Mathieu Blondel

Japanese TV has many programs to learn English. Today, I was zapping channels when I saw one of those. It was about ordering food in a restaurant. And I noticed that “entrée” means “main dish” in American English. This is an example of misuse of French.

In French, like in British English I think, entrée means first course. This noun comes from the verb “entrer”, meaning “to enter”. So it should be quite obvious that entrée is the course to “enter” the dinner. Japanese is borrowing the French word too, アントレ (an-to-re).

Speaking of which… Japanese is noteworthy for having many loan words too. During the GW, I did paragliding. In Japanese, this is called パラグライダー which comes from paraglider. But in English, paraglider is the name of the person doing paragliding, not the name of the sport.

So it’s funny that sometimes some languages borrow words from other languages but they get the concept wrong or make some blatant mistakes…

Ever wondered what is the origin of the Japan and China names? Wikipedia has three nice articles I recommend you to read: Exonym and endonym, Names of Japan and Names of China. In short:

An exonym, as opposed to an endonym, is a name of a place, used by a foreign language, that is not used within that place by the local inhabitants. For example, Japanese and Chinese people do not respectively use Japan and China to refer to their own country. It is noteworthy that exonyms have developed only for those places that are of especial significance throughout history for speakers of the language in question.

The Chinese traditionally positioned the emperor of China at the center of the world, considering other countries as being culturally inferior and barbaric. Thus, Chinese called their country 中国, zhōngguó, the “Middle Kingdom”.

The word China (French: Chine) may derive from Cin, the Sanskrit transcription of the name of the Qin Empire (2nd century BC). Marco Polo was already using Chin to refer to China at his time (1254-1324).

Before Japan had relations with China, it was known as Yamato and Hi-no-moto, which means “source of the sun”. When hi-no-moto was written in kanji, it was given the characters 日本. At that time, these characters began to be read using readings borrowed from China, first Nippon and later Nihon.

The word Japan (French: Japon) may come from Chinese. At the time of Marco Polo and the early trade routes, 日本 was not pronounced Nippon anymore in China but something like “Cipangu”. And indeed, in modern Mandarin, 日本 (riben) actually sounds close to “Japan” to my ear.

I have just tried out Jgloss, a program written in Java that adds annotations to a text written in Japanese.

I have first attempted to run it with free java virtual machines such as gij or kaffe but it did not work. So I resigned myself and finally installed Sun’s java runtime environment. Fortunately, it installs in a directory (which can be in your home directory). That makes the whole thing not too intrusive.

Jgloss works pretty well and is pretty fast. It uses Chasen, a part-of-speech and morphological analyzer to split a sentence into words (Japanese does not use spaces) and EDICT to get the reading and meaning of each word.

I would have appreciated a function to zoom in or something because meanings are very difficult to read.

I had a problem with japanese fonts. I suspect that the fonts selected in the settings are not used for all widgets, especially in the tree view on the right pane.

I would like to add a similar feature to Nihongo Benkyo one day. The only problem I’m seeing is how to display annotations, from a user interface’s perspective. I think pango will be my friend for this purpose.

I came across some interesting statistics about the frequency of apparition of chinese and japanese characters in the chinese and japanese wikipedia.

The first 100 characters for Japanese:
の に る ン と は た い し を で て が な 年 ス れ ル 日 ト イリ か あ ア
す ら ラ う っ り こ も さ ク月 ッ ま 大 タ ド 本 シ く ジ よ ロ レ き 学
フ ん カ 国 テ 道 一 人 ム マ 中 市 駅 つ ィ め バ プ そ コ お け ウ オ 線
用 行 者 グ 県 メ え 部 ど デ ビ 地 サ や ニ 東 キ わ 名 チ ナ 合 上 作 出

The first 100 characters for Chinese:
的 年 一 中 人 是 有 在 大 之 不 日 以 国 月 和 行 為 上 为 了 國 其 生 用
学 地 法 文 公 子 出 第 家 成 斯 世 主 作 而 他 者 十 民 三 可 名 部 自 本
分 前 二 代 也 於 西 下 政 所 方 个 理 于 到 王 多 事 南 定 利 物 使 天 德
同 要 得 特 小 及 北 道 或 立 会 高 能 后 由 外 新 等 如 教 科 山 台 時 克

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First, let me introduce EPWING, a dictionary and encyclopedia format which is quite popular in Japan but still remains almost unknown else where. Development of the format started during the 80s. In 1991 the EPWING Consortium was formed by Fujitsu, Sony, Iwanami and other Japanese IT and publishing companies. In 1996, EPWING was standardized as JIS (Japanese Industry Standard) X4081 and revised in 2001. The EPWING format exists in several versions including such features as sound, movies, compression, etc. and offers various search methods. Versions are backward compatible but not forward compatible.

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