Here is a (rather reluctant) translation of 「きれいな女の子」.
is an interesting
thing
fingernails
the colour of lipstick
the sound of her smile
she lowers her eyes
where
is she looking
a pretty girl
is a dangerous
thing
the colour of words
the price of beauty
the sound of silence
she looks down
what
is she thinking
空
靴
色
側
I guess one thing VTC was good at producing was insane, paranoid idiots. Case in point: Paul Caldwell, tuteur extraordinaire (yep, the same guy who brought golf clubs to a listening class and ranted about nothing but golf for nearly an hour).
What happened today was that I was contacted by a former VTC tutor with regard to information I might be able to help with. Soon enough, I have received a very interesting missive from Mr. Caldwell, stating (regarding one of the staff members who was fucked as gently - with the proverbial chainsaw - as the rest of the tutors and students):
Michelle is not being treated as an enemy but we know she lied; you expect me to believe she had no idea how much money was in the bank account, that's ridiculous. Dude, if she was out that much money she would have left MONTHS [sic] ago!Say what?! Oh, and then there was this little doozie:
Either you are lying, Michael, or you are being lied to. One way or another we will find Branden and we will serve him our claim. [...] If you don't want to 'fess up and give us Branden's address then we can add YOUR name to the claim too, also Michelle's.Charming. After a few calls to the police and quite a high volume of hate [e-]mail, I finally got the following:We're not going to quit. If the law won't help us then I will track Branden and anyone who protected him and I will fucking paralyze them! You've got 'til Friday, or I give your name to the police.
Okay then, I probably did go too far with that threat. It was an empty one after all, the law will help us, I think we learned that today. [...] Look how Mike's trying to play me now; I'm not afraid of him, he wouldn't notify the police after threatening my life [...]Yeah. Apology accepted, eh? (Try to use a few more conjunctions, eh, Paul?) Let me say it here again, for the record: I will not let myself be punched one more time in my life, you motherfucker. Well, that's all, folks. As Ambrose Bierce tells us, "the road to hell is paved with good Samaritans." Dixi.
Well, there it is, ladies and gentlemen: a call last week; a call tonight, and a nice, forwarded e-mail:
Dear all,I thank the stars that I had the wherewithal to actually quit this goddamn place back in July (and get all my money, to boot). My heart goes out to all the tutors who will now remain unpaid and all the students who will not get their tuition fees back.At first, I would deeply apologize for the situation we have reached at [sic] now.
I have tried to do my best to save VTC and you all, but unfortunately every thing that I tried was [sic] not gone through.
VTC will be closed down by the Landlord as the date [sic] of Sep 28, 2009 which is tomorrow and VTC will be under the legal managemnet.
Please consult about this issue with your legal assistant.
Thank you so much for your all dedication and efforts I will never forget that.
I hope you will have a better job in the future.
Best Regards,
Branden Yu
President/CEO
VTC Education Group Inc.
Branden, you asshole, how could you promise me that you would never give up on VTC? All those who doubted you now stand vindicated. If there is one lesson we can learn here is that an educational institution should never put profit before education and should always keep its name clean. Rot in hell.
P.S. Incidentally, last night I had a dream nightmare that I went back to VTC to ask for my job back. Thank god I didn't, eh? ;)
P.P.S. Here is the original link to the Global BC report that was filmed today.
[A translation is now available here.]
面白いこと
です
爪
口紅の色
微笑みの音
眼を伏せました
どこを
観ていますか
きれいな女の子は
危ないこと
です
言葉の意味
美しさの値段
沈黙の音
顔を俯けました
何を
考えますか
This weekend, I had the unpleasant experience of getting into an extremely ugly argument with three of my closest Chinese friends regarding the origins of Japanese in relation to Chinese and other languages.
Now, maybe this is the 鬼佬 in me talking, but every time Derek brings up China, Chinese politics or Chinese culture, it sounds like he says that, by virtue of being an eternal, noble victim of Western oppression and hegemony (Japan often sounding like a proxy oppressor on America's behalf, in these cases) China deserves special treatment and respect.
Before I go any further here, I do not mean to deny that the complex interactions between the East and the West over the last three hundred years have certainly put China at an extreme disadvantage. The problem I have with this line of argumentation is that very often this "underdog" argument extends very far, to encompass all inventions, technological advances and cultural products, to the point that it sometimes sounds that the Chinese were everywhere first.
