developments

So the thesis process is progressing, and I have finally chosen a direction in which I am proceeding. I think I'm going to analyze the change of Japanese through the influence of English/foreign language and attempt to track the changes regionally to see if certain areas of Japan were earlier adopters of various foreign words and/or recently adopted non-traditional Japanese approximations of foreign phonemes. I was hoping to research regional newspapers and record the ratio of occurrences between the older approximations like フイルム、チーム、バイオリン vs フィルム、ティーム、ヴァイオリン、etc. I wanted to do a chronological and regional analysis of various newspapers around Japan, ie examine at least 3 newspapers - probably a Kyushu newspaper, a Tokyo newspaper, and maybe a Kansai newspaper - and look at the foreign words in use in each paper at different times, eg Meiji, pre-WWII, post-WWII, and current newspapers.

While post-WWII newspapers are readily available in digitized format, pre-WWII newspapers are considerably, if not entirely not at all, available in searchable, analyzable, digitized format. For example, the Yomiuri Shimbun has fully digitized articles from around 1978, and while it has scanned papers dating back to early Meiji, the full texts do not form an analyzable database and are of little more use than microfilm. The Kumamoto Nichinichi Shimbun similarly has digitized versions available from the 80's, but anything earlier is scanned and, along with being difficult to read, does not constitute a searchable database. I'm expecting the biggest change in Japanese newspapers to be between pre- and post-WWII examples, yet without access to large amounts of prewar data, I can't make any statistically significant arguments showing change over time or distance in Japanese newspapers.

A possible reason for the lack of digitization of old newspapers might be due to the near-complete lack of a standardized writing/printing system in prewar Japanese. Old newspapers are presented in many different orthographical formats, examples being kanji/hiragana hybrids, kanji/katakana, hiragana only, katakana only, and a fairly even spread between with- and without-furigana typesets. The difficulties this would create for successful OCR are understandable but regrettable. I'll have to find another way to chronologically and regionally analyze unique katakana occurrences.

One thing I'd like to look into a bit more is the シェ・クァ pronunciations in Kumamoto and see if they influence the pronunciations of loanwords currently being used by Kumamoto natives that say シェンシェイ （先生）and うんどうくぁい（運動会）. Do they say things like シェーター and アメリクァ？

Currently, I'm reading up on the history of katakana usage and when, how and why it became relegated to 外来語. I'm also reading Loveday's Language Contact in Japan to see what has influenced Japanese in the past and if they're similar to the changes Japanese is currently undergoing. Hopefully, this book will provide something of a bridge between the katakana ideas I'm looking at and some of the evolution stuff by Mufwene that I'd really like to investigate more.

I still really want to look at the phonological changes between dialects of Japan and English, but realize that it's too big and involved of a project for a master's thesis, but would potentially like to research more should I decide to aim for a doctorate in the future. I realize I'm getting ahead of myself a bit, but I have a strange attraction to dialects and don't want to abandon that field of study.

The End for now.

Topic

So I was thinking today, reading Mufwene's Ecology of Language Evolution, and I came up with a possible idea for my thesis. I've been wanting to do something regarding dialects and divergence and evolution in the creation of dialects. I'm also interested in why phonological differences appear between various English dialects (eg. pronunciation of "I" in American and Australian Englishes), while they don't really appear in Japanese dialects (eg. something written わたし is pronounced "Wah-tah-shee", with little/no change in vowel or consonant pronunciation in any dialect of Japanese). In Mufwene's book, he explores the influence of the lexifier (base language of a creole) on the structure and vocabulary of a developing creole. However, he doesn't attempt to explain the effect of the lexifier's phonology on the resulting creole's phonology. With English having been influenced by so many languages throughout its long history, its possible that phonological differences in English dialects are the result of extended contact with foreign languages and foreign speakers of English. Japan, on the other hand, has had a famously isolationist history and foreign language influence had been largely non-existant save early Chinese influence and recent English influence.

An interesting thing to note is the current influence of English on Japanese phonology (eg ヴェ and ティ sounds etc. becoming more and more common). These kinds of additions to Japanese phonology seem to be nationwide rather than isolated to certain dialects, maybe due to widespread dissemination of English through TV and music rather than concentrated English influence in distinct regions. Another point to look into would be if Japanese people tend to use the "non-Japanese" constructions like ティ and ヴェ when using 標準語, but tend to use more classically Japanese approximations like チ and バ when using loanwords in dialects. Use corpuses! That Japanese corpus that's in the process of being completed now could definitely be useful. Maybe a corpus of 熊本弁 would also not be out of the question. I'd need to have a sample size large enough for a study to be statistically relevant, and, from casual toying around with English corpuses, words occur at such low frequencies that an immense corpus would be necessary to make any sort of statistically significant conclusion about differences in pronunciation between dialects and 標準語.

Lots of ideas. Doesn't relate directly with evolution, but I really shouldn't attempt to push evolution as a reason for studying. It will be useful regardless of what I decide to research. While I pulled out the 進化学 