[serinemolecule]

As far as I'm aware, it's a lot more common to use Pinyin for the English translation.

Like, Touhou Wiki's entry for Kurenai Misuzu Hon Meirin says Hong Meiling.

The English title of Paripi Koumei uses Kongming and not Koumei.

I regularly see Sun Wukong (rather than Son Goku) and Lu Bu (rather than Ryofu) in subtitles, too.

I think the older you go, the more common it is to transliterate the Japanese, but in modern times basically everyone uses Pinyin.

When translating a manga set in China, should we transliterate the names as if they're Japanese kanji or should we assume they're the Chinese pronunciation?

touhou fans have spent literal years arguing about this

[serinemolecule]

It does have to do with people. It comes from 人 hito + 手 te, because the five-pointed star looks like a human hand. 人手 is also an alternative way to write starfish in Japanese.

One thing to note about Japanese is that frequently the written word and the spoken word have completely separate etymologies (the technical term for this is jukujikun or nankun). It's a good guess that's what's happening, whenever you can't figure out how the pronunciation and kanji are related.

[serinemolecule]

These are stamps you might get on your homework in a Japanese elementary school. I love how relentlessly optimistic they are. From left to right:

really good job

good job

you tried

let's try

[serinemolecule]

Japanese/Chinese both want "walk a step" [1] or "step a step" [2], and "do a decision" [3] (Japanese also accepts "do a step" and "decide a decision" [4]).

[1] 一歩を歩む / 走一步 [2] 一歩を踏む / 迈一步

[3] 決定をする / 做个决定 [4] 決定を下す

"Take" and "make" are both ungrammatical for both phrases in both languages, except "do"/"make" are the same word in Chinese, so "make a decision" is a valid parse of the Chinese.

In French we say "take a decision" and "make a step", while it's the opposite in English

[serinemolecule]

Hi, I'm just making my about page into a pinned post.

L-Serine is a proteinogenic amino acid.

…

I always feel weird talking about myself, I guess I worry that it makes me seem conceited or something, but I like learning about people through their About pages and pins so I guess I should talk more… so.

Hi! I’m Emily. I’m a huge nerd, which is mostly what this blog is about.

“I’m a huge nerd” means, among other things, I’m infatuated with the Chinese and Japanese languages, and can seriously infodump at you for hours about them. I’m also like this about a lot of other school-related and generally-nerdy stuff (like amino acids, if you couldn’t tell from the blog name/URL).

This blog is probably approximately 50% linguistics.

Popular posts I’ve written include:

- Kanji, an overview of how weird Japanese kanji is

- Racist map projections, the story of the Gall-Peters projection

- Names in Japan, an overview of how people name their kids in Japan

- The Book Test, an opinion on whether viruses are alive

- How to credit card, a practical guide on how to credit card

- Copyright notices are not clocks, about how © is used wrong

- Tiananmen, thoughts and context

- Diacritics in English, about how accents like “é” exist in English, too

Sometimes, this blog veers into politics. I’m left-libertarian: I think markets are a good way to reduce suffering, but the important part is reducing suffering, not protecting property rights or anything like that.

Other things… I’m Chinese and blog about being Chinese sometimes. I’m approximately utilitarian. I’ve lived all across the world and blog about the differences of living in different places. I’m probably a LW-style rationalist. I don’t really talk about myself much but if you’re curious, you should feel free to ask me about me.

I have a sideblog at @serinemisc – a mix of stuff that I think are too spammy for the main blog, including hot takes on programming, quiz results, really casual chatter, and contentless reblogs of stuff I like.

[serinemolecule]

Speaking of bad Japanese translations, I started learning Japanese because I fell in love with the song 恋の印 Koi no Shirushi, and it has this line which is very tricky to translate:

平凡すぎる毎日にピリオドを打ったの

Probably the most common translation is something along the lines of "In my boring life, you hit the periods". It doesn't particularly make sense, but, hey, song lyrics.

The trick is that "hit the period" is a Japanese idiom, it should be interpreted in the sense of "hit the period key on a keyboard". Which is a metaphor, "you hit the period key" as in "you put an end to it, like you hit the period key to end the sentence". So this line actually means "you put an end to the boring part of my life".

But I don't think I've encountered a single translation (other than my own, which is the one in the Kaminomi wiki and the one on Animelyrics), not even paid translations, that got that one correct.

