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Patio11's perspective on the Japan Earthquake

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Re: Patio11's perspective on the Japan Earthquake

#41

Post by jrockway »

burke wrote: post #31
patio11 wrote: post #15

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Well, you learn something new every day. (The Japanese word, borrowed from Chinese, sounds like "taifuu.")

I had to stop and think about that one for a while. Are there any cases that you know of where a Japanese word is anglicized before becoming an English word? It seems like english speakers have an easy enough time guessing at Japanese pronunciation that we normally keep the direct romanization. This is why "typhoon" seemed weird to me. It makes a lot more sense that both languages would have imported it from Greek.

Unlikely. The first character in taifuu means "big", and the second means "wind". They came up with this on their own; and it's simply a coincidence that other languages have a word that sounds similar.

Re: Patio11's perspective on the Japan Earthquake

#42

Post by HSO »

adrianbye wrote: post #20
patio11 wrote: post #2

There is a bit of overlap here with my comments on HN the last couple of days. I've had to explain it to 100+ friends, family, customers, clients, etc, so I figured I might as well polish it and put it somewhere public. At the risk of stating the obvious: I am not "HN's Japan Guy." There are many, many HNers in Japan. A few dozen of them make it out to the Tokyo meetups. There are many, many perspectives on this disa…

excellent post and exactly what i suspected. i think the news should steer back to the middle east and libya in particular right now; thats where things hang in the balance and can impact billions of lives.

absolutely. i have no doubt that the japanese people will continue to deal with this in the most admirable way. where attention could make a serious difference now is in libya and the wider region. speaking from germany, libya now gets allocated about a minute in the main news and you can see the political pressure for an intervention dropping while german politicians are now starting a stupid discussion about nuclear energy.

Re: Patio11's perspective on the Japan Earthquake

#43

Post by Natsu »

mechanical_fish wrote: post #11

English-language reporting on the matter has been so bad that my mother is worried for my safety. I can believe it. So, on the one hand, it often seems like HN spends way too much time absorbed with inside-baseball conversations on the design of social news. How do we keep social-media communities intelligent and informative? How do we prevent them from being constantly trolled, dominated by sugar-coated memetic fluf…

People seek the most exciting news. The most outrageous headlines get the clicks, even from people who should know they're exaggerations.

If you want to fix the news, start there.

Re: Patio11's perspective on the Japan Earthquake

#44

Post by HSO »

ugh wrote: post #38
mantas wrote: post #34

Earlier quoted context omitted.

At least in Lithuanian mass media coverage in one sentence is "Shit did hit the fan". And featured article in biggest news website this weekend is notice issued by National Nuclear Smth saying nuclear stuff shouldn't hit us. Probably. I haven't seen single article in local media saying how well Japanese survived the earthquake/tsunami. It's more about how shitty situation (usually with ever-rising dead/missing headco…

Shit did actually hit the fan. Several thousand people are dead. It could have been much worse but it is bad.

> It could have been much worse but it is bad.

Guess the glass can be half-empty or half-full. FWIW, I'm also sitting in Germany and I'm mighty impressed by the Japanese response. It's bad but it could have been much worse.

Re: Patio11's perspective on the Japan Earthquake

#45

Post by radu_floricica »

brazzy wrote: post #29
mantas wrote: post #7

Agreed. After living in Japan for a while, european point of view on this earthquake makes me smile. Anyway, prayers and best wishes to Japan. On nuclear reactors: I bet Japan will restart them soon. Give them a month, max 3. For the fcks sake, they still hunt whales. IMHO Japan is one of those countries that still don't give a damn about loud-screamos. Although they'll upgrade their plants to prevent failure like th…

Re reactors: you're kidding yourself. The reacors that shut down regularly will be restarted, sure. But those where cooling failed will NOT run in a month or 3. Those where the core melted are gone beyond salvage. And patio11 is talking bullshit as well: the situation at Fukushiuma may not be a Apocalyptic Nightmare Scenarios yet , but the systems did not work "exactly as designed", the situation it's not under contr…

Since AFAIK they were designed to withstand a 8.2 earthquake, they pretty much exceeded expectation. And we can reasonably count on the standards being upgraded significantly after this.

I like a lot the comparison of nuclear energy with airplane safety: when you look at the statistics, it's a lot safer. But when it fails, it makes the headlines.

Re: Patio11's perspective on the Japan Earthquake

#46

Post by chc »

burke wrote: post #31
patio11 wrote: post #15

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Well, you learn something new every day. (The Japanese word, borrowed from Chinese, sounds like "taifuu.")

I had to stop and think about that one for a while. Are there any cases that you know of where a Japanese word is anglicized before becoming an English word? It seems like english speakers have an easy enough time guessing at Japanese pronunciation that we normally keep the direct romanization. This is why "typhoon" seemed weird to me. It makes a lot more sense that both languages would have imported it from Greek.

Actually, there are several like that. The most salient one in this case would be "tycoon." A few more:

- skosh

- bokeh (a photography term referring to a certain kind of blur in English)

- rickshaw

Re: Patio11's perspective on the Japan Earthquake

#47

Post by ugh »

HSO wrote: post #44
ugh wrote: post #38

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Shit did actually hit the fan. Several thousand people are dead. It could have been much worse but it is bad.

> It could have been much worse but it is bad. Guess the glass can be half-empty or half-full. FWIW, I'm also sitting in Germany and I'm mighty impressed by the Japanese response. It's bad but it could have been much worse.

I did not in any way say that the Japanese response was inadequate or even merely ok and I have seen nobody in the media making a statement to that effect (nuclear incident excluded – but that’s mostly about the lack of information and contradictory information).

Saying that the situation in the affected areas in Japan (which, even relative to Japan’s size, is quite a large area) is most certainly bad is in itself not at all a criticism of the Japanese response and I’m a bit baffled at how you could get that impression. There are certain things no diligent and excellent preparation can currently prevent (as evidenced by the horrible death toll).

Re: Patio11's perspective on the Japan Earthquake

#49

Post by chc »

jrockway wrote: post #41
burke wrote: post #31

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I had to stop and think about that one for a while. Are there any cases that you know of where a Japanese word is anglicized before becoming an English word? It seems like english speakers have an easy enough time guessing at Japanese pronunciation that we normally keep the direct romanization. This is why "typhoon" seemed weird to me. It makes a lot more sense that both languages would have imported it from Greek.

Unlikely. The first character in taifuu means "big", and the second means "wind". They came up with this on their own; and it's simply a coincidence that other languages have a word that sounds similar.

Besides that, I'm pretty sure the original Greek word was pronounced something like "to fawn." It's only once English speakers bastardized it that it started to resemble the Japanese word.

Re: Patio11's perspective on the Japan Earthquake

#50

Post by adelevie »

benohear wrote: post #28

Brilliant article. I have written to the UK Guardian and Independent encouraging them to syndicate it.

Articles like this really demonstrate the value of HN as a community.

Most people would never think a relatively obscure software blog would be a source of some of the most reliable information about an event that the entire world is watching. Because we read HN (probably more often than we should), we are more informed than a sizable portion of news consumers.

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