Thus, a number of unsubstantiated claims were thrown my way, and I threw a number of unsubstantiated arguments back in return. To wit, Amelia argued that, because Japanese borrowed Chinese 漢字 characters (and subsequently developed the ひらがな and カタカナ from them), Japanese owed its structure to Chinese; Derek argued that linguistic research (and historical linguistics, in specific) are motivated politically and even economically and are thus de facto biased and inadmissible; I argued that the correlation between systems of writing does not imply parallel linguistic or lexical development, that there may have been a land bridge between the Korean peninsula and Japan, explaining migration and separate linguistic development, and that there may even be links between languages such as Russian and Chinese (due to the similar sibilant sounds in Russian and Chinese and the flexible word order in the former language) or even English and Chinese (both being SVO). Dave sat and listened to us politely.
In the end, my argument seems to have been understood as a blatant attack on Chinese language and culture (to the extent that Derek classified my views as taken from "Japanese textbooks" and "Japanese teachers" that "rewrite history" and ignorant or politically-motivated Western scholars). I had then somehow understood that I have expressed my arguments regarding Japanese in an ostensibly anti-Chinese way (however, some of the nuances that have caused such offense are still unclear to me). With a great feeling of guilt, I have apologised profusely and, the next day, I sat down to do some research.
At first blush, I have immediately found out some facts which explain both my own and my friends' misconceptions. However, things turned out to be much more complicated than I had initially thought. According to our good friend Wikipedia, Chinese is a Sinitic language from the Sino-Tibetan language family, and Japanese is a Japonic language from the Japonic-Ryukyuan language family. Interestingly, "The identification of the varieties of Chinese as 'dialects' instead of 'languages' is considered inappropriate by some linguists and Sinologists." In addition (in keeping with a separate argument, in which Derek had argued that Cantonese and Mandarin are dialects, not languages)
From a purely descriptive point of view, "languages" and "dialects" are simply arbitrary groups of similar idiolects, and the distinction is irrelevant to linguists who are only concerned with describing regional speeches technically. However, the idea of a single language has major overtones in politics and cultural self-identity, and explains the amount of emotion over this issue.With regard to loanwords, Wikipedia states that
Chinese vocabulary has exerted an enormous influence on the Japanese language. At the time of their first contact, the Japanese language had no writing system, while the Chinese had a written language and a great deal of academic information, providing new concepts along with Chinese words to express them.In truth, I have never debated this issue, and, anyway, I needed more evidence regarding structure. While I kept looking, I found out that loanword movement seems to work both ways, since "like any other language, Chinese has absorbed a sizeable amount of loanwords from other cultures."
Since the 20th century [...] using existing kanji,, the Japanese re-moulded European concepts and inventions into wasei-kango (和製漢語, literally Japanese-made Chinese), and re-loaned many of these into modern Chinese. Examples include diànhuà (电话/電話, denwa, "telephone"), shèhuì (社会, shakai, "society"), kēxué (科学/科學, kagaku, "science") and chōuxiàng (抽象, chūshō, "abstract") [...] jīngjì (经济/經濟, keizai), which in the original Chinese meant "the workings of the state", was narrowed to "economy" in Japanese; this narrowed definition was then reimported into Chinese. As a result, [...] there is some dispute over [...which words] the Japanese or Chinese coined [...] first.Further research on Wikipedia has been difficult because of its obviously-unreliable and general nature. However, even here there was a lot of disagreement, vagueness and uncertainty: on the one hand, I came across such statements as "[the] relationships [of Japanese] with other languages remain undemonstrated" and "more distant connections remain contentious among historical linguists," and, on the other hand, I read:
The possibility of a genetic relationship to the Goguryeo [...] language has the most currency; a relationship to Korean is widely considered but is problematic; an Altaic hypothesis is less widely accepted. A few linguists support the hypothesis that Japanese is genealogically related to the Austronesian languages.Thus, although I have determined with certainty that I was completely wrong with regard to my Russian-Chinese and English-Chinese hypotheses (since both Russian and English are classified as Indo-European languages and Chinese is classified as a Sino-Tibetan language, and physical contact from the Middle East seems to have never reached Asia during the initial stages of linguistic development), I was still in the dark with regard to the rest of my questions. After a whole lot of Googling, I decided to contact Dr. Alexander Vovin, a U.S.S.R.-born professor at the East Asian Languages and Literatures department at the University of Hawai’i at Mānoa.
Dr. Vovin replied to me yesterday, being very concise and specific in his answers.
