…with a bu-bu here and a bu-bu there…?

We tend to think of animal noises as falling into the language category of onomatopoeia — cats meow and cows moo– which is why I think it is so weird that different languages have different sounds to represent these animal sounds. Here are some for Japanese: 

• cat:  niya-niya 
• dog:  kan-kan  or wun-wun
• pig:  bu-bu 
• sheep: meh
• horse:  hi-hin
• cow:  moo-moo (this is how they spell it put it sounds like mo-mo)
• owl:  ho-ho
• frog:  gero- gero (with a hard “g” sound) 

 And now back to our regularly scheduled programming. 

 

Language Part 2

I realized sometimes last weekend that my last post totally changed course as I was writing it. While everything I wrote may be interesting to you it wasn’t the post I intended on writing.

I spent most of last Friday (after the MRI) proof-reading a 10-page brochure (is that even still the word if it’s that long?) that the Tourism Section puts out about Onoma. Onoma is a quasi-national park (that includes a mostly dormant volcano) that is located in the Northeast of Nanae and has had a long history of tourism. The brochure was last printed in 2006 and was looked over by one of the other foreigners working in Nanae at the time but they wanted me to look it over just in case something caught my eye. Because the printing company people don’t speak English (I’m assuming) there were some little mistakes with spacing etc. that they didn’t catch. I also took out a few words here and there to make it more concise. When I was done Emi brought it down to the Tourism Section but returned a short time later with the marked-up brochure and a 3-page hand written letter. Turns out, a year or two ago a Japanese man living outside of Sapporo came across our broucure somewhere in Sapporo and found some mistakes . Apparently he is some sort of English expert and native English speakers who happen to live in the Sapporo area sometimes ask him for help editing. What?!?@#

 

MRIs and kanji and names! Oh, my!

At the behest of The Other Woman’s husband’s insurance company I had some x-rays and an MRI taken this morning and by all accounts my brain seems to be just as it should. I had to tell the doctor that I had been having some headaches so the insurance would pay for it but since it was her insurance company that wanted it (since I didn’t get anything like this at the hospital) that seemed a little strange to me. The MRI was much quicker than I was anticipating. The technician told Emi (or at least she thought he did) that it would be really loud and last for 45 minutes; it was rather loud (though not unpleasantly so because of the headphones I was wearing) but kind of comfortable and I was looking forward to a little nap but it only lasted about 10 minutes.

There were some interesting posters on the wall– I’ll post a photo I took soon. Sugihara-san filled out the medical history form for me and part way through explaining what had happened he wanted/had to use a kanji (Chinese character) that he couldn’t remember how to write. He and Emi discussed it for a few seconds and then she looked it up in the dictionary in her phone. This still strikes me as strange even though it is not the first time this has happened by a long shot.