emoji

I have been wondering what the hell "orz" means. So today, I learned about "OTL" and then found out it's the same thing, basically. It's a drawing of a stick-figure guy kneeling, on hands and knees, with his head on the ground.

Jeez.

OTL
orz

Get it? Guh.

further on the "ideo-" issue...

So, real issue is that the symbols mean WORDS rather than IDEAS.

Um, ok. Sure. Yes. Fair enough. So perhaps "logographic" or "lexigraphic" might be better than "ideographic." Certainly.

I think this starts to beg the question about the difference between an "idea" and a "word." Seems also really easy to end up down a road that ends in Plato's Cave, too.

The real question this raises for me, though, is compound kanji that are made up of radicals - smaller versions of stand-alone kanji that, when combined, create a new kanji - therefore, a new word. A good one is "mori" 森　which is made up of three small versions of "ki"　木. Ki means tree, and mori means forest. This makes some sense. And I would argue that that's more than just a "word" - it's a word made from other words to convey a more complex idea involving the first word. So, OK, maybe I'm falling into the whole "simple early learner" trap mentioned before. But at some point we have to acknowledge that WORDS exist for the explicit purpose of communicating IDEAS, and are, in fact, representations of ideas, no matter the language. Obviously, where the early theorists went wrong was overstating the issue. But this guy feels sort of overcorrective, and that can totally cause problems, too.

Another fun example of compound kanji: "noisy" - 姦　"woman" - 女　(this is a bit unfair, though. that symbol is also part of the words for "adultery" and "rape" as well as "crafty" and "scheme" and "villain." So it's not necessarily good to be with many women, and the multiple women thing can express several ideas. However, there's also this proverb: 女三人寄れば姦しい - "Wherever women gather it will be noisy."

"Ideogram" is a Myth

Interesting chapter on the "myth" of ideographic writing: http://www.pinyin.info/readings/texts/ideographic_myth.html
I follow the arguments pretty well, and on some level it's all about splitting a very fine hair: the notion that Chinese writing exists (or ever did) completely independent of sound as a way to transfer ideas. The point being that the language, as soon as it shifted from representational drawings into actual writing, began to use one symbol to stand for things that were pronounced the same, even if they were dramatically different in idea or concept. The example given is the word for "wheat" - in Chinese, the character that means "wheat" also means "come," because they were pronounced the same way. The symbol was first a stylized picture of a wheat stalk, but as soon as it was standardized into writing, it was used to mean something that had nothing to do with wheat, but which sounded the same when spoken. Egyptian heiroglyphics were similar.

OK. I get it. I also get that the notion of an ideogram-basis for the symbols is reinforced by the fact that you learn really simple symbols first when learning Japanese or Chinese - stuff like "river" and "mountain" and "man" that look sorta like those things. This makes it easy to keep thinking of the characters as ideograms rather than "letters" the way the Roman alphabet works.

Fine.

What it doesn't change is that one symbol, perhaps complex but still a single entity, functions not only as a sound (or in Japanese, potentially several sounds) but also as an idea or an entire word. And in Japanese, the limited number of phonemes (sounds) means that one phoneme is associated with several characters, and the meaning is impossible to distinguish unless one knows the kanji or the context. I think it's not that "ideogram" is a bad label, but instead that it's been taken to mean "picture-only language component."

Gaijin-Smasher Sighting!

So, about 10 days ago, I actually met Azrael from Gaijin Smash in person! He was at the last WhyNot?! Party. Very calm, friendly guy.

kurisumasu keeki

Today I followed some students down to the school kitchen, and there were about 20 girls in there learning to make chocolate Christmas cake:



Yukari didn't have a partner, so I was soon drafted to help her out.



The Ingredients:

1.5 bars of bitter (Ghana Black by Lotte) chocolate
60 g of butter
3 eggs
110 g of granulated sugar
30 g of cocoa
20 g of powdered sugar
more powdered sugar to taste

FIrst, chop up the chocolate bars into slivers to make it easy to melt. Start a pot of water boiling to use as a double boiler, and you'll need a large metal bowl in which to melt the chocolate, too.




Meanwhile, you'll want to separate the egg yolks from the egg whites. Put them in two different bowls (you'll need to use an electric mixer or whisk with each eventually). First, mix half the granulated sugar with the yolks until frothy. The whisk is fine here, but if you have an electric mixer, it'll be easier in the long run.

You'll then want to melt all the chocolate, stirring all the time. After you have the chocolate melted, stir in the butter until it melts into the chocolate. After you have the butter mixed in completely, add the frothy sugar/egg yolk mixture and stir until the whole thing is a uniform lighter brown color. Use a rubber spatula for this if possible.

Now is probably a good time to preheat the oven to 170 degrees Celcius (325 - 350 degree F).

Afterward, sift the cocoa and powdered sugar to get all the lumps out. Sift them together. Then add half to the chocolate mixture, stirring it all in. Add the rest and again stir it all in, using the rubber spatula.



Next, you need to make a meringue. This sounds hard and all Frenchy and stuff, but it really just means add sugar to egg whites and whip. Use an electric mixer if at all possible, and gradually add some of the remaining sugar as you mix the egg whites. It should be more like a malleable pseudo-solid than a liquid by the end (think shaving cream, or cool whip), so just keep mixing.

You COULD use a whisk instead of the mixer for the meringue, but that's a nightmare. It'll take a long time, either way. Longer than it seems like it should, anyway. (At least, I thought so).



After you have a suitable meringue, take 1/3 and stir it into your chocolate mixture with the rubber spatula. When the color is uniform, stir in the rest of the meringue.



When you have finished mixing everything together and it's all the same color and consistency, you'll need a baking mold. Ours were cardboard (which surprised me) with a diameter about the length of my hand, wrist to middle fingertip (so... 8 inches? probably 20cm). The cake batter filled 1/3 of the mold. Spread it to cover the bottom and so it has a consistent depth.

Bake for 50 minutes.



Use stencils and the rest of the powdered sugar to decorate...





Merry Japanese Christmas!