Monday, October 24, 2016

同性社交性 - homosociality

Many sociological terms lack decent equivalents in Japanese.  It seems the order of the day to get away with some clumsy Katakanese but to me it feels very unsatisfying ( 物足りない). In that sense, Chinese, having no other way but to render foreign words in relevant characters, shows more effort and creativity. Yet, character usage does differ between Chinese and Japanese and Som Chinese neologisms feel a bit of a stretch or not quite there.

One example: homosociality. The Japanese Wikipedia article is titled ホモソーシャル, which is not just a mere phonetic rendering, but is not even a noun. What's the noun from this then, ホモソーシャル性?Doh.

The Chinese term is 同性友愛. Makes a lot of sense,  doesn't it? But then it excludes a plethora hierarchical homosocial relationships, which are neither about friendship or love, or friendly love.

My suggestion  for a term with the coverage more or less equivalent to the English original is 同性社交性 or 同性関係性. What do you think?


Tuesday, October 11, 2016

The origin of the Japanese word keizai (経済 'economy'')

https://pixta.jp/illustration/13193819
No you won't see this yojijukugo in common use, but it is a widely accepted etymology of a very common word 経済, economy.

When Japan opened to the rest of the world in mid-19th century, it had to learn to communicate a lot of new things. Despite the thousands years of both inherited Chinese and indigenous Japanese scholarship, Japanese at the time lacked words to convey many concepts. Names for new objects as well as for abstract ideas had to be invented. In those days, the Japanese did not rely as much on katakanese, so they put their minds to make up new kanji-based words. Most of times,  those would  be very clever renderings of the meanings deciphered from European words and then reassembled  in Japanese. For example, the word for society, shakai, would be made of two characters 社会 meaning "gathering in/around a Shinto shrine", which rather neatly and with a hint of metonymy gets across what a contemporary Japanese would envision society like. Swap the characters, and here comes 会社 kaisha, "company" or "firm" (by the way, both société in French).

E
conomy in the sense of a discrete domain, (egregiously) thought to exist independently of everything else, such as society, environment, or psychology, is a relatively new way of thinking about the relations between money, commodities and labour. It was novel to the 19th century Japan (and, granted, just barely established in the West too). Understandably, there was no corresponding Japanese word for it. So
Meiji intellectuals, well versed in Classical Chinese, digged out a wise maxim 經世濟民 keisei-saimin from The Book of The Master Who Embraces Simplicity, a 4th-century treatise by Ge Hong, a Jin Dynasty official.

The meaning of  the phrase can be interpreted  as "keeping the world in order will help out the people". This idea shows a strong influence of the Chinese political concept of  the Mandate of Heaven with its insistence that "moral government brings peace to the country"). That kind of understanding echoes well with the parallel Western concept of political economy. Nearly two centuries of intellectual debate It is also rather contrary to the latter-day Neo-Classical idea of economy as a self-contained and self-serving Moloch, to the quantified attributes of which (such as growth, controlled inflation and an infinitely expanding slew of other numerical meta-entities) everything else needs to be sacrificed (aka  #GoodForTheEconomyShitForThePeople). It is interesting to see how economy from a way of social advancement through economic means  has come to mean the opposite, the advancement of economic factors  at the expense of social "externalities".


Writing Thai with Chinese characters? Consider it done!

When I started learning Thai, I really missed characters to make sense of the language. Many ur-Thai words (not those of Sanskrit, Pali or Khmer descend) do have that East Asian quality of being short, expressing a conceptual meaning, and also being handy to use as morphemes to form word compounds with new meanings. So what I did, I assigned Chinese characters to Thai words with corresponding meanings! I was so proud of myself,  thinking I invented a new way to write Thai! Besides, it really helped me ease in into a new language.

Twenty years later, almost to the day, I discovered that there has been a very similar way to write a Tai language like that: Sawndip script of the Zhuang language.  This fascinates me no end, so I thought I would share this  discovery with you.