(identity 'myron)

Sat, 20 Mar 2004

Eco [/World]

Yet another eco-apocalyptic story though not quite as bad as the last one.

This study goes a long way to confirm what we expected. It's also a strong argument to counter those who deny that we are in the midst of a massive extinction of life forms.

....

Vast areas of the tropics that have lost their forests will have the same damn weeds, bushes and scrawny eucalyptus trees so that you don't know if you're in Africa or the Americas.

Those damn weeds, we should bring back Captain Planet.

// posted at 11:13. permalink   comments

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Japan and China: National Character Writ Large [/Japan]

Interesting article inferring that differences in representing foreign loan words in Japanese and Chinese reflect different ways of thinking in each country of itself vs the rest of the world. For anyone who doesn't know the two languages, Japanese generally spells out foreign loan words in a very square and distinct script. Chinese, in contrast, coins new words using Chinese character compounds to match the meaning of the new foreign word. Some people seem to have a funny take on why this is:

"China is a big continent and has an inclination to think that it is No. 1 and that others are uncivilized," said Minoru Shibata, a researcher at NHK, Japan's public broadcast network. "Therefore, they feel that giving Chinese names to foreigners is doing them a favor."

Riight... and nevermind that last I checked, Japan still requires anyone gaining citizenship to adopt a legal Japanese name.

The rest of the article goes on to talk about overseas Chinese and overseas Japanese. Second-generation overseas Japanese seem to get their names spelled out like foreign words, rather than with the normal use of Chinese characters, the implication being that they're more or less counted as foreigners. The same is not true of the Chinese.

There's also a decent rebuttal of these pretty far-out conclusions here. Although I don't agree with them entirely because they don't address points like how names are written. They argue the use of the special script for foreign words is no different than italics in English. Well, then, my name is clearly foreign, so why isn't it Myron Wu? And if you were pedantic, it's doubly foreign, because the first name is supposed to be of ancient Greek origin. So why wouldn't it be "Myron" Wu?

// posted at 09:13. permalink   comments

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