Konstantin Velichkov

@shinobu_books Counterpoint: at least it isn't used officially by organs of the state (e.g. a フリーター局 or the like). The abomination known as マイナンバー, on the other hand...

The worst abomination is フリーター (freelance worker) which combines the English word “free”, which with an abbreviation of the German word for work “arbeit” Less like a “freelance writer“ and more like a person who just flip-flops from part-time job to part-time job

@taicosama Wouldn’t the ‘desinicised’ 日本 be ‘Hi-no-moto’? Whatever one takes as its underlying etymology, ‘Yamato’ is no less a gikun for 日本 than it is for 大和. Also, good luck with making the Japanese version of Anglish lol

DESINICIZE JAPAN Nippon / Nihon → Yamato Kyōto → Miyako (Taira no Miyako) Kantō → Azuma Tōkyō → Azuma no Miyako Kyūshū → Tsukushi no Shima Honshū → Akitsushima Tennō → Sumera Mikoto / Mikado

@marcpuck @BCJCarter Leaving aside that it’s a disastrous idea, must all future ecumenical councils inevitably take place at the Vatican? If it is really necessary to have one, it would be better to convoke it elsewhere.

@BCJCarter An ecumenical council in this time of social media nonsense and press bias and incompetence would indeed be a spectacle.

I think we've all had quite enough Vatican Councils, thank you.

One dimension of the AI-in-art-and-music debate that is overlooked, is its potential to circumvent censorship and cancellation. Case in point: none of the human-sung recordings of 'I Vow to Thee, My Country' include the second verse. Before AI, I had *never* heard it sung!

@heisei_ramen @QuetzalPhoenix The one part of this chart that is completely wrong is コンセント being in any way semantically related to ‘consent’, it’s from ‘concentric socket’.

@QuetzalPhoenix One of the great parts about Japanese is that the orthography literally bans you from doing this. I’d sound like a lunatic if I used the English sound. It also has the nice side effect of letting Americans say “sushi” without feeling pressured to do a bad Asian accent.

Seriously, you never see French people do that, they are perfectly happy to sound French. Always speaks to a deep insecurity. When I speak English I butcher pronunciation if needed. When I speak Spanish and I say an English word, I say it like Sofia Vergara. Just be normal!

@shinobu_books Draconian severity with weights and measures when it comes to staple foods for urban populations seems to be a pre-modern universal. Look at how strict regulations on bakers and brewers in medieval London were (though not, iirc, ever quite rising to capital offences).

In the Edo era, you got decapitated if they caught you using a non-standard Masu 桝measuring box for rice or Sake

@EsquireCatholic Another point for my thesis, that most of these people, some ironically, others entirely unconsciously, end up embodying 19th century anti-Catholic caricatures.

One of the hallmarks of post-conciliar church apologists is this idea that Catholics cannot really know the faith unless you’re a trained theologian. What they really don’t want you doing is reading a Catechism written anytime before Vatican II and asking uncomfortable questions.

@heisei_ramen I wonder whether investingating and shaming the specific companies by name which seem to have such an insatiable appetite for foreign labour wouldn’t work better given Japan’s culture and social norms… Or maybe the investigator just gets slammed for ‘defamation’!

One of the reasons people radicalize so hard about mass immigration is that stopping or reversing it is long, arduous and tedious, but somehow new instances of it just sort of HAPPEN, like fires or earthquakes, without anyone noticing.

@shinobu_books I will have to tone down my habitual complaints about excessive katakana and unnatural loanwords if the alternative is this cursed romaji-kanji 混ぜ書き...

High class apts going up in Ginza. Not sure if I want to have to write “precious” in my address tho

@MurrayRundus This entire discourse is full of a particular kind of Trad-popesplainer archetype, which seems to be some latter-day ironic imitation of a 19th century anti-Catholic caricature.

If tomorrow the Pope said “Ah well, SSPX, you guys are all good. Here’s a canonical status” There are many Catholics on this app who would be making TikTok edits of Bishop Fellay the next day despite condemning them as the worst heretics and schismatics the day before

@timothyjphelan The truly regrettable thing is that I can think of scarcely any (nominally) Christian ‘first world’ country where industry executives facing a similar crisis will commission and attend a votive Mass or other public prayer for its resolution.

For 28 straight years, Kesennuma City in Miyagi Prefecture had been Japan’s top port for fresh skipjack tuna. Then last year’s catch plunged. Yesterday, the local TV evening news showed about 30 fishing industry executives gathered at a Shinto shrine to pray for a recovery this season. One was quoted as saying, “We’re so desperate we need help from the kami of the shrine.” In Japan’s supposedly secular public life, asking this can sit naturally inside an economic news story.

