Cyrillic and Runes

 Not surprisingly, looking at my pill counter it seems I somehow managed to miss taking my meds all day yesterday. If anyone feels "unsurprised" by the following missive, I sympathize, but they should "irregardless" turn themself over to the grammar police and throw themself on the mercy of the diction court ;-).

https://youtu.be/4npuVmGxXuk?si=JREshyUKMsU_TYK4

Is Cyrrilic another example of a bad shoehorning of Roman characters into a foreign language? At least Saint Cyrrilus created a bunch of new characters.

Ш sh

Щ tsch 

Ч ch

Ы (и? Й?) not sure if these are actually pronounced differently like русский rooskee (why the extra й?) or вы vee “you” (formal). To wit, a French person telling you that the o in hôtel and hommage are pronounced differently is almost certainly yanking you—it’s really more like a Richelieu nod to words that were spelled with an s in non-Parisian dialects during nation-building under Henri IV. Also yankeriferous the Japanese native who asserts that 端橋箸 (all “hashi” edge, bridge, chopstick(s) respectively) have different tones—whatever, dude-sensei… it could be easier argued that English is a tonal language. 

Я Ю ё Э(“liquid vowels” ya, yoo, “yioh,” “yuh/yeh” — whackily enough, eerily even, these are written the same as their matching liquid hiragana characters in Japanese やゆよ(“ye” obsolete in modern Japanese but also similar)…in Cyrillic cursive, anyway) 

Actually I think I got that wrong—e is liquid as in ещё раза (“yeshyow rasa” - “one more time”) making Э the non-liquid high middle vowel. 

ь ъ “pronunciation modifiers” — I don’t have a good grip on these, they might be to do with final glottal stops or voicing/devoicing or something…they’re called something like myakisnak and vrekisnak, respectively (“something-mark” and “something-else-mark”) I gather they function as “in-line diacriticals” or something, and they may govern the entire word or maybe just the preceding character. 

How to spell stuff in Russian? I still have a lot to learn but it seems god-awful, eg, пожалуйста “pahzhaluhsta” = “please” So Russian shares the icky English orthographic (ortho being generous) feature of all unstressed vowels going to schwa 

ə (or to “ah” in the case of Russian). Джиперс! Or maybe it’s джйпэрз! Or even джйпорз! Or maybe something else again (Jeepers!)—one of them may actually be “right”...

…combined with painful absence of user-friendly Spanish-like stress indicators (except in dictionaries and books for children)

As you may notice, there is no hard J in Russian orthography (just as, like with Jack Sprat, or Яков Спратов, English has no soft), which leads me to guess that the Dzhanibekov effect is not named after an ethnic Russian mathematician, per se, but a Kazakh or something. I write my name as Джей Иванович Дирен in Russian, for instance (Jay Dearien, son of John). My first name is almost as long as my last!

Those darn Romans! Imposing their alphabet on us Slavs and Germans!! The Japanese must harbor similar resentments and love-hate relationships vis-à-vis Chinese cultural/textual hegemony. 

Anyway, that’s just stuff I’ve picked up over the years…

Attachments area

Preview YouTube video Why we should go back to writing in runes

Why we should go back to writing in runes

漫画 Louise Prancing

    Manga index

Not enough tigers

 YouTube video 

It’s great that we have the societal knowledge and technology to combat mental illness. However, the way mental illness “works” looks like a kind of systemic shutting down or “checking out” rather like exist at all levels of the organism, eg, there are lots of genes and processes at the cellular level that literally say “we’ve suffered a radioactive or other insult and we need to hit the self-destruct switch before we hurt the rest of the organism” and these switches and mechanisms exist and cancer researchers study them. 

Having said that, bipolar and even alcoholism may be “adaptive” at the group level à la “we’re going to lose this war or miss this product deadline or whatever unless one individual can step up and not sleep for weeks at a time, talk a thousand times faster than any of us, have visions, steamroll over social conventions, etc, until we ‘win’ even if that person burns out and dies or is burned at the stake once it’s all over.” The Joan of Arc effect. 

Then there’s what I call the “there aren’t enough tigers” effect. Tigers eat the stragglers, the sick, the members of the herd who “just aren’t getting it” but there aren’t enough of them, they’re busy, they can only eat so many, and if there were enough tigers around to get the job done, it would probably be Really Bad. 

Hence, I theorize, the individuals do this for themselves. Something clicks, and the self-destruct mechanism is set in motion. One isolates, alienates others, neglects self-care, even commits suicide. That may be the source of the feeling of being so utterly trapped, but at the same time as if nothing is specifically wrong, as such. 

That may be a useful description of what one is going through in struggling with a mental illness, or trying to intervene or treat someone, as well as why “hitting bottom” is so crucial, and so heartbreaking to sit by the sidelines waiting for it, and why so many tend to “gallop through the gateways of madness or death” before they reach it. 

