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Abe explains choice of Reiwa for next era name

japantoday.com

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Re: Abe explains choice of Reiwa for next era name

#71

Post by wodenokoto »

ekianjo wrote: post #54
fenomas wrote: post #16

Amusingly there's a pun here on "Zero-sum Era". This because "rei" is a common way to read the numeral zero, and "zero-wa" (using the same "wa" from the new era name) is the Japanese term for "zero-sum".

No, because nobody cares about the sound. The kanji matters. Soundwise there are tons of kanji with the exact same pronounciation so there is no pun to be found.

You are right that there are many homonyms in Japanese, but you are wrong in thinking that that results in nobody caring about them.

Japan has a proud tradition of phonetic based puns, called dajare. Wikipedia has a surprisingly long list, which includes explanations:

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dajare

Re: Abe explains choice of Reiwa for next era name

#72

Post by rangibaby »

glandium wrote: post #66
unsignedint wrote: post #44

Earlier quoted context omitted.

This may be due to the fact that previous era names had its source in Chinese literature. Reiwa, on the other hand, comes from passage that appears in Manyoshu poetry collection.

It's not even a word in Manyōshū. It's two characters taken from two words in a sentence from there, 令月 and 和ぎ.

Heisei and Showa are both made up of single characters selected from poetry passages, I guess that is how they choose names

Re: Abe explains choice of Reiwa for next era name

#73

Post by Kurtz79 »

wodenokoto wrote: post #71
ekianjo wrote: post #54

Earlier quoted context omitted.

No, because nobody cares about the sound. The kanji matters. Soundwise there are tons of kanji with the exact same pronounciation so there is no pun to be found.

You are right that there are many homonyms in Japanese, but you are wrong in thinking that that results in nobody caring about them. Japan has a proud tradition of phonetic based puns, called dajare. Wikipedia has a surprisingly long list, which includes explanations: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dajare

"ウランは売らん (uran wa uran) Translation: I never sell uranium. Explanation: ウラン (uran) means uranium, and the second 売らん (uran) means "never sell"."

While in the West we have Uranus puns.

Re: Abe explains choice of Reiwa for next era name

#74

Post by rangibaby »

dr_dshiv wrote: post #43

Harmony is an important concept in East and West -- and it has a much more specific meaning than "goodness." It played a major part in western philosophy (Pythagoras and Plato), where it was hypothesized that a mathematical harmony pervaded the cosmos. The first empirical -- even scientific -- hypothesis testing investigated this idea [0] using proportional lengths of string and the thickness of bronze chimes. Contem…

Don’t forget that the Chinese character for harmony also represents “Japan”

Re: Abe explains choice of Reiwa for next era name

#75

Post by earthboundkid »

fenomas wrote: post #33
enqk wrote: post #29

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Isn’t Reiwa 1 also this year?

It's both - dates through April 30 are Heisei 31, and dates from May 1 are Reiwa 1, is the official take.

Well, I don't foresee that causing any bugs.

Re: Abe explains choice of Reiwa for next era name

#76

Post by thaumasiotes »

rangibaby wrote: post #74
dr_dshiv wrote: post #43

Harmony is an important concept in East and West -- and it has a much more specific meaning than "goodness." It played a major part in western philosophy (Pythagoras and Plato), where it was hypothesized that a mathematical harmony pervaded the cosmos. The first empirical -- even scientific -- hypothesis testing investigated this idea [0] using proportional lengths of string and the thickness of bronze chimes. Contem…

Don’t forget that the Chinese character for harmony also represents “Japan”

The Chinese character for harmony is 和. The Japanese character 和 does represent Japan. The usual Chinese character that would represent Japan is 日; 和 is used in expressions taken from Japanese like 大和民族, the Japanese race.

Re: Abe explains choice of Reiwa for next era name

#77

Post by thaumasiotes »

fraculus wrote: post #19
SECProto wrote: post #10

Anyone else gets display issues with 令? It shows up incorrectly in certain android locations (keyboard, hangouts) but looks fine in firefox. The stroke order illustration on jisho also has the last stroke wrong [1] [1] https://jisho.org/search/%E4%BB%A4%20%23kanji

This might be a problem arising because of Han unification. In Japanese, the character is commonly written with a vertical final stroke (at least in print), whereas in Chinese it's a diagonally down and to the right. However, they are encoded as the same in Unicode. What gets displayed depends on the font choice, possibly aided by somewhat hacky language hints. This particular character is the second example in the l…

Speaking of this, my computer just switched from displaying Chinese by default to displaying Japanese. I was able to configure Firefox back to Chinese, but couldn't figure out how to set Windows 10 back. It only really affects me if I happen to be typing Chinese in Notepad, but still, it's annoying. Do you know how?

Re: Abe explains choice of Reiwa for next era name

#78

Post by thaumasiotes »

earthboundkid wrote: post #75
fenomas wrote: post #33

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It's both - dates through April 30 are Heisei 31, and dates from May 1 are Reiwa 1, is the official take.

Well, I don't foresee that causing any bugs.

Bugs of that type should have been worked out long ago; it is not the norm for the era change to coincide with the new year.

Re: Abe explains choice of Reiwa for next era name

#79

Post by thaumasiotes »

needle0 wrote: post #50
kochikame wrote: post #30

Earlier quoted context omitted.

it is a self-imposed complexity that we could opt out if we were smart You could say that about a lot of things in a lot of countries. You have to think twice before you throw away such an old tradition that connects people to the past and the history of their culture. Most Japanese people I know are either ambivalent or happy about it. No one is suggesting doing away with it. You do know that plenty of other culture…

I'm Japanese, and while I don't exactly suggest doing away with it completely, I don't think it has a place in the vast majority of information processing going on in society today. These Gengō updates force a massive, MASSIVE number of date entry forms (both paper and digital) -- from banks to government offices to driver's licenses to middle school soccer club application forms to just literally ANYTHING else imagi…

> These Gengō updates force a massive, MASSIVE number of date entry forms (both paper and digital) -- from banks to government offices to driver's licenses to middle school soccer club application forms to just literally ANYTHING else imaginable -- to update to new versions including the new era name, resulting in so much wasted resources and taxpayer money every time it happens.

The early Babylonian system was to give each year its own name. This has really helped us, thousands of years later, to develop an accurate chronology of the period.

If Japan used that system today, do you think the per-switch cost of switching would be higher or lower? How about the per-emperor cost?

Re: Abe explains choice of Reiwa for next era name

#80

Post by Nullabillity »

thaumasiotes wrote: post #78
earthboundkid wrote: post #75

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Well, I don't foresee that causing any bugs.

Bugs of that type should have been worked out long ago; it is not the norm for the era change to coincide with the new year.

It is not the norm to reset your date system every 30 or so years.
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