The Reading Room

G Warner

00:22

Am I an old stick in the mud to think I shouldn't ask for a story identification of some pulp fiction from the 80's in "Literature" SE?

@Tsundoku Cheese Grommet! CHE-EESE!

North Læraðr

00:59

@EddieKal Ewwww that book blech

@Tsundoku FIFTY-FIVE UPVOTES?! Dang Gareth

I mean that post is an amazing answer, don't get me wrong

But wow. I haven't seen an answer with that many upvotes in a very long time

@EddieKal I'm not sure you should keep asking boundary-pushing questions until we clear up the muddiness in the definition of literature

I think you might have a different view of literature than perhaps other people

Oof my rep. Losing 100 is kinda big if you have only 1k. That kind of hurt to look, but I honestly want to clarify that question, at least some sort of attempt

Eddie Kal

03:23

@NorthLæraðr But I think we could do that as two separate enterprises. After all, what is literature and what is on topic are two different things, aren't they?

North Læraðr

@EddieKal True, but your definition of literature doesn't seem to match most other people's.

I voted to leave it open, btw. I think it's alright bc of Hamlet's post. But is it seriously necessary to keep pushing the boundary like that? Especially when such definition is blurred and where we ourselves don't really know what consider off-topic?

You're trying to push a hazy boundary around and I get where you're coming from, but I don't think most people do is the problem

And as evidenced by the -3 downvotes on my "What is Literature" question, apparently, people either think that's off-topic on a literature site or they just don't care to know bc it would seem straightforward

Just bc the definition of literature varies from scholar to scholar I see no reason why that need be downvoted. Honestly, geez

And 2 close votes

okay 1. Someone else retracted their vote

Eddie Kal

04:57

@NorthLæraðr What I am doing is minesweeping. Ever played Minesweeper? Sooner or later someone would have to step in a minefield, either wittingly or otherwise. I'd rather it's my posts that are getting all the downvotes and closevotes than some new user who doesn't know any better, just so we could have a better delineation of the site scope

Rand al'Thor

07:48

@GWarner Our scope is very inclusive - don't worry about something being "not proper literature" or anything like that. Pulp fiction from the '80s, epic poetry from the 800s, everything goes.

Gareth Rees

08:12

@NorthLæraðr It's bizarre, isn't it? It's not a bad answer, but it didn't take much in the way of effort. I find it best to imagine the process as the whim of the HNQ gods, bestowing favour quite at random.

@EddieKal "Sooner or later someone would have to step in a minefield" ⟵ why not just fence it off and leave it for later generations to deal with? Like the Zone Rouge?

Tsundoku

08:40

@NorthLæraðr Ouch. Now I need to do my research within the next seven days instead of taking a few weeks. And I had turned List of bounties with no deadline into a featured meta post just a few weeks ago.

Tsundoku

09:08

@NorthLæraðr (67 upvotes now) If a question about a popular fantasy author or a popular comic becomes HNQ, it gets upvoted much more highly than other HNQ questions. I've never read Tolkien but if I wanted to benefit from this bias towards fantasy, I should.

Bookworm

0

Q: Help in finding a book

In 2008 I read a book (fiction) about a boy living with a carnival. The carnival was a bunch of radical environmentaists. I can't recall the title or the author so I'm hoping somebody on here can help me. I read the book whilst sitting beside my mother's bed in hospital and I have brain dog about...

story-identification

b_jonas

@NorthLæraðr Yes, because discussing in chat doesn't solve the problem that we don't know the boundaries of the site. Only posting actual questions will, because then we'll see what kinds of questions our visitors like, and what they are willing to try to answer. Many of our experts won't be participating in the chat discussions or tell their opinion on the meta, but we will be able to see what questions they like and what they don't.

@Tsundoku I don't know, I never felt pressure like that. Like, Game of Thrones is already popular on Sci Fi, so Game of Thrones questions will get a lot of good answers from other people, why would I need to help that? If anything, I should help the less popular topics that I already enjoy, as in Jules Verne or Stanisław Lem.

Tsundoku

@b_jonas I know what you mean, but if you invest several days into a question (rereading an entire novel or play and reading secondary literature) and your answer gets ignored, while other questions get dozens of upvotes because fantasy is popular, you begin to wonder why you would continue submitting your answers here instead of just posting them on your own website.

b_jonas

Also it's possible to post boundary-pushing questions that are also HNQs. You managed with literature.stackexchange.com/q/15437/139 , and unusual questions like the underwear ones always get more attention.