Mike: Can it be said that the Japanese language has developed independently from the Chinese language?What have I learned here? 1. I should definitely avoid talking to my Chinese (and Korean) friends about Asian linguistics in general and anything Japanese in specific; there is just too much conflict and various flavours of nationalism and exceptionalism to go around. The field is highly volatile and I have yet much to learn about both Japanese and Chinese. 2. Just because two languages share a writing system does not mean that they have not developed independently from each other (dynasties, World War II and textbooks notwithstanding). 3. Just because two features in different languages seem the same, does not mean that they have common origins.
Dr. Vovin: J and C are unrelated, but C did influence J phonology and lexicon, not to mention that J writing system is derived from C (for kana it is through a Korean intermediary). This influence becomes especially apparent from Kamakura on [a period in Japanese history between 1185 and 1333]. There is no ostensible influence in syntax, J stayed SOV [Subject Object Verb, whereas English and Chinese are both SVO].
M: "How correct is the hypothesis regarding the development of Japanese from older Korean?
V: I think it is wrong, but some believe it is right. My main [...] argument[s] are: 1) there is no common paradigmatic morphology, 2) the lexical parallels are sadly lacking among such basic vocabulary as [...] body parts, and when they are present we ran into lack of regularity of correspondences, unaccounted segments, etc. 3) the best possible etymologies for Korean show up only in Central J.
M: How correct is the hypothesis regarding the land bridge between Korea and Japan (in the Palaeolithic or Neolithic) and the subsequent crossing over of cultures and/or languages?
V: Well, the bridge must have been there during Ice Age, but J migration to islands occurred no earlier than 4 c. BC -- too late. It must have been maritime.
M: Is there any connection between Indo-European languages and Sino-Tibetan languages (i.e. Russian and Chinese or English and Chinese), or have the two language families developed in complete isolation from each other?
V: They are completely unrelated, and some linguists even question the validity of ST -- most likely we have there Chinese family and Tibeto-Burman family, with [...] lots of contacts, but originally unrelated.
What am I still curious about? 1. Why are two Indo-European languages like Russian and English so different in terms of word order? 2. How can the ostensible similarity between Russian and Chinese phonemes be explained (if there is any)? 3. Can something like "стыдно" be correlated with "恥ずかしい" (as complete units of meaning)? 4. Why are English and Chinese SVO but Japanese is SOV? 5. Why is historical linguistics such a contentious field and why are my Chinese friends so protective about their linguistic theories?
Well, I hope you enjoyed my foray into the world of linguistics more than I enjoyed being looked upon as an idiotic white guy indoctrinated into believing falsehoods by an evil Japano-American academic armada. It's all in a day's work, right?
Well, I rode the Canada Line with my student Emi, for the first (and probably last) time. (If you are wondering why the photos are in black-and-white, it's because they were taken with a shitty, 2MP phone camera).
I am a Maniac
えみ
Waiting in Line
Rotem!Aside from the obvious problems with the entire enterprise, which I already covered, I would like to share some basic math with you:
Granville at 71st to Seymour at Georgia = 24 min. on the 98 B-Line
Granville at 67th to Seymour at Georgia = 26 min. on the #10 Hastings
It is irrelevant how long it took me to get to Cambie at Marine Drive from Georgia at Granville (the Canada Line was running on its demo schedule, anyway). What is important in this story, however, is that it took me 25 minutes just to walk from Cambie at Marine Drive to Granville at 70th.
Yeah, there is something wrong with this picture (not the picture above, the metaphorical picture). Even if I were to cycle from Granville and 67th to Cambie at Marine Drive, it would still take me at least fifteen minutes, and then I would wait between five and ten minutes for the Canada Line. 25 minutes! OK, but what if I walk down to 70th at French (five minutes), wait for the #100 (15 minutes), and take the #100? 25 Minutes!!! (Don't even get me started on the new #10 extension on September 7: wait for the #10 (ten-fifteen minutes), take the #10 (ten minutes)...)
Marine Drive Station
Looking RichmondwiseIt's crystal-clear now, eh? With the elimination of the 488, 490, 491, 492, 496 and the 98 B-Line, an additional 25 minutes is added to my every commute by the assholes at TransLink. But wait - you might say - what if you take the #10 Downtown the old-fashioned way? Well, if the #10 will indeed "run more frequently," I expect at least 1.5 times much more traffic (if not twice the traffic during peak hours), which would allow me to wait less outside of the bus (-5 minutes) and more on the bus (+5-10 minutes), making the Canada Line a moot point any way you look at it. One step forward, two steps back. What can I say? Joseph Heller would be proud.
