Kiyohara’s pretty good at making clear and explicable diagrams, isn’t she? It’s a skill all professors have!
yeah so i don’t even know what’s up with the schedule any more– next comic on saturday? i… guess?
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Ha, wouldn’t have thought you could make a joke off of that aspect of Japanese vs. Chinese.
I like the subtle joke in the name Beiguo. Considering which country is actually called something like Beiguo (I think?) in Chinese. Beikoku in Japanese.
Riceland! Well named, too — according to Wikipedia (almost):
The largest three exporting countries are Thailand (26% of world exports), Vietnam (15%), and Riceland (11%), while the largest three importers are Indonesia (14%), Bangladesh (4%), and Brazil (3%). Although China and India are the top two largest producers of rice in the world, both countries consume the majority of the rice produced domestically leaving little to be traded internationally.
Well, Thailand and Vietnam, being little countries, don’t really count.
*looks silly*
What I meant was, “Rice Land” are the symbols used in Japanese (and I’m pretty sure Chinese as well) for the United States. Rice = Prosperity, so the U.S. was named “Land of Prosperity”.
What do you mean by “speaking”? On this planet at least, the pronunciation of any stage of Classical Chinese is not preserved; linguists have to reconstruct it. Classical Japanese consists of taking the kanji in the order required by Chinese grammar (quite different from Japanese grammar) and pronouncing them as they are in modern Japanese; and in China itself, it consists of reading the old texts aloud, character by character, in modern Mandarin or Cantonese or whatever.
Nope. In Chinese, it’s ?? (modern Mandarin: M?iguó), “beautiful country”. If you take these characters and pronounce them in Japanese, the result is Mikoku, and when WWII came, it was considered inappropriate to call the enemy’s country “beautiful”, so another mi was substituted, the graphically simplest one, the one that means “rice” – ? (modern Mandarin: m?).
I always thought “Beiguo” was supposed to be ??, B?iguó, “northland”?
Fuck. Why doesn’t Unicode work here anymore!?! This page actually is coded in Unicode.
This page was in Unicode (UTF-8) both when I submitted the comment and when I viewed the results. Yet it behaves as if it were in Western European (ISO-8859-1). How come?
OK, so without the tones and the characters… modern Mandarin distinguishes “beautiful” from “rice” as mei and mi (both in the third tone), but this difference is missing in the Japanese pronunciations of those characters, so they’re homophones in Japanese.
Grmpf.
I’m not really sure what went wrong with the Unicode, but in any case, you’re right, the “Bei” in Beiguo means “North”. It’s kind of a throwback to the Midlands name “Northland” even though now it’s not particularly to the North of anything– well, it’s north of the Jiansur Union, I guess.
Has Chinese always used the same symbol combination for the US? I have an old sewn item from WWII-period Taiwan, which apparently informs everyone that the bearer is an American soldier. It’s definitely in Chinese, not Japanese, and the symbols “Rice-Country” appear prominently several times.
Maybe the fact that Taiwan was governed by Japan meant that the name for America followed the Japanese version? I know that a lot of younger Taiwanese people had been educated in Japanese during the colonial era (IIRC there were some newspapers still featuring Japanese language pages being published for a short time in the postwar era for and by Taiwanese people until the Chinese government shut them down– there’s a bit on this in Wu Zhuolin’s The Fig Tree), so there might have been some Japanese influence on Chinese texts as well, with the word for America using the same characters as the Japanese one?
As I understand, the “bei” in Japanese (rice) has nothing to do etymologically with rice or prosperity, but represent the abbreviation of an original unwieldy transliteration (???? Amerika or ??? Meriken), in which that character was used to represent the “me” sound. Chinese may be the same. If those characters don’t display, they’re on the jp.wikipedia.org entry for “amerika gasshuukoku”.