HELLO FROM JAPAN

[Edminster]

Right. "The shoe (of) Neglect is." is still an odd sentence and I am having difficulty figuring out a circumstance where you would use it.

Unless maybe it's like saying "Holy shit Shoe's back!" but there's got to be a better way to say it in Japanese.

e: i think it's how calm and matter-of-fact it is that's throwing me off. Like it's answering a question that wasn't asked? I dunno, maybe LR can tell me why I'm buggin' about it.

[Cirtur]

But how do I know this isn't an illusion?

[Snarky00]

It is literally just a statement of existence. kutsu wa mushi desu ka? Is there a neglected shoe? hai, kutsu wa mushi desu. Yes, there is a neglected shoe.

It probably sounds weird because it requires two words a particle (wa) and a copula (desu) to say what would only require two words in english.

[Edminster]

It is literally just a statement of existence.

Yeah I'm pretty sure this is why I'm catching the vapours. It's like if people were discussing the general idea of mathematics and I interjected with "17 plus 41 is 58". Yeah it's tangentially related to the topic at hand but it's pretty damn weird to just say if nobody asked what the sum of 17 and 41 is.

This has been Analogy Time with Edminster.

[LordRetard]

Right. "The shoe (of) Neglect is." is still an odd sentence and I am having difficulty figuring out a circumstance where you would use it.

Unless maybe it's like saying "Holy shit Shoe's back!" but there's got to be a better way to say it in Japanese.

e: i think it's how calm and matter-of-fact it is that's throwing me off. Like it's answering a question that wasn't asked? I dunno, maybe LR can tell me why I'm buggin' about it.

ANSWER: You're anglocentric. Another linguistics mystery solved!

[Sahan]

And that brings us to another insightful episode of Mysteries of Language by our very own Lord Retard!

And so we wrap up Sahan's Commentaries for another post! I hope to see you all soon! Good night!

[Edminster]

I was hoping for a more in depth analysis of why I'm a language racist

Like, what rule is it breaking for my subconscious understanding of English to be raging so hard? Is it the "nobody asked if she exists" thing I think it is?

Thus ends another post in the Reopening Issues series.

[Snarky00]

Existence is implied in English unless you explicitly say otherwise. Like if you say "Joe" it is understood that Joe exists and since its english it's implied that you are talking to Joe.

[Cirtur]

And so ends another issue of Cirtur Goes With the Joke to Get That Postcount

[Edminster]

Existence is implied in English unless you explicitly say otherwise. Like if you say "Joe" it is understood that Joe exists and since its english it's implied that you are talking to Joe.

So in Japanese if someone interjected with "My cat's name is Mittens!" during a conversation regarding various breeds of cat nobody would bat an eyelash?

I am trying to analogise as hard as I can because I don't have the vocabulary necessary to say exactly what I mean and I have to do this weird-ass analogy-dance to try and get my meaning across!

[Cirtur]

So unless you explicitly state that something exists, it doesn't?

So if you're talking about your cat, until you say "My cat is" people will assume you are talking about your ideal cat?

So in Japanese if someone interjected with "My cat's name is Mittens!" during a conversation regarding various breeds of cat nobody would bat an eyelash?

I am trying to analogise as hard as I can because I don't have the vocabulary necessary to say exactly what I mean and I have to do this weird-ass analogy-dance to try and get my meaning across!

Ed, just fucking leave it, man.

[Oldrac the Chitinous]

Conversational rigor is very important!

"There exist a person you and a day today. How are you today?

"Let y be the current time. For all times x that are elements of today such that x< y, I have been pretty well.
Therefore, I am doing pretty well today. QED."

[AHMETxRock]

So unless you explicitly state that something exists, it doesn't?

So if you're talking about your cat, until you say "My cat is" people will assume you are talking about your ideal cat?

So in Japanese if someone interjected with "My cat's name is Mittens!" during a conversation regarding various breeds of cat nobody would bat an eyelash?

I am trying to analogise as hard as I can because I don't have the vocabulary necessary to say exactly what I mean and I have to do this weird-ass analogy-dance to try and get my meaning across!

Ed, just fucking leave it, man.

You mean like U.S. Miranda Rights? HEY OH!

[LordRetard]

I was hoping for a more in depth analysis of why I'm a language racist

Like, what rule is it breaking for my subconscious understanding of English to be raging so hard? Is it the "nobody asked if she exists" thing I think it is?

Thus ends another post in the Reopening Issues series.

Honestly I can't answer this 'cause I don't know much about Japanese (certainly not enough to know if Snarky's Japanese is actually that good), but you have to understand that the connotations of meaning vary between languages and cultures and so just because the most literal meaning of an utterance might not make sense in your language doesn't mean that there can't be something that you're entirely missing because you're still looking at things from the perspective of the English language.

For an example that's closer to what I actually know about, in Inuit cultures it's extremely hard to elicit useful data samples because if you say something that they wouldn't say, then they simply don't understand it and they can't make any sense of it, even if it is otherwise grammatical. For instance, if something isn't true, they have a hard time saying it. So, if you're trying to get them to say, "Bob is in the house," when Bob is clearly not in the house, then you'll just confuse them. One of my TAs related a story where she couldn't get a speaker to talk about stabbing an animal because "you don't shoot an animal, you stab an animal." When I took an Inuktitut class a lot of the times we couldn't get our Inuit speaker to say something unless the prof acted it out for her.

[Snarky00]

The sentence isn't really about existence at all. I used です(desu) instead of あります (arimasu). It basically just means "the shoe is neglected"

If I had said　 くつ　は　むし　あります. That would mean The neglected shoe exists or There is a neglected shoe since that makes more sense in english.