Tsundoku

Some people here still venerate Hamlet, who left the site three years ago. Hamlet wanted answers based on deep analysis, but when you look at voting behaviour on that type of answers, that tells a different story...

b_jonas

09:23

Ones where people can easily understand the motivation even if they haven't read a particular book.

Tsundoku

@b_jonas Physical books had been considered within scope for several years when I posted that question, though.

b_jonas

@Tsundoku You have to always consdier that the votes depend not only on how much the users like the answer, but also on how many ever look at the answer, which depends on how popular the topic is so they even open the question.

Among others, this means that you get much more votes if you post an answer quickly after the question, because most users won't look at a question more than once, so if it doesn't yet have the answer the first time they see it in active, they will never see your answer. It also means that linking to questions from elsewhere (in other answers or comments or chat or even other websites) can help.

Tsundoku

@b_jonas Just look at the "views" before and after the answer was posted. I have seen questions where the views went up without changing the votes on the answer. That includes questions where the OP was active on the site and probably saw the answer.

b_jonas

I do a lot of such linking, which is why I have a lot of announcer badges (mostly for Sci Fi, but many other SE sites). I do that not really for the votes, but to perhaps get new users interested in SE sites.

@Tsundoku Well, answers can get lost if there are lots of other answers, that's the flip side of answering popular questions.

I usually don't care too much about the votes though. I'm here to have fun, the imaginary internet points are nice but I get them anyway, I don't optimize for them too much.

Or so I claim.

Tsundoku

@b_jonas What I want to say is that thorough analysis takes time. If people don't bother looking at such answers, rewarding mostly new stuff or fantasy, they don't exactly encourage that kind of research. It's a way of saying, "Pff, we're not really interested, so don't bother."

Rand al'Thor

09:30

@Tsundoku Sometimes I even consider not upvoting an overly-popular answer, even if it's good, just because it's not that much better than others with lower scores.

b_jonas

@Tsundoku Yes, I know. But if you just want votes, post the fantasy questions and answers on Sci Fi, where you almost always get more votes for them.

Tsundoku

I'm not talking about SFF SE, I'm talking about Literature SE.

Rand al'Thor

I also try to compensate with bounties sometimes, but I favouritise lower-rep users with bounties (trying to get more people into the higher rep privilege levels), so you/Gareth are unlikely to get any from me despite your many outstanding answers :-)

Gareth Rees

@Tsundoku This is an understandable emotional response but it's not really fair — it's not that the people read the low-effort Tolkien answer and the high-effort obscure poetry answer and decided the former was better than the latter, it's a combination of (i) the site's algorithm showed them the former and not the latter; and (ii) even if they saw the obscure poetry question they would not have felt in a position to judge whether the answer was good or bad

Rand al'Thor

09:52

@GarethRees Another unfortunate effect is that votes tend to skew towards the posts from early in the site's history, especially private beta period, because more people were actively around and voting on the site back then. Unfortunate because a lot of answers from those days were either out-and-out bad or at least less good than many later ones after there was more of a push to improve quality and more high-quality contributors arrived.

If you compare the scores of content from Jan '17 and say '18-'19, they're really not correlated with quality, even with no HNQ effect.

At least most of the top-voted poetry answers are actually good.

Tsundoku

@GarethRees It's not just about poetry, though. It's also about novels and plays by major authors.

Rand al'Thor

Major in terms of literary significance or in terms of popular awareness?

Gareth Rees

10:09

@Tsundoku The people who arrived via HNQ didn't see those questions either.

Tsundoku

Authors like Shakespeare and Camus, both of whom are also read in schools. (I'm not saying that all answers requiring serious analysis get virtually ignored, but some have been.)

@GarethRees That's their decision, not enforced by SE. They can see those answers if they choose to do so.

Rand al'Thor

Another unfortunate effect is that longer analysis-based answers take more effort to read than shorter low-effort ones.

For example, I've seen you posted a few long Camus answers recently, which are probably good, but I haven't had time to read them in order to vote responsibly on them.

