I love how potato in French is pomme de terre, which pretty much means “earth apple.”
like what stupid frenchman saw this:
and said “zis petite légume looks like a, how you say, APPLE! hmmm… but it grows in ze earth… HON HON HON! MAIS OUI! C’EST UNE POMME DE TERRE!”
j’adore comment ananas se dit pineapple en anglais, ce qui veut littéralement dire “pomme de pin”, genre quel type anglais a vu ça:
et s’est dit : “ow cette étrange big fruit ressemble à une, how do you say, POMME! hmmm… mais plutôt une pomme qui pousse dans les pins… HU HU HU! OH YES, IT’S A PINEAPPLE!”
(z’avez vu, on peut le faire aussi… hon hon hon!)
I can’t even read French and I’m laughing my ass off
Huge shout out to the dedicated fans who use their knowledge and understanding of Japanese to translate comics, drama CDs, and other supplementary materials that otherwise would have been inaccessible to those of us who don’t understand Japanese.
That’s a lot of hard work and consumed time, and I honestly cannot thank you enough for what you’re doing. You’re amazing.
holy shit, you guys, i just had the most exciting breakthrough on what the fuck is happening with the playful manipulation, deconstruction, and recombination of language you see on tumblr and twitter. like i’ve been chewing on this for years: is it post-modernism? is it post-structuralism? is it absurdism? is it surrealism?
it’s cubism.
“In Cubist artwork, objects are analyzed, broken up and reassembled in an abstracted form—instead of depicting objects from one viewpoint, the artist depicts the subject from a multitude of viewpoints to represent the subject in a greater context.[6]” (wikipedia)
look at birds_rights, fruitsoftheape100, or rate-my-reptile. it’s not simply oversimplified grammar like lolcats. every sentence is set up to fully convey meaning, but in as absurd a jumble as possible. like this birds_rights tweet:
“hi Merica. I know it your birtday. But maybe you can a little less TRY TO EXPLOSION ME OUT OF THE SKY???? Thank.”
or a rate-my-reptile comment:
“EXCUSE ma, lamma go!!! Got get to to work! Gots a interviu, and a Jobberpumpipty!9.6271/10 Babbie Businis is Still.. Busness!(try a not hold lizats by they tails! but, just a touche is usual fine tho!)”
see, you know what they’re saying, but if you sat down to mark what was formally wrong it’d be exactly like trying to redline the anatomy of a woman in a picasso painting: rendering a clear communication of a single thing, at a single point, from a single perspective isn’t the priority.
“Aimed at a large public, [Salon Cubists’] works stressed the use of multiple perspective and complex planar faceting for expressive effect while preserving the eloquence of subjects endowed with literary and philosophical connotations.[4]” (wikipedia)
every part of rate-my-reptile’s post is being approached from a different grammatical angle, and then you have the employment of misspellings, typos, and melodious abstraction, respectively ‘lamma’, ‘interviu’ , and ‘jobberpumpipty’, and these individual abstractions all collaged into a coherent— but not clear— message.
は (wa) goes on nouns that are serving as context/background information for the rest of the sentence. Basically, you’re bringing up the topic of (noun) and then commenting on it. (は is sometimes called the “topic particle” because of this.)
が (ga) marks a noun that’s looking for something to do. (Or be.) This noun will be the subject of the next verb/adjective/whatever you see. (が is sometimes called the “subject particle” because of this.)
In English, we don’t really have two specific words with those jobs–we express those concepts in lots of different ways, or just leave them out completely. So when you look at translations of sentences with は and が, sometimes it looks like the は and が either don’t matter or are totally interchangeable, which isn’t true! They have completely different jobs, it’s just that there’s some overlap when you bring up a topic (with は) that happens to be doing a verb or something (and could take が).
I found that the best way (for me) to get a feel for は and が was to listen to people try to explain it, then look at sentences and imagine how they would be different if you switched a は for a が or vice versa. So here are some examples with really wordy explanations!
Note: I’m relying on my (non-native-speaker) は・が sense for these, so if anyone finds errors, let me know.
The kanji for life or birth or several other related things! It’s a picture of a live plant growing out of the ground. It’s pronounced せい (sei) or しょう (shou) in most compounds with other kanji, and also shows up in verbs like 生きる (いきる/ikiru “live”) and 生む （うむ/umu “give birth to”)
生 is a very common and useful kanji with a lot of meanings related to life…and it’s also really mean to beginners who look it up in a dictionary and see just how many different pronunciations it has. It feels like at some point, Japan just went through a phase where everyone was like “I guess that word DOES have something to do with life. Sure, we can write that one with 生 too. THROW IT ON THE 生 PILE WITH THE OTHERS!”
And then dictionaries (or at least the one I was learning from) tend to list all these 生 words without much explanation, as if they didn’t just dump a ton of new vocab words on you all at once. I tried to kind of explain the common readings in order of how important they are, so you can stop whenever it starts being too many…
PiraticOctopus 