a-cubed.info

It’s that time of year, and I never knew if Japan had DST. So, having been reminded of the issue by User Friendly, I did a web search and found that Japan does not follow daylight saving time. You learn something new every day, and today one of the things I learned is that in Antarctica there are three time zones observed: Chile, GMT-3 and New Zealand. The Chilean and New Zealand zones observe their relative DST settings, but the British base at Rothera maintains GMT-3 all year. So, when the UK “springs forward” I’ll only be eight hours ahead of the UK.

There’s a fun site that allows you to generate maps of places you’ve beenfrom a full worldwide map to the US states, European countries et al.

My world travel map:

my US states map:

and my European countries map:

(create your own maps)

During discussions with my collaborators yesterday we ended up discussing the present evolution of Japanese. Explanation of this requires a quick description of Japanese writing systems. For those of you who know about this, you may wish to skip down to below the “read the rest of this post” marker.

Japanese Writing

There are three main elements to Japanese writing: Kanji, Hiragana and Katakana. Hiragana and Katakana, collectively referred to as kana, are a syllabic phonetic system. There is very little “spelling”, although the pronunciation and dictation are not quite as simple as Japanese teachers first present (is anything?). The two kana systems have various usages historically but present usage is that hiragana, a more “cursive” script is used for Japanese words and word fragments (see below on kanji usage for word-fragment usage) such as desu (です), while katakana, the more blocky or angular script is used for Western loan words such as camera (カメラ). The kana were derived from phonetic simplifications of imported kanji (see below).

The Japanese Kanji are derived from three different imports of Chinese Kanji characters. These importations were sometimes based on the sounds of the characters, sometimes on their meanings, and sometimes on both. In addition, original misunderstandings of sound or meaning were possible and divergences in both spoken language, kanji usage, and kanji presentation have now led to a significant divergence of the kanji in use. Until about twenty years ago, however, it was still common in schools to study Chinese literature by reading the kanji in Japanese. This practice seems to have mostly been dropped, possibly except for some private schools. Partly because of the way the kanji were imported. When using kanji, there are usually at least two and often more than two possible phonetic “readings” of the characters – based both on multiple phonetic imports from China and also on different spoken words in Japanese represented by the same kanji. Just to make things more complicated kanji may have overlapping meanings with the same or difference readings. A typical written sentence in Japanese will contain multiple kanji with hiragana used for parts of speech: particles (a bit like English prepositions, conjunctions etc) declensions and conjugations. For example, the kanji 上 with conceptual meaning of above, over, rise, raise etc. is read as “a” in 上げる (ageru: raise or give) and in 上がる (agaru: rise) in transitive and intransitive variants of the same verb, but is also read as “oo-eh” in 上に (ue ni: on top of or above). The hiragana げ, が and に indicate the correct phonetic reading. When kanji are used in multiple kanji “words” there is a specific reading of the combination, usually but not universally, based on the Chinese phonetic reading. Some close phonetic variants such as kawa/gawa (川), ta/da (ç”°) occur in different combinations due to euphony (sounding good) or ease of pronunciation.

OK, now you’re ready to appreciate some modern Japanese written puns.
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In the run-up to the 50th anniversay of the signing of the Treaty of Rome, various people and groups are setting forth their vision of Europe. Amongst these is the German Chancellor, Angela Merkel, who has a decidedly Christian view of Europe, in her proposals for the “Berlin Declaration”. Humanists, and secularists (some of whom are of course of a variety of religions), opposed to such a religious viewpoint, have drafted a counterpointing Brussels Delcaration.

I received a couple of emails today which I almost ignored as they looked like possible spam (adware/spyware infection sites looking to get me to visit their website, or meta-spam). However, there was a chance they were genuine and they were about someone misusing my portrait from my web page on a fraud site. So, I checked the site and found that the emails were legitimate and the site isn’t. They’re using my thumbnail portrait for a fake person called Curtis Andrew. They’re downloading the image directly from my University server, including making the picture a link to the larger copy of the photo. This makes them vulnerable to a counter-attack. Once I’ve made the complaint to their service provider (it’s a Lycos-hosted service on tripod.com) I’m going to replace the files they’re using with warnings that this is a fake, while moving the files to new names on my sites, A bit of work on my part but not too much to avoid helping out fraudsters. I think using live URLs on their part was a big mistake in a number of ways. Thank goodness for stupid criminals.

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