Gareth Rees

@Tsundoku I don't think this line of thinking takes into account the way the HNQ mechanism works. People are attracted to click on a post by an intriguing question title, and one of the things that makes a title intriguing is enough familiarity with the subject matter to understand what it is asking. What we're seeing is a population effect (the Stack Exchange audience is more familiar with Tolkien than with Shakespeare)

Knight

10:26

All right, later in the Preface of Three Plays for Puritans Shaw himself says that he likes to write Prefaces,

> I would give half a dozen of Shakespeare’s plays for one of the prefaces he ought to have written.

Tsundoku

@Knight Shakespeare apparently did not write his plays for publication but for performance by the theatre company in which he was a shareholder. Publication was something the company decided after a number of performances - but not for all his plays. Plays were simply not as highly regarded as poetry in those days.

Gareth Rees

That's a great quote from Shaw — plain wrong, but amusingly so because it's clear that Shaw recognises his idiosyncrasy on this point

Rand al'Thor

@Tsundoku It's funny somehow that Shakespeare is so venerated now, when in its time much of his work was basically cheap entertainment, complete with dirty jokes.

Tsundoku

@Randal'Thor Well, his plays were also performed at the royal court, so they spoke to a wide audience.

Rand al'Thor

All of them? Or were some of them produced for royal audiences and some for the masses?

Tsundoku

10:41

We know that a number of them were performed at court, e.g. The Winter's Tale. I think the frequency of such performances even went up under James I.

Gareth Rees

@Randal'Thor I think people recognized pretty quickly that Shakespeare's plays were something special — his funerary monument in Stratford-upon-Avon was built prior to 1623, and people put a lot of work into the Folio edition

Tsundoku

Audiences at the Blackfriars' Theatre were fincially better off, but it seems their taste in plays wasn't significantly different from that of the groundlings in Southwark.

b_jonas

@Randal'Thor But Tsundoku just said that poetry was highly valued, and Shakespeare wrote sonnets too. Maybe he got venerated for those, and because of that, people look at the stage pieces too.

Rand al'Thor

Hmm, there's an interesting thought. I've never paid much attention to Shakespeare's sonnets. Of course his plays were written to be performed, and turned into books later, but where were his sonnets originally published?

"Learning Late Letters" is one of four winning poems selected by David Tomas Martinez for the 2020 Words Without Borders—Academy of Americans Poets Poems in Translation Contest.

Time for our first vietnamese-literature questions?

Bookworm

0

Q: What do the silks and tattoos represent in Sui-Yun's poem about Eve?

One of the Peruvian writer Sui-Yun's Four Short Poems (translated from Spanish by Jennifer Shyue) is written as addressed to "Eve, my eternal mother". I hope I'm not being excessively dirty-minded in reading the verse about "licking the tip of evil" as a sexual reference: particularly in light of...

poetry symbolism spanish-literature sui-yun

Gareth Rees

10:55

@Randal'Thor archive.org has a first edition so you can see for yourself that they were printed in London by George Eld for publisher Thomas Thorpe

There is some evidence that the sonnets circulated in manuscript form prior to their printing, as there is a variant of sonnet 2 whose manuscripts are listed by the CELM

Bookworm

11:16

1

Q: What's the possible connection between a boat and livery stables?

In "Stolen Ingots" in Dr. Thorndyke's Case-Book by R. Austin Freeman, Mr. Badger was standing on a bridge watching a boat running with a stolen case. Badger cursed volubly, and, turning to the fishermen, exclaimed in a rather offensively peremptory tone: “I want a boat. Now. This instant.” T...

short-stories r-austin-freeman

Tsundoku

11:32

@Randal'Thor His narrative poems, published in the 1590s, were published with much more attention to textual correctness than the plays. They were published by Thomas Thorpe, whom Shakespeare probably knew from Stratford. His sonnets weren't published until 1609, when the great vogue for publishing sonnet cycles had apparently already passed.

Knight

14:04

> It does not follow, however, that the right to criticise Shakespeare involves the power of writing better plays. And in fact - do not be surprised at my modesty- I do not profess to write better plays.

-Bernhard Shaw

Napoleon Wilson

14:15

Reasonable.

North Læraðr

14:50

@Tsundoku Damn, I forgot about that! Grrrr

Tsundoku

15:10

@Knight Unlike some Restoration playwrights, who created adaptations of some of Shakespeare's plays, such as a King Lear version with a happy end. I believe John Dennis though he could write a better version of The Merry Wives of Windsor; one of his other plays was take off the theatre programme after the first performance because the audience disliked it too much ...

