| HN Mirror

Sorry for not acknowledging your post earlier but I simply forgot. Anyway, thank you for that little gem of wisdom; I've already 'noted' it in my mind's useless info dept. :-)

It's an excellent metaphor because that's what happens. Over the years I've noted many times that some facts (even seemingly irrelevant ones) in one field can play an important role in me understanding a concept in a totally different (and often unrelated) one. The trouble is that I've never had a photographic memory so all too frequently when I encounter something new then I can be left thinking 'now I recognize that from something I've come across previously but where?'. It's a nuisance but I put it down to my brain's 'garbage collection mechanism' being overly efficient.

Sometimes it's also a burden especially when you can't mentally discard or turn off an old 'connection' as it can become annoying. Here's an example you might appreciate. It's well known fact there's a propensity for English language speakers to steal words from other languages then incorporate them effortlessly into English as if they'd always been there—simply because the foreign imports sound fashionable or posh—and that this practice happens even when well-known and perfectly adequate English words or phrases exist. The trouble is that inevitably they never take the time or effort to pronounce these imports correctly. (Right, it's no wonder English is such a bastard language).

When in Japan years ago I learned to pronounce tsu - つ, ツ - perhaps not perfectly but likely better than many Westerners/English speakers do who have never been there. Nowadays, the transliteration of the Japanese word ツナミ is more commonly used in English than its original native counterpart! Unfortunately, the trouble is that almost no native English speaker takes the time or effort to pronounce tsu correctly even though the Latin characters provide a reasonable facsimile of/guide to its correct pronunciation (even those who've much better diction than me—BBC announcers for instance—usually make a mess of it).

Thus, whenever I hear a slurred-out overly-long tsu it inevitably grates with me. If I'd never learned the correct Japanese pronunciation, which, given that I'm a native English speaker (thus it's essentially useless information), then I could be blissfully ignorant of the fact just like everyone else. ;-)

No doubt, having provided the phrase 'まめちしき', you are also aware of the difficulty we native English speakers have in pronouncing tsu. I often wonder what the Japanese think of us given that we're so efficient at mashing up their language and that we don't give a damn about doing so. It annoys me is that we've the hide and arrogance to adopt the word ツナミ then just mangle its pronunciation. In my opinion adopting and incorporating a word from another language and being insensitive or oblivious to its cultural significance is both rude and indicates ignorance. (Here, I make a distinction between incorporating a word into another language and say those who are learning another language and who are having difficulty in pronouncing words in that newly-acquired language).

BTW, I don't want to give you the impression that I'm fluent in Japanese as I'm not. Some decades ago, I worked in Japan for a short while but I was never there long enough to acquire an adequate understanding of the language let alone gain fluency. Also, I'm aware that I've a mixture of hiragana and katakana here (kanji is too complicated for me to deal with here). One curiosity I've never quite figured out (except perhaps that it's traditional), which is to ask why a certain formalism seems to have been adopted in the naming of Japanese cities. Why do cities and towns [seemingly] nearly always use kanji for their names (and not hiragana or katakana although there are exceptions); and why do most major cities use two kanji characters whereas smaller cities often use three or even four characters—or sometimes only one (as in the city of Tsu)? I can't remember Tsu's kanji name (character) but I do recall it was a sort of exception in that the hiragana character tsu, つ, is also sometimes used, which seems a little strange to me (but it makes excellent sense [to me] if for no other reason than it seems like a good shortcut).