Language is Funny. In Other News, Airplane Food is Not That Good

Short one today. As they say in certain parts of Japan (such as JET seminars and import shops), "deal with it."

One of the lovely little quirks about reading Japanese is the interesting linguistic combinations you get with a pictographic writing system. Each kanji character can have many different meanings and pronunciations, and a word is usually made up of a few kanji put together. For instance, 天気 is pronounced "tenki," means "weather." If you split it up, though, 天 means roughly "heaven" or "spirit," and 気 means "nature" or "disposition." Thus, it's not "weather," it's "mood of the gods." Cool, huh?

I guess, on further reflection, you can do this with other languages, too -- according to my research, Althoff is from the German roots "alt" (ancient) and "hoff" (slayer of dragons) -- but it's certainly easier to do with Japanese, since it's entirely possible to understand the individual kanji of a word and have no clue how to pronounce it. Example: there is a noodle shop near our house that we could only understand as "Udon Sky-Country" for several weeks until Jenn thought to look it up. Turns out it's "Udon Heaven." Or...not really, since it's the Japanese word for heaven, but yeah. Anyway.

With this method of linguistic bullshittery, you can forge a fantasy novel-esque analogue for any mundane word. It's not a train (電車), it's a LIGHTNING CAR. It's not deodorant (消臭剤), it's VANISH-SMELL POTION. You can see how anime series get such ridiculous names; "Arrow Emblem Hawk of the Grand Prix," which is apparently a real anime, is really just a mistranslation of "car driver."

There's endless fun to be had with this, but even more to be had with giving ourselves Japanese names that sync up with our existing English names. Evil Ben used to spell his name 白男, "shiro otoko" or "White Man" in Japanese class [/shoutout]. Jenn has determined that her name can be written in kanji without translating it to Japanese first: by simply typing "Jennifaa" (how her name is pronounced over here) into a word processor, you can end up with "Money Flower," which is a pretty awesome name. I've been told that "harii" can be either "Reasonable Tooth" or "Banana Power." Sweet.