In Japanese, there's a verb イメージ image, which very frequently gets translated to "image". This is arguably understandable because, like, yes, this is a true cognate, the English word "image" became the Japanese loanword "image". On the other hand, no, "to cast a spell, image it in your head" is not how English works. "Image" as a verb doesn't mean that! You're looking for "visualize" or "imagine".

Famously, English speakers are always tempted to say "excited" in Spanish as "excitado", which is funny because it actually means "horny". It's a true cognate! It just doesn't have the connotations you think it does. But this is famous because it's a mistake students make all the time. Meanwhile, it's translators making the "image" translation!

[serinemolecule]

In Japanese, there's a verb イメージ image, which very frequently gets translated to "image". This is arguably understandable because, like, yes, this is a true cognate, the English word "image" became the Japanese loanword "image". On the other hand, no, "to cast a spell, image it in your head" is not how English works. "Image" as a verb doesn't mean that! You're looking for "visualize" or "imagine".

Famously, English speakers are always tempted to say "excited" in Spanish as "excitado", which is funny because it actually means "horny". It's a true cognate! It just doesn't have the connotations you think it does. But this is famous because it's a mistake students make all the time. Meanwhile, it's translators making the "image" translation!

[serinemolecule]

You know, if it's not Chinese or Japanese or Korean, how did we come up with "go"?

The name Go is a short form of the Japanese word igo (囲碁; いご), which derives from Middle Chinese ɦʉi gi (圍棋, Mandarin: wéiqí, lit. 'encirclement board game' or 'board game of surrounding').

We were so close.

The Japanese name for go (game) is igo which, unlike go, is not already a common English word, and so would be far less confusing. Genuinely baffled by the choice to anglicize it this way. English has had the word go forever, surely it was immediately confusing!

[serinemolecule]

Do you have opinions on the Fidelity Rewards Visa Signature Card? From an initial scan, it seems like mostly just a straightforward upgrade over the Citi Double Cash—Visa rather than MasterCard and so marginally-broader acceptance-range, and no foreign transaction fees—but it seems worth asking just in case there are hidden traps you're aware of which would make it nonetheless worse-on-net.

Oh no I think I forgot to answer this! (Well, I answered in our DMs and forgot to answer is publicly.)

Anyway, the 2% card I recommend these days is the Wells Fargo ActiveCash. It's similar to the DoubleCash except 1. it comes with an intro bonus, and 2. it's a Visa so you can use it in US Costcos.

There've been some other 2% cards but they all have some sort of constraint. The Fidelity's constraint is that it requires a Fidelity account. But if you have one, it's not a bad choice.

[serinemolecule]

I think my main objection here is that the "Pluto is a planet" people tend to say things like "I learned there are 9 planets, therefore there are 9 planets".

Like, we did learn something new about the world: we learned that Pluto is tinier than we thought, we learned that Eris is basically the same thing as Pluto, and we learned that Pluto was part of its own "asteroid" belt, so the reason we used to remove Ceres from the list of planets would, if applied fairly, also make Pluto not a planet.

Valid to say there are 8 planets, valid to say there are 16-18 planets, valid to say there are thousands of planets. But "there are 9 planets" is... I guess you could argue that it's technically not denying science to say "the only valid definition of planet is a member of the list I learned when I was 6 years old, even though the reasons we used to make that list turned out to be wrong" but it sure feels like denying something important.

I've noticed something I find somewhat concerning and it's that for a lot of people, 'pluto is a planet' has fallen into the stock list of examples for what one might call 'science denialism', along with things like antivaxx, denying the existence of feathered (non-avian) dinosaurs, and flat earthers

there's a sentiment that goes like 'well, sure, you learned in school that the solar system has nine planets, but Science Marches On and we now know it has eight' and while certainly people should not take what they learned in school to be immutable law they should also like. have a concept of the rather significant difference between 'we've learned something new about the world' and 'we've decided to slice up the world in categories along different lines'

slicing up the world into categories is one of the basic operations of human thought and if you do not understand it well enough that you think 'people used to think the earth flat -> now we know better' and 'astronomers used to call pluto a planet -> now they don't' are analogous processes then you fucked up somewhere.

and if you don't think they are analogous, if you understand the difference i am pointing out and think it does not matter to the quest of listing stock examples of people disagreeing with things scientists say, well. you fucked up in a different place, probably.