"do not be surprised at my modesty": secretly fishing for compliments? ;-)

However, John Dryden's All for Love, an imitation of Shakespeare's Antony and Cleopatra, has remained successful after the Restoration and is still regularly staged.

@NorthLæraðr I hope you get a badge for that.

North Læraðr

@Tsundoku What badge?

Tsundoku

@NorthLæraðr Benefactor? Ah, but you already have that one.

North Læraðr

@Tsundoku I already have all the badges relating to bounties except being awarded one :/

Tsundoku

15:26

I don't have the altruist badge yet. I should find a question by someone else that I can add to the list of bounties with no deadline.

North Læraðr

@Tsundoku Wow, only nine people have earned that badge

Eddie Kal

@GarethRees In a sense I am future generations and I am getting blown up as I send feelers to test the waters (land). I may as well be taking a tour in Croatia

Napoleon Wilson

@Tsundoku When isn't modesty also fishing for compliments? ;-)

It's a difficult balance.

Tsundoku

@NapoleonWilson When people are just modest instead of saying that they are modest.

Napoleon Wilson

Hmpf.

Tsundoku

16:49

I have greatly expanded my list of bounties with no deadline by adding bounties on questions asked by others.

Knight

17:16

> If technical facility were the secret of greatness in art, Mr. Swinburne would be greater than Browning and Byron rolled into one, Stevenson greater than Scott or Dickens, Mendelssohn than Wagner, Maclise than Madox Brown.

- Bernhard Shaw

Rand al'Thor

17:32

@Tsundoku You left a couple of comments with what are probably typos ("has" seems more natural than "as", although I suppose "as" could also make sense).

@NorthLæraðr You don't get any badge for being awarded one.

North Læraðr

@Randal'Thor Oh, really?

Rand al'Thor

@EddieKal "The universe speaks in many languages, but only one voice. It speaks in the language of hope; it speaks in the language of trust; it speaks in the language of strength and the language of compassion; it is the language of the heart and the language of the soul. But always it is the same voice. It is the voice of our ancestors, speaking through us, and the voice of our inheritors, waiting to be born. It is the small, still voice that says: We are one. No matter the blood, no matter the skin, no matter the world: We are one."

Congratulations to @MatrimCauthon, @Riker, and @Spagirl on breaking 6k reputation, and to @Spagirl on breaking into the top 8 users.

I wanted to wait and congratulate muru on 6k too, but he's been stuck one upvote away and letting people overtake him ;-)

Also congrats to @GarethRees on 17k reputation.

@NorthLæraðr Oops :-)

North Læraðr

@Randal'Thor WHOOPS

Mithical

17:48

tsk tsk tsk

Gotta do better than that, Benjamin

Rand al'Thor

ROFL

In-joke for those who remember private beta days? ;-)

Tsundoku

@Randal'Thor Thanks. Copy & paste is so convenient. You can copy the same typo over and over again...

Bookworm

0

Q: What's meant here by "her sails over the land!"

In "Stolen Ingots" in Dr. Thorndyke's Case-Book by R. Austin Freeman, there was a boat that chases a barge in a tidal river and amongst muddy banks: Meanwhile the fugitive barge, having got some two miles start, seemed to be drawing ahead. But it was only at intervals that we could see her, for ...

short-stories r-austin-freeman

Tsundoku

18:10

@Randal'Thor Wouldn't it need to be spelled 'as instead of as?

North Læraðr

@Mithical It was an honest mistake

See that's why it's good that it goes through review queue

Tsundoku

@NorthLæraðr And it provides occasions to increase edit counts :-P

North Læraðr

@Tsundoku Yes, I'm sure

I skimmed the Wikipedia page but somehow missed that he was German

Tsundoku

Did you unconsciously see Marx as a Russian communist?

North Læraðr

That gives me too much credit

I consciously saw Marx as a Russian communist

Bookworm

18:17

-3

Q: Websites to ask for specific book recommendations

Are there any websites designed for asking real people for specific book recommendations? I know there are websites where you can enter your reading preferences and have an algorithm give you recommendations, and that here on Literature Stack Exchange asking for help finding a book that you know ...

book-access

Tsundoku

@NorthLæraðr sui-yun is still waiting for you.

