People send me stuff. I get so many books and manuscripts to review that I could heat my home if I had a wood burning stove. While I was away, one arrived in the mail from Japan. Despite claims that Climategate is going away or was inconsequential, as evidenced below, it continues to gain interest worldwide.
Of course, I can’t read a thing in it.
The sender, Tadashi Watanabe wrote this curious note in the margin:
I’ve never thought of the Japanese language to be “freak”, just unreadable to me. (Note: in comments it has been pointed out that he may have written “fresh”, which makes more sense. I looked at it several times, but the last letters looked like a small a and small k. They still do. But let’s go with “fresh”.)
Fortunately the book has some familiar pictures, actually, a lot of them.
I feel honored that WUWT gets notice in Japan and I thank Mr. Tadashi Watanabe for the kindness of sending me this book. I also offer congratulations to Steve Mosher and Thomas Fuller for breaking the language barrier.
If you haven’t got your copy yet, click on the image on the right sidebar to order THE CRUTAPE LETTERS from Amazon.
Oh, and a note of acknowledgment to WUWT regular “bulldust” who coined the phrase “Climategate” right here on WUWT (Bulldust coined the phrase at 3:52PM PST Nov 19th) just hours after we broke the story. It was great to meet you in Perth.
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As another non native speaker of english, I salute tokyoboy for his gracious presentation to Anthony of an intriguing coffee table book, including the dedication .
Still don’t understand the whole “(insert scandal here)-gate” thing that resonates with so many, but whatever. I’ll take it. If I had to take anything from this story, it’s that there’s no stopping this now. Climategate is the virus of truth.
And on a side note, “People send me stuff” reminds me of, “That’s the way it was.” Some day we’ll all be looking back on this saying, “People send me stuff.”
This may be a translation problem. Japanese is a language linguistically unrelated to any other on the planet (there are said to be only three in the world, the others being Finnish and Basque). In that sense it is a peculiar/Freak/special language.
TA says:
July 5, 2010 at 6:33 pm
However, thank goodness the Japanese are very gracious and do not expect foreigners to master the subtleties of their language and culture.
When I was leaving Japan after my stint as visiting professor I gave a small farewell speech in which I apologized for at times behaving as a bumbling foreigner. With typical Japanese bluntness, the director [of the Institute] responded that I shouldn’t worry too much about having behaved ‘correctly’, because “our expectations were low”.
That word could be “great” as in “Enjoy a great language”.
He’s saying that he enjoys your blog and that he speaks English (as evidenced by his English message).
Great to see the word getting out to more corners. As for the Japanese language being freaky – it’s certainly pretty unique (in terms of its structure, honorifics and other rules) and the Japanese people are quite aware of this, so this may have been what was meant. Kuraimatto Geeto – Kuruuteepo Retaazu, gambatte!!!!
@ur momisugly Geoff Sherrington: Ohhhh, now we get it.
Since no one seems to have done it yet for this , below is a rough translation of the main title and large point text in white on black at the bottom of the page:
“Earth temperature warming change
Scandal”
“Warming affirming faction vs. skeptic faction, which is correct?”
Note that Tadashi Watanabe appears to be the translator of this book into Japanese. It is his name in Japanese kanji characters written below that of Tom Fuller.
One final note, Japanese is closely related to Korean (I usually realize someone is speaking Korean because it sounds so familiar and yet it is completely incomprehensible). Both languages are in turn probably related to languages spoken in eastern Siberia since the peoples of the Korean peninsula and the Japanese islands originated in that part of the world. There is a Finnish connection in there somewhere . . .
@ur momisugly Neil Jones.
Japanese is very clearly related to Korean. (A Japanese friend who was learning Korean told me that the word order is almost identical.)
Finnish is a member of the Uro-Altaic group. It is very closely related to Estonian, and less closely related to Hungarian, Turkish, and Mongolian. (Other members of the family.) There is some speculation that Japanese and Korean also belong to the family, but they do not show the vowel harmony that is so characteristic of the well-recognised members of the family.
Basque certainly seems to be unrelated to other languages, but it is not the only language isolate.
Wiki has a long list here.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Language_isolate#List_of_oral_language_isolates_by_continent
Further research may establish that some of these are actually related to other languages.
Look, English is full of words that, from the viewpoint of other languages, denote the same basic quality united with the idea of “in a good way” or “in a bad way”. “Freak” means unusual in a bad way. Change the idea to unusual in a good way and you should use a word like “exotic.” Another good example of how this works is the word pair “outstanding” and “egregious”. “Outstanding” of course means unusually noticeable in a good way and “egregious” means unusually noticeable in a bad way. As a science progresses it tends to develop a collection of technical terms where the connotations of “in a good way” and “in a bad way” have been stripped away. Scientists who have learned a foreign language to communicate with others in their field may well be insensitive to this aspect of foreign words because it is by and large irrelevant to their technical communications…
Here is a more accurate and up-to-date version of the previous post.
Japanese is not quite a language isolate. It is, of course, related to Ryukyuan. There is a debate about its relationship with the ancient Kogyuro languages, and its relationship with Korean. (Neither Koreans nor Japanese usually want to admit that their languages are related. I think the relationship is pretty strong.)
The big question is whether J and K are related to the Altaic group of languages. (This group includes Mongolian and Turkish)
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Classification_of_the_Japanese_language
Finnish is certainly not an isolate. It belongs to the Finno-Ugric group, along with Estonian and Hungarian. There is a debate about how closely the Finno-Ugric group is related to the Altaic group. Oldies like me still tend to think of Ural-Altaic as a single family.
Basque is certainly an isolate, but it is not unique in that. A list of languages now regarded as isolates, and an excellent discussion of the whole issue, can be found here.
http://www.worldlingo.com/ma/enwiki/en/Language_isolate
I don’t know any Japanese either, but Tadashi Watanabe has got to win coolest name of the day. Watanabe. Tadashi Watanabe. Sounds even cooler if you do it in the staccato fast Japanese pronunciation.
Well done to your parents sir.
Hey tokyoboy!
Missed seeing your comments here of late. That present to Anthony was real nice, he sure deserves it, doesn’t he and the whole crew? Liked your frequent comments back near January, keep in touch. I’ve got a few questions on plant growth later, great to hear you’re the man!
( And your freaky language is no more freaky that English, believe me, just look at the list on new additions to Webster. Wish I could just add a certain glyph to press my point sometimes, maybe we could just merge the two languages! 🙂 )
Ref – wayne says:
July 6, 2010 at 10:22 am
“Hey tokyoboy!…”
__________________________
Ditto! Ichiban!
Alll of the other S’s in the text are unconnected so I doubt that it is an S. It looks like the rest of the lower case A’s.
Welcome, and thank you for your efforts, and your thoughtful gift!
We, in the unworldly uncoordinated compacted mess that has become English, do enjoy the advantage of being to create more puns than any other language: Thus, I agree that Anthony Watts has done a one-erous job – because there is no other that has equaled his results.
The translation is now on the Amazon Japan site as:
http://www.amazon.co.jp/gp/product/4535786526
Three positive reviews are there, though for most of you this is the jungle of a bizarre language, except for “IPCC”, “CO2” or the like.
I am not expecting too strongly that you would press the purchase button.
Cheers, T. Watanabe
You make me blush Anthony, the pleasure was all mine. Thanks again for doing the wonderful tour. It was great to meet Dave Archibald too. I hadn’t realised he was a local… I guess I don’t get out enough 🙂