Dude is mad [homophobic slur] and [ethnic slur] think his Trump shirt promotes hate

@EJ (The Other One)

Well, it is said of us Finns that we are silent in three languages, and in each and every one of their dialects. (Those languages being Finnish, Swedish and Russian)

@Skiriki

Have a good sleep, and don’t let any wolves steal the cattle! 🙂

@EJ

Let me know if you ever need a linguistics related teal deer about anything else. :p I could go on.

@Verily Baroque

Sure, I could do that anytime you want. The non-teal deer version is you use various constructions within the present tense.

EDIT: I can do a more thorough explanation either tonight or tomorrow morning, if you want?

@Pandapool

The name Hans is actually just a short form of Johannes, which comes from the Hebrew Jochanan.

But the similarity to the pronoun has been noted by others, as well. 🙂 There’s an old joke that goes something like this:

– What’s your name?
– It’s Hans, like the King!
– But the King isn’t named Hans.
– Yes he is! Hans Majestät (His Majesty), the King!

@IP

Sure, I could do that anytime you want. The non-teal deer version is you use various constructions within the present tense.

EDIT: I can do a more thorough explanation either tonight or tomorrow morning, if you want?

YES PLEASE

Krhm, I mean, it would be delightful if you happened to have a time for it some time and I’m definitely not going to be checking this site several times per hour until then, of course not.

(But seriously, don’t feel obligated to do this for me. If you happen to feel like writing the explanation, I’ll adore you. If you don’t, I’ll be disappointed but it won’t kill me. I don’t want you to waste your free time on this if you have better things to do – you were already way too kind with the newspaper request.)

I’ve yet to reach much gender-related stuff in my actual Japanese classes, but it occasionally comes up in translator’s notes.

First way of handling it is to just not use pronouns. Sentences have implied subjects reasonably often, and it’s also fairly common to just use someone’s name every time if you know it.

Beyond that, Japanese has a full spread of gendered and gender-ambiguous pronouns for people. I’m pretty vague on the contexts in which people use them, but gender-ambiguous ones are fairly common and used often enough that they don’t stand out*. There are actually various gendered first-person pronouns, but the ambiguous “watashi” is fairly common. Second-person pronouns are generally rude and I don’t know much about them. For third-person, I get the general impression that kono/sono/ano (this/that/that(thing/person not near listener)) hito(person) is more formal and the gendered pronouns kare(masculine) and kanjo(feminine) are less, but I couldn’t tell you which would be appropriate in a given situation.

This has been giving the fan translator for Nanoha InnocentS fits, because it’s exploited for a joke that doesn’t translate well. Basically one girl thinks another girl named Subaru in her class is a boy in her class, as do a number of other characters. Then they’re the characters in focus for five straight chapters before one of Subaru’s family members casually mentions that one of her sisters is just angry because her older sister is paying attention to someone else. The readers knew in advance.

Japanese also uses honorifics, though they’re mostly genderless. -san is neutral and moderately formal; it is the one westerners are advised to use when in doubt. -kun is generally masculine and semi-formal; it is sometimes also used neutrally to refer to subordinates (though often -san is used when referring to women), -chan is neutral and informal; it’s more likely to be used to refer to young girls but may be used affectionately with close friends of either gender or appended to words for an older sibling (particularly when speaking to yours). -sama is respectful and in period pieces often translated as lord/lady but does not specifically imply nobility.

*Note: there’s an urban legend that Samus is identified ambiguously in the original Japanese and the translators made it male. This sort of thing does happen because translators tend to convert ambiguous pronouns and repeated names in one paragraph to gendered pronouns if they think they know which is correct because calling a woman you know “that person” sounds strange in English, but the Japanese manual uses a masculine pronoun. I think that’s a consequence of story rewrites and typesetting deadlines rather than meaning anything in particular.

Oh joy, insomnia sure is going to fix the currently lurking migraine! Today is not a great day.

WeirwoodTreeHugger | February 12, 2016 at 7:32 am
Cerberus,
I think it’s the same thing with rape. There’s always, always at least one person who says that if a rape victim doesn’t go to the police, they’re either making it up for attention or are to be blamed for future victims of their rapist, because reporting a rape definitely always results in the rapist being jailed. They use this anytime a rape survivor speaks of their rape publicly. They said it about Bill Cosby’s victims even though several of them actually did go to the police and nothing was done.