North Læraðr

@Tsundoku Oh yeah, I have no idea what to put for that

Questions about the life and works of Sui Yun, a Peruvian poet?

Mithical

@NorthLæraðr probably mixed him up with Lenin or someone

North Læraðr

@Mithical ~~Honestly I see all communists as Russian~~

Tsundoku

Communist party members talked a lot about "Marxism-Leninism", which may explain the confusion.

@NorthLæraðr Mao Zedong is turning in his grave.

North Læraðr

18:20

@Tsundoku Well let him. He's Russian, right :P

Mithical

I was at a kibbutz today...

North Læraðr

RUSSIAN

Mithical

Nyet! Nyet ruski!

Ivriskii!

North Læraðr

Nice RUSSIAN

Okay, I'll stop

What even was that

Hmm, Hebrew gave some translation, except for Ivriskii

Tsundoku

Surely, you can guess what "nyet" means without drinking vodka?

North Læraðr

18:25

New?

Eddie Kal

no

Mithical

@NorthLæraðr I think I got that word wrong in any case.

North Læraðr

Well putting it into Maltese gave Ivriskii Drink

Mithical

(I don't speak the language.)

North Læraðr

@Tsundoku No

Oh hahaha

Rand al'Thor

18:27

@Tsundoku 'As 'Enry 'Iggins 'ated 'Arrogate?

North Læraðr

No matter which way I answer I'll be correct

Tsundoku

Da.

North Læraðr

Nein

Is Ivriskii supposed to be Israeli?

Rand al'Thor

@NorthLæraðr Might be worth mentioning that she's "Asian Peruvian", I think from a Chinese background, since apparently both cultures may play into her writing. (See comments under my question.)

North Læraðr

@Randal'Thor Ah, okay, I was a bit confused on the name

I'm like

Her name doesn't sound Peruvian

And I couldn't figure out the gender

Rand al'Thor

18:29

@NorthLæraðr wordswithoutborders.org/contributor/sui-yun

North Læraðr

Ahhhh thank you, thank you

Tsundoku

@Randal'Thor Indeed. Her parents were Chinese.

Yun (云）is Chinese for "cloud"; this is not unusual in Chinese girls' names.

Eddie Kal

@Randal'Thor Wiki page?

Tsundoku

(Unless her name is a different 'yun'; there are so many homophones in Chinese.)

@EddieKal Not even Spanish Wikipedia has an article about Sui Yun.

Eddie Kal

@Tsundoku I am not sure her name is in pinyin though. What's "sui"?

Tsundoku

18:33

I don't know which "Sui" that is, but China had a Sui dynasty just before the Tang dynasty. Short-lived but probably more important than most people think.

Eddie Kal

@Tsundoku Hmm so that could be her family name?

North Læraðr

@EddieKal Like how in Korean (I don't know about other languages) the last name comes first?

Tsundoku

Yes, if she uses the Chinese convention of family name before given name.

Also in Japanese and Hungarian (I think).

Eddie Kal

Yeah Japanese names follow that order too. I just thought "sui yun" sounded more like a nom de plume

Tsundoku

It could be a nom de plume, since Chinese names usually follow the pattern "one syllable for the family name + two syllables for the given name", but they don't always do that.

Rand al'Thor

18:38

@Tsundoku So maybe @b_jonas would be Jonas B. in the usual English surname-last formulation ;-)

Tsundoku

@Randal'Thor Possibly.

Rand al'Thor

@EddieKal It could be, since the name is given with a hyphen rather than a space, just "Sui-Yun" with no second name.

Tsundoku

@Randal'Thor Curiously, I didn't see it consistently with a hyphen.

Rand al'Thor

Oh.

Tsundoku

Also, I couldn't find anything by her on Amazon.es, regardless which variant I used.

Eddie Kal

18:42

spires-of-agartha.fandom.com/wiki/Sui_Yun

Okay this one is for real

elperuano.pe/noticia-entre-rayos-poesia-73654.aspx

> La premonición se cumplió y en el año de la cabra de 1955 nació en la ciudad de Iquitos Sui-Yun, que en el idioma chino significa la flor que se abre.

Tsundoku

By the way, there are two Sui surnames (隋 and 眭), one of which corresponds to the name of the Sui dynasty (隋).