漫画 Louise Prancing

   Manga index

Religion and mental illness

 YouTube video 

Good share—I think I resonate with what you say.  Faith is a step into the crazy already, or potentially so, so if one is already crazy, it calls for, as I think you’re saying, rightly so, even more introspection. Another problem is that one’s religious community, also engaged in openness to the metaphysical, tends to be supportive or enabling of one’s mental-illness-fueled flights of delusion, ie, not keeping one foot in the mental illness side of the equation. In other words, one’s community (especially an evangelical/charismatic one—my situation) tends to err on the side of it being connection to the divine as opposed to pathological. 

It can also alienate oneself from a lot of (non-religious) people, which can worsen the illness. 

By the way, AA is a community which is both deeply spiritual even to the point of absolutely believing in things like temporal divine intervention, ie, mysticism, while at the same time keeping an eye on it and holding everything up to the rigorous real world lens of spiritual, mental, and physical health and well-being. 

So AA is not looking for, or supportive of, the Joan of Arc who has visions, leads their armies to victory, casts out the enemy, and then gets burned at the stake, which is something religions have shown themselves won’t to do. 

Having said all that, and given my own spiritual and religious journey, I still regard mystical/metaphysical experiences to be very comforting and supportive, eg, praying in tongues, hearing the voice of God, divine inspiration, prayer & meditation, even the gift of healing, but I still keep one foot in “maybe this is crazy” or “other people might think this is crazy” (Slavoj Žižek might term it “hysterical doubt”). Real is real, which means can it be proven by tests and experiments, and do other people think it’s real. Also, I tend to regard these spiritual things as personal, not something that others “have to believe” or I’ll cut them out of my life. 

日本語 露仏独の日本語能力試験用

 Yes, there are French, German, and Russian resources available for preparing for the Japanese Language Proficiency Test (JLPT) Level 1 (N1). Here's a brief overview of what you might find in each language:

### **French Resources:**

1. **Books and Textbooks:**

   - **"Manuel de Japonais: JLPT N1"** by the Japan Foundation is a comprehensive guide.

   - **"Le japonais en manga"** series, while generally for beginners, has advanced volumes that might help with N1 preparation.

   

2. **Websites and Online Courses:**

   - **"Nihongo-France"** offers articles, quizzes, and resources specifically for French speakers.

   - **"WaniKani"** and **"BunPro"** are English-first, but can be used in conjunction with French grammar explanations and kanji learning.

   

3. **Apps:**

   - **"Obenkyo"** is a popular app with French language support for kanji, grammar, and vocabulary practice.

### **German Resources:**

1. **Books and Textbooks:**

   - **"Japanisch Schritt für Schritt"** by Anne Kaneko and Ursula Gräfe, tailored for advanced learners.

   - **"JLPT N1 Grammatikbuch"** in German specifically for grammar and kanji practice.

   

2. **Websites and Online Courses:**

   - **"Nihongo-German"** offers a variety of resources including practice tests and study guides.

   - **"JBridge"** offers German-supported lessons specifically aimed at N1 learners.

   

3. **Apps:**

   - **"Imiwa?"** and **"JLPT Sensei"** offer German language support and resources for vocabulary and grammar study.

### **Russian Resources:**

1. **Books and Textbooks:**

   - **"Японский язык для начинающих"** series has advanced volumes aimed at JLPT preparation.

   - **"Грамматика японского языка"** for comprehensive grammar study focused on N1 level.

   

2. **Websites and Online Courses:**

   - **"Nihongo-Russia"** provides resources, including articles, vocabulary lists, and grammar explanations for N1.

   - **"Russian Kanji Book"** and associated online resources offer kanji practice specifically for N1.

3. **Apps:**

   - **"Kanji Study"** and **"JLPT Russian"** are apps that offer Russian support for kanji and vocabulary learning.

If you’re looking for specific titles or need help finding these resources, I can help with more details or searches.

TOOL Hiraku Utada First Love

Wikipedia article on First Love 

Her name is written 宇多田ヒカル、 in katakana, first name, which is kind of a hippy flourish. I have known カヲリs, which a super-hippy-sixties name, which I would have thought an illegal name under Japanese law (turns out not), kind of like using a number or punctuation as the legal name of an English-language child.

Now she writes is as 光 in kanji.

A young woman, the child of entertainers, returned to Japan while I was living there.

I found this album to be among the most cohesive album I've ever encountered. It seems to paint an arc of "first love" from excitement and hope to the realization of being trapped to pain to resignation. The flipping back and forth between English and Japanese made this feeling more poignant for me for...reasons.

I played it on loop at a tough time when my relationship seemed to be melting down and I was in a not-so-great place, rather like some of the songs depict.

I maintain, semi-flippantly, that Japanese is the only language for properly talking about human feelings and relationships, rather like talking about cooking or sex outside of French is kind of a waste of time. Talking about sex in English has about the same poetic quality as talking about highway construction, for example.  One thing about Japanese (and French) is that the parts of the body is less "nuanced" or "loaded" without being clinical--something like that.

I don't know if I want to mention this, but I thought about the subtle difference between, say, "ikanakatta," and "ikenakatta", which Japanese people would totally pick up on.

