Dude, who even knows.
Post reblogged from Kontextmaschine with 177 notes
In Japanese, I’m told, a slight modification in one word or reference changes a sentence entirely, so that— I don’t know Japanese, I’m making this up— if a syllable changes in one word, then “the crickets are singing in chorus in the starlight” becomes “the taxicabs are in gridlock at the intersection.” I gather that Japanese poetry uses these almost-double meanings deliberately. A line of poetry can be translucent, as it were, to another meaning it could have if it were in a different context. The surface significance allows a possible alternate significance to register at the same time.
does anyone know if this is a real thing UKLG is referring to? if so, word for it, examples?
some googling turns up this:
which looks like is just “japanese has a lot of homophones and poets will use them for artistic effect,” more or less the same as they will in english
Yeah a lot of it is that Japanese (a non-tonal language) repeatedly borrowed words from tonal Chinese, stripping them of tone (so that several words once distinct were now identical) and then re-borrowed the same roots centuries later after meaning and pronunciation had drifted, with the result that there are a ton of words that sound the same and punning is a major feature of Japanese-language culture.
It is huge in Japanese poetry (where the regular suffixed conjugation makes end rhyme trivial), the most honored stuff – even stuff you might be familiar and impressed with – translates poorly because you can only translate one meaning at a time, lacking the centuries of cultural context that would make the others even make sense.
Often the Chinese borrowings were primarily in a literary written context and semantic drift between the borrowings, Chinese language sounds, and Japanese sounds had proceeded differently in terms of written characters and sound. Sometimes the borrowings were from dialects that used completely different sounds for the same characters.
Haiku developed from a form of battle rap where competitors alternated verses and the goal was to continue the poem while retroactively forcing reinterpretations of your opponent’s lines