Friendly reminder that Wade-Giles is the superior romanisation for English speakers who haven’t and don’t intent to study Chinese, and all alleged arguments against it boil down to either ‘it’s not what the PRC uses’ or ‘people are too lazy to type apostrophes correctly’…

@shinobu_books @DamianFlanagan In an exercise I once rendered ‘Please check the engine oil’ as ‘機関の油を確認してください’. Apparently the correct native expression is ‘エンジンオイルをチェックしてください’…

@DamianFlanagan My favorites when I use the Japanese word for a tool and get met with confusion 金鎚？oh you meanハンマー

It is always good to add practical words of Japanese to my vocabulary. Despite having a PhD in Japanese literature, I find I am often alarmingly ignorant about the Japanese names of quite simple household items. A couple of years back I noticed my curtains were falling down and thought I had better get some hooks, but wasn’t exactly sure what they call these kind of “hooks” in Japan. This was before you could simply ask AI so I walked into some household accessory shops employing some old-fashioned terms before cottoning on that in Japan they just use the loan word “fukku” (which to English ears sounds quite comical). “Fukku o sagashite imasu” (“I am looking for fukku”) is the amusing phrase you need if ever like me you are caught in a curtain emergency. My DIY vocabulary was further augmented a couple of weeks ago when I was looking at the filler used copiously on the exterior of my little house and again wondering what they called it in Japanese. (Japanese houses are often a timber frame clad with panels with thick margins of water-proof filler). If in doubt in such circumstances, just try a Japanese version of the English word - “firaa”(フィラー) - and AI seemed to confirm this, but when I tried this out on my neighbour, she didn’t have a clue what I was talking about. It turns out that what the Japanese actually say is another, more old-fashioned English word, “pate” (“putty”). In Britain, the word “putty” is used almost exclusively for the sealant around old, single-glazed windows. (Everything else is “filler”.) But I’ve discovered that “putty” (“pate”) has taken on a far more high-profile role in Japanese construction and is an essential word to have in your DIY vocabulary. Confusingly, the Japanese use exactly the same word for the French delicacy, “pâté”, so be careful not to seal around your building with liberal amounts of duck pâté by mistake.

@thelb236 The irony is that nowadays the feast of St. Joseph the Worker is in practice kept by only by a very particular kind of Trad who strictly sticks to the 1962 ordo and rubrics and dares not attempt anything pre-1954, even in Holy Week.

What Pius XII, with John XXIII following close at hand, did to the first week of May is an utter travesty. You don't just up and move the feast day of two apostles (Ss. Philip and James) to make way for a novel feast of St. Joseph as workman (in a desperate attempt to counter the socialist May Day holiday) that never caught on in Catholic devotion. At least, you don't do that without proving every Orthodox concern toward Rome's lack of respect for its own liturgical patrimony correct.

@timothyjphelan Of course, the crux of the issue you raise lies in the fact that this very fine ‘doulia-latria’ distinction that exists in Catholic theology is not at all obvious to the majority of Christian laymen, let alone to a non-Christian society.

@timothyjphelan The Shinto case is a bit more difficult, but the latter instance seems to me to have been resolved in the ‘Chinese rites controversy’; to wit, it is licit to incorporate traditions of honouring ancestors if it’s not done in a way that implies they are being *worshipped*.

Religious acts become so ordinary in Japan that even practicing Catholics stop seeing them as religious. In a men’s gathering after Mass last week, one parishioner said that while traveling, he bows and claps at a Shinto shrine. Another said he lights incense and offers it before the deceased’s photograph when attending a Buddhist funeral. These were practicing Japanese Catholics. They weren’t trying to reject Catholic teaching. But no one seemed to see tension with the Catholic faith. I was surprised.

@RWApodcast Seriously, is there any good game-theoretic reason why the railways and roads within Ukraine leading to the Polish border haven’t been bombed to hell? I doubt they could cover the entire route with effective AD…

As always: look at what they're doing, not at what they're saying

@countmaculad @madcowpanzer That particular popesplainer (I have him muted) always confuses me when I see his name in qt's, because there used to be another anon going by Boethius a few years ago who was trad and right-wing

@madcowpanzer Never expect anything less from Modern Boethius, glad to have him and his premium coal back on my tl

Pope Francis restricted the TLM because you guys don’t like girls coming into Mass wearing dem booty shorts. If you don’t like seeing a little jiggle work at Mass you’re pretty much a Pharisee”

@timothyjphelan I recall an older, pre-war publication—perhaps one of the many prefaces to the various editions of ‘Bushido’—outright referred to it as ‘the native manner of saying grace before meals’.

“Eat a duck we must.” When I first came to Japan, this is how I memorized itadakimasu (いただきます). It means something like “I humbly receive.” People briefly put their hands together and say it, often in unison, before starting to eat. A small ritual. A moment of gratitude.

@pluant *He* was suspected of being too orthodox?! I shudder to imagine the infernal depths to which that order descended during Pedro Arrupe’s term…

Contrary to the prevailing view in Rome that he’d been exiled by the Jesuits because he was orthodox, Jorge Bergoglio was persona non grata in S.J. communities because he was divisive and unpleasant.