Librarian

0

Q: Websites to ask for specific book recommendations

Are there any websites designed for asking real people for specific book recommendations? I know there are websites where you can enter your reading preferences and have an algorithm give you recommendations, and that here on Literature Stack Exchange asking for help finding a book that you know ...

discussion

Eddie Kal

> Sui-Yun is the daughter of Chinese immigrants from Chungzahn, Kuantong.

That's not pinyin. I wonder what romanization system those two words are transcribed in.

Tsundoku

@EddieKal "la flor que se abre"? I couldn't find any flower that is pronounced either "sui" or "yun".

Eddie Kal

@Tsundoku That's why it is likely her name is not rendered in pinyin.

Tsundoku

18:51

Well, if the name is Cantonese (Kuandong), I'm lost.

Eddie Kal

I wonder if there is a Cantonese Yale pinyin converter

Tsundoku

Yale to Hanzi?

Eddie Kal

@Tsundoku That's would be a nifty tool. But just Yale to pinyin would be helpful too. Pinyin-hanzi lookups are much easier

Tsundoku

Unfortunately, I need to go and buy some food...

Rand al'Thor

19:23

@NorthLæraðr Done (a few days late).

North Læraðr

@Randal'Thor With what?

Rand al'Thor

Even that part was interesting. I hadn't realised that Sauron as Lord of the Rings is referred to explicitly (if not by name) in the revised Hobbit.

North Læraðr

Oh editting the question?

Answer*

Ah yes

Rand al'Thor

@NorthLæraðr It was a link-reply to your reply from a few days ago :-) Revising the Hobbit answer.

North Læraðr

@Randal'Thor Yeah

Rand al'Thor

20:00

btw the name Sui-Yun is a pseudonym, the author’s actual name apparently being Katie Wong Loo. — Spagirl 1 min ago

Eddie Kal

@Randal'Thor Interesting. Source?

This?

tandfonline.com/doi/abs/10.1080/…

legacy.com/obituaries/nytimes/…

Looks like very credible scholarship

Rand al'Thor

@EddieKal Googling "Katie Wong Loo" gave me this page in Spanish and this academic paper mentioning "the poet Sui-Yun (Katie Wong Loo de Geitz, b. 1955) has published poetry marked by Christian-Taoist mysticism as well as by her long-time residence in Spain, United States, France, and Germany."

Eddie Kal

> Tenía apenas 16 años cuando se unió a un grupo de chinos veteranos que de Cantón se enrumbaron con destino al Perú. Alfonso Wong On, hijo del gran médico Wong Siu-Tong, llegó a las costas peruanas aproximadamente en 1930, luego se trasladó a Iquitos al encuentro de su hermano mayor Emilio.

Family name Wong

She wouldn't have had contact with pinyin growing up unless through a conscious decision

Bookworm

21:11

0

Q: What is meant here by "Did you..."?

From When the Emperor Was Divine, by Julie Otsuka: He put down his suitcase and looked at her. "Did you..." she [the mother] said "Every day," he [the father] replied. Then he got down on his knees and he took us into his arms and over and over again, he uttered our names, but still we could n...

meaning

Tsundoku

21:52

We could use more suggestions for forums etc for other literatures in the answers to I've been told my question is better suited to a forum, but where should I go?

Rand al'Thor

@Bookworm Books like that are good for increasing awareness (although I never read concentration camp stories). I wasn't even aware that that happened. Wow.

> I don't want any of them [persons of Japanese ancestry] here. They are a dangerous element. There is no way to determine their loyalty... It makes no difference whether he is an American citizen, he is still a Japanese. American citizenship does not necessarily determine loyalty... But we must worry about the Japanese all the time until he is wiped off the map.

swearing redacted

Not much moral superiority over the Axis powers there.

Tsundoku

I saw the film Snow Falling on Cedars in 1999; that's how I learnt about those camps.

And we still don't know what Mithical did at the kibbutz today.

Eddie Kal

22:09

@Randal'Thor That's part of human experience too.

"for an influential work that with linguistic ingenuity has explored the periphery and the specificity of human experience."

That's culled from Peter Handke's Nobel recognition, but my point is things like concentration camp and suffering under racism are also part of human experience

@Randal'Thor Ever read The Man in the High Castle?

Rand al'Thor

22:36

@EddieKal No, but read about it. Great premise for a story.