It's an impression, of course, but it has to do with the head-last default sentence structure, how feelings are literally baked into the grammatical structure of the language (someone else thinking/feeling something has its own verb tense, being made to do/feel something by somebody else and being emotionally traumatized by that, and wanting/not wanting that is a verb tense, etc., etc., etc.), "sentence incompleteness" is much more permissible than say, in English (or French), and the lability with which noun phrases may be plugged in everywhere and modified and also "tagged" with modifiers which are effectively verbals but which act like adjectivals with the compactness and versatility of Latinate/Germanic tags used in English like "non-" or "un-" or "counter-" or "über-" or "-like" and these are everywhere in Japanese, and Utada applies them to the English phrases peppering her songs in the same way (like the "Bonnie & Clyde" reference, which Serge Gainsbourg also referenced, by the way--Bonnie & Clyde really seem to be top-of-mind in some parts of the world). Japanese also has tens of thousands of "onomotopoeic words" (sei-on-go or gi-on-go) that convey things like "that feeling of heart-pounding anticipatory excitement" which may be combined and inflected into a single word such as doki-doki-sasetakute tamaranai (roughly "to luxuriate in the wanting to be made to feel that feeling of heart-pounding anticipatory excitement") which is effectively a single word in Japanese and may also be treated as a single stand-alone sentence. French and Spanish have interesting interjective/prepositionals such as "chez quelque chose" or "Ojalá" and Japanese is rife with these sorts of things, in all sorts of grammatical incarnations.

All this may be why Japan and Japanese are so interesting to us in the West, from Pocket Monsters (Pokèmon), Manga, Animé, Costume Play (cosplay), etc.

In terms of writing lyrics, Japanese has so many different ways of "conjugating" verbs and sentences and the ability to drop whole parts of sentences (especially of already mentioned themes) and adding more and more particles and endings that it makes matching up verses more flexible. The language is phonetically like Spanish however, ie, phoneme-poor, so it's relatively easy to rhyme and establish rhythm, unlike English, where it's a challenge, and also a challenge to squeeze word lengths into a meter scheme, which can make English (and French and German and Russian, etc.) songs "catchier" and I feel that Utada used her peppering of catchy English phrases into her lyrics worked to mollify this.

Some Japanese pop bands have the annoying habit of completing an enjambement by adding the hallmark of Yokohama dialect, i.e., a final "sa". It reminds me of the '80s band HEART which seemed to love this sort of lazy, gratuitous end-rhyming. Mercifully, Utada didn't do this anywhere. I'm sure I would've found it jarring.

I didn't know that this album transformed Japanese pop and was and still is the best-selling album of all time in the East until I read it on Wikipedia. I read it described as "hip-hop." I don't pretend to know what that means, as such.

My desperate prayer is that if we're going to go down the favorite rabbit hole of which musical genres are which and such, that participating rabbits or Alices at least explain what musical features and time periods and regions and bands and music critics and such are involved in determining whether a given song or album was Lower Slobonian Life-Support Metal or Splunge Gizmo Glop-Glop or what-have-you, otherwise the discussion risks to be stultifying for the rest of us. Can this album considered to be "hip-hop" (or whatever) because it "seems" like hip-hop? Since it's effectively a Japanese album, can it be squeezed into such classifications? Or can we look at the influences on Utada, on her parents, on their earlier work in New York? Was she part of a trend or a collection of influences which she then brought back to Japan? The impression in the media in Japan was that it was a kind of "homecoming" of a child of Japan who had been away her whole life, and that this was her first effort and that it was a uniquely Japanese one.

Songs on Album

1.  Automatic

2. Movin' on Without You

3. In My Room

4. First Love

5. Amai Wana 甘い罠 "Paint it Black" (Sweet Trap)

6. Time Will Tell

7. Never Let Go

8. B&C

9. Another Chance

10. Internude

11. Give Me a Reason

12. Automatic (Johnny Vicious Remix)

漫画 Louise crouching

  Manga index

漫画 Louise with teeth

 Manga index 

I’m trying the teeth style from American Dad! I think the hand turned out okay. The curl in the middle of her forehead could be emphasized a bit, maybe. 

Next time I can work on other mouth 👄 stuff like the tongue and such. 

模倣子 MemeWars

 Memetic index 

Spacefaring life

“There’s nothing like the spacefaring life!”

…actually, we can’t be sure, since nobody we know’s tried it…and frankly with artificial gravity, inertial damping, and all the lighting, climate control, desalinated water, and quantum-replicated food and other products that an antimatter reactor and advanced AI can deliver, it might be even more comfortable than say, glamping in an RV or living on a yacht 🛥️ 

Just make sure to get off your phone 📱 every once in a while and look Out the window for goodness sake! We didn’t warp spacetime all the way out here to the rings of beta Antares three just so you could send an Instagram selfie 🤳 to your so-called friends!

Oh, sometimes I don’t know why I bother…

漫画 Louise

 Manga index