Sheer Abject Laziness
Lately my spelling in messenger programs has been getting worse. More and more mistakes are creeping into my chat conversations.
And I haven't been caring.
I really should, because that will trickle into my typing accuracy for when it is necessary to be correct.
But I don't.
Hmm...
Tags: personal spelling
Pronunciation Sandwich
GameTrailers has been doing retrospectives of the Final Fantasy series over the last month or so, from the beginning. I haven't seen the last couple that came out while I was in Hawaii, so Kyle and I were talking about it earlier and he mentioned that he thought they pronounced some names strangely. Pronouncing Yuffie different than the officially established pronunciation (in Kingdom Hearts, and I think her name was said in Advent Children as well), and some of the FF9 characters. When he came to the subject of Freya, their pronunciation was correct and his was wrong, as they pronounce the name as Norse mythology has it pronounced.
A simple interpretation of pronunciation can be rather difficult in the English language, since there are so many different languages that root it. One example today was on Notebook Forums, where I derived a similar pronunciation to a Reuben sandwich from the word "ruberish", a rather odd misspelling of "rubbish." Later 'r' ignored, the mere removal of a 'b' changes the sound from a "ruh" to a "roo".
Which leaves me wondering if you use ruberish to make reuben sandiches.
Tags: pronunciation video_games words
Back from Hawaii
I'm back from Hawaii. Actually, I've been back for a few days. I don't have anything to talk about, though. I've been spending most of my free time since I got back watching episodes of House, as I'm sort of out-of-gear for writing right now.
My trip did inform me of one thing though: I need to work more on my Japanese studies. There were a lot of Japanese people around, and I was only able to pick up small bits and fragments of their speech. Had I been working on it seriously since I got out of High School it ptobably would have been much better, I'm guessing now that I may very well know less vocabulary-wise than I did then.
Of course, language barriers don't hinder my understanding of universal language, such as the case watching a Japanese woman swat her son in the head after he made some smart-aleck remark on the elevator we were on. :D
Tags: anecdote japanese personal translation travel
C-c-c-combo Breaker
Well I'm going to have to break off my seven days of Skewed updates, because I still have some more things I have to take care of before I go to Hawaii. So I'll have to spend the next few nights working on those, rather than more story.
It was rather fun, but was making me dead tired expelling so much energy working each night. Several times today I was starting to fall asleep, which isn't a problem I've had at work for the last few months. But more importantly, because it was making me tired it was causing my writing quality to slip. I don't really have much time to work on things at night, there's only a four hour gap from when my shift at work ends and I usually go to bed. Out of that I've been doing other things that needed to be done for the day, so I haven't been getting to writing until after 10, leaving a mere 2 hours for deciding how I want the section to go and writing it.
That's not a lot of time, and it does hurt things. Despite the fact that I treat the Pokegym version of Skewed as a "first draft" copy, which will be revised later, I still try to do some good quality writing. With my last update, the library discovery, I wasn't happy at the end of it at how it turned out. Had I taken more time to work on it, I would have written it more carefully, and it would have been better.
So for now, to keep my sanity, and keep me from being dead tired at work any more and nearly falling asleep, I'm ending the marathon writing. I might do it again sometime, because as I said it was pretty fun, but it will have to be at a time where it will not compromise my writing quality, and not compromise my alertness.
Tags: internet personal skewed travel writing
Bilingual Illiterate
Writing Skewed occasionally presents an unusual problem.
Skewed takes place in Japan, and its characters are (with a couple exceptions) Japanese. However, I'm obviously not writing the story in Japanese, I'm writing it in English, otherwise few people would be able to read it. If I was writing it in Japanese, then non-japanese people should be able to read it for only the following three reasons:
1. they have taken Japanese language classes or have lived in Japan
2. they are linguists
3. they've got a Babelfish in their ear
If you know claim to know Japanese and none of those three apply, then stop right now, you need help.
Anyway, I don't normally need to worry about that. I just write it, and everything's treated like a massive auto-translate function is applied. The characters are still speaking Japanese to each other, and there's not a problem.
The problem comes in when I have to refer to things in another language. Particularly, in this case, English.
The update I wrote for Sunday demonstrated the first problem, which I solved by having a bilingual character just say what was being said in an English-language video. However, it became more difficult with last nights update, when I was actually discussing linguistic roots of words. Ending up with English, Japanese, Greek and Latin in one paragraph, and also French would have been there as well if I could find the breakdown for the French names of the Eevee evolutions.
I decided the best way to break the auto-translate was to italicize the words so they would be in the actual language, thus allowing me to refer to the Japanese name Blackie as such, instead of havving an odd sentence of "the English name for Umbreon is Umbreon," which is rather obvious.
So as to not resort to the dubbing industry's usual tactic of using southern accents, I'm not going to even try writing accent differences for Skewed.
Tags: english japanese linguistic skewed translation writing