Eddie Kal

22:55

@Randal'Thor I was going to say Dick--as much as I like him and think of him as a genius--completely ignored the Japanese American experience in that book and made it a story told from White middle class Americans

Tsundoku

Looking for the correct spelling of “tsundoku” in Japanese on Japanese Language SE. Closed.

Eddie Kal

@Randal'Thor I don't know if you are a Star Trek fan, but if you follow George Takei, you will on social media you will see how much he talks about his painful family history

@Tsundoku Because there is none I believe

Orthography is dead in Japan. One of the few "Western" concepts they don't treasure

Tsundoku

In what way is orthography dead? (Did it ever "live"?)

Eddie Kal

Yes it did live back in the day when written Japanese was more reliant on kanji

Using kana when a word can be rendered in kanji was frowned upon

Tsundoku

I see. But it never worked very well without kana, did it? As far as I know, the Japanese developed kana because Chinese hanzi did not fit their language very well. (But I know they reduced the number of kanji in the 20th century.)

That reminds me of a teacher of Japanese who admitted many people (including herself, I think) did not know kanji very well. She even taught the stroke order of 七 incorrectly...

Eddie Kal

23:04

@Tsundoku There were some inconsistencies here and there. Like ん in tsundoku or ヶ that randomly appears in place names

In a certain sense hanzi is also not fully compatible with colloquial Chinese, especially dialects

Tsundoku

Except that teachers of Standard Chinese don't like to hear that, in my experience.

Eddie Kal

Sort of like African American vernacular, new words have to be created for a way of speaking

Tsundoku

巴士 (bashi) for bus in Cantonese. We even learnt that word, even though we were learning Standard Chinese.

Eddie Kal

Interesting, so did they teach you a standard Mandarin word for bus?

Tsundoku

And 拜拜 (báibái) for "bye bye".

Rand al'Thor

23:09

@EddieKal Unsurprising I suppose.

Tsundoku

@EddieKal 汽车 is the one I remember, but that can also mean "car".

Rand al'Thor

I wonder what the experience of Japanese Americans would have been if the Axis had won the war and occupied the US.

Eddie Kal

@Randal'Thor Sounds like a sequel to The Man in the High Castle

Tsundoku

If you're looking for an idea for an alternative history novel...

Rand al'Thor

@Tsundoku I was going to say, if you asked that, it's another instance of someone asking about something they were already confident enough to put in their profile :-P

Tsundoku

23:12

I just wanted to find out who, besides Cheese, has a their own tag somewhere on the SE network.

There is knight, for example, but unfortunately synonymised with 'knights'.

Rand al'Thor

@EddieKal Some of the Trekkies on SFF convinced me to give TNG a try, and I watched a couple of seasons, but the disconnected "planet/alien of the week" episodes and lack of overall plot or development failed to hook me. I later discovered Babylon 5 and now disdain Star Trek even more than back when all I had to raise above it in the world of TV sci-fi was Doctor Who. TL;DR: no, not a fan.

Eddie Kal

@Randal'Thor You and me both

Rand al'Thor

@Tsundoku Character tags are quite controversial at SFF, but they do exist in many of the bigger franchise tags, so it's plausible that one day there'll be a rand-althor tag.

There's a Null tag on Stack Overflow.

Tsundoku

There are several users named HarryPotter or a variation thereof on SO.

Rand al'Thor

And of course we have a hamlet tag here, but that's no longer a user.

Tsundoku

23:20

(There are plenty of Hamlets on SO, but not here.)

JRE has their own tag on Software Engineering.

Eddie Kal

@Tsundoku Wait I just thought to ask: she a native Japanese speaker?

Tsundoku

Yes, a native speaker.

Eddie Kal

Interesting. People get stroke orders wrong all the time, but Japanese people who are able to reach a certain mark in their high school Japanese class should be able to read and write basic kanji

I have a friend who was not good at writing kanji (I think he reads okay). I don't know how bad he was, but he went to college in the US

That's very unusual for Japanese kids. Most people stay in Japan.

I thought it might be because he couldn't pass Japanese subject exams

Tsundoku

23:37

I don't know how they teach stroke order in Japan, but the Chinese seem to be rather strict about it.

Tsundoku

23:51

Japanese kanjis and Chinese characters: a request for comparative stroke order on Japanese SE. Some differences exist, but not for something as simple as 七.

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