TMI/TW FOR RAPE MENTION AND SEXUAL HARASSMENT

Or, in my case, I went to the police, got my abuser/rapist arrested, and then he continued to be a disgusting piece of shit, hitting on a woman via mail or something, and having her harass my mom and say things like “Oh when [Rapist] gets out of prison, we’re going to get married and have kids and he loves me more than he ever loved you! Ha!”

My mom’s response was “I told you what he did to my kids. You’ve been made aware of what he’s like. You can have him for all I care. Don’t contact me again. *Blocked*”

Then, after that, he stayed in contact with my younger step-sister (his bio kid), and I was okay with that, because she deserved to have that, and he started asking her…weird questions through their correspondence. “What do you wear for your boyfriend when you have sex?” “Is his mom hot?” “Do you give your boyfriend blowjobs?”

And these letters all managed to get through the prison staff.

This man was sexually harassing his own daughter and they let it happen!

Well, Sister at the time was staying with her boyfriend’s family because my mom couldn’t afford to take care of both of them because she’s making peanuts. So, boyfriend’s mom, who loves her like her own daughter, read the letters beforehand and reported him to the prison.

Thankfully, they took care of it and moved him to another facility. Of course, that didn’t stop him from threatening Boyfriend’s Mom over it.

So yeah, sometimes the system fails to protect people even after “justice has been served”.

guy says:

I have literally only seen it being an issue reading an English-Japanese dictionary, because Japanese does not have grammatical plurals but does have some specific words that are always plural and also has gender-ambiguous pronouns.

Actually, where human beings are concerned, Japanese has several plurals: ら (ra), たち (tachi), ども (domo), がた (gata). They’re just not generally obligatory like they are in English, but they’re hardly rare either and show up more in certain contexts like addressing a group of people.

There’s also at least one example in Japanese of a pluralized word that came to be used in the singular as well: tomodachi (友達), meaning “friend(s).” (If you can read Japanese, here’s an article about it written for older kids.)

As for dictionaries, there is such a huge range of quality. The better ones seem to have no problem covering the nuances of “they” (including notes like “you don’t often need to directly translate the generic ‘they'”), though they’re for Japanese speakers, not learners. If you’ve seen it being an issue, maybe that’s a sign you’re working with an inferior dictionary. (Of which there are a distressing number, all of which my friends studying Japanese seem to find and cling to and then wonder why they find Japanese so confusing. *sigh*)

Verily Baroque says:

one of the main reasons I comment so rarely is because no one likes random “Well, on the other hand, in LANGUAGE X [insert an off-topic teal deer]” comments…

I like linguistics so much I just started reading a seven volume comprehensive descriptive grammar of modern Japanese in Japanese (my second language). For fun. I don’t think I’m especially unique around here, either.

It drives me up the wall how so few authors question this. Long ago I decided that I’d design names for female gaming characters that did not end in a, i, y or n. (The n is just because it’s overrepresented in general, not because it’s gendered.) It’s hard to get away from even on purpose, and I sometimes still have to write out the alphabet to stop my brain from ignoring certain candidate letters.

The current series I’m reading isn’t too bad about this (especially given the Metric Fuckton of Characters it has), and while at one end there is “Apsal’ara”, “Masan”, and “Kilava”, at the other end there’s “Kilmandaros”, “D’rek”, and “Shurq”. There are also some fairly feminine sounding male names, such as “Dessembrae” and “Ibra”.

I may not finish the analysis of FS’s amazingly manipulative trolling tonight. I’m going to finish it because this is proving to be very interesting. They have been very very naughty.

As an example In the thread with the memes by Trump fans I can see that the criticism pointed at Paradoxical Intention was of a kind where they simply wanted to be critical for the sake of being critical. The information in the criticism was somewhat topical in the first and garbage in the second, but there was nothing wrong at all with what PI posted. This is reminiscent of how some people try to keep others compliant and less confident by always finding something to critisize.

The situation with “douchenozzle” is more manipulative than I first thought. It’s an example of someone using something important to another person to try to control them. All that garbage they layered onto the insult over here are things that feminists would be concerned about and would be hypocritical and disingenuous if they were really using. The hope is that they can “gum up the works” socially speaking, though another way of thinking about it is “using your social momentum against you”.

It’s a genuine social conflict technique in the abstract that I’ve used in ways that are not so vile. For example when I was arguing with people on Facebook who were trying to claim that people pointing out racism and sexism were “shutting down conversation” when it was pretty clear that they were simply incapable of looking at the information that went along with the characterization that they wanted to pretend was just an insult. I pointed out that they were effectively asking for a safe zone.