Hacker News Reader

Comment by pilaf | Hacker News Reader

Japanese is the only script I'm familiar with (other than Latin), and it's very clear to me that the person who drew the hiragana characters in this book wasn't familiar with them as they only vaguely resemble the actual characters. I wonder if there was a bit of a "game of telephone" effect going on too, as the book cites a French encyclopedia as its source, which may also have contained non-native renditions of those characters.

It's also interesting how they refer to the language as Japonese instead of Japanese, which makes sense if they their source was a French encyclopedia, but I wonder if Japan was being referred to as Japon in English too back then.

View on HN

Not just that, but also the last row is probably 180° rotated. The last 5 entries (labelled as "no nu n'a n'e n'i") do read "na ne ni no nu" (なねにのぬ) after rotation. Remaining 3 entries also seem to be similarly transformed, compared to other letters that are at most missing some parts (e.g. "da" た).

This was written at a time when the borders were closed to most of the outside world, so perhaps that is why.

The vocabulary section is also very iffy, assuming some common Japanese words haven't changed their vowels in the last two centuries!

The whole section is a reminder of how much we take for granted freely available and accurate information from the other side of the world, something that was absolutely not the case when this book was written, instead relying one presumes on sources based entirely on "travellers' tales".

The vocabulary clearly reflects Western Japanese, e.g. "Laughable" Okaski corresponds to modern Standard Japanese okasii while retaining the k that's also present in modern inflected forms like okasiku; and "Quick" Faijo corresponds to modern hayai but has the -o ending that's also present fossilized in ohayou gozaimasu. The choice of f instead of h for the first consonant likely also records a historical pronunciation of [ɸ].

That is quite a big assumption, given that the standard way to write 今日 in hiragana was けふ until 1900.

on page 38 you can see a list of reference works.. there is no source for the Japanese.. "A Voyage Around the World" by Perouse is the only alternate there?

what is "Ecclemach" a language of North California on page 78 ?

Imagine the tattoos

Reply on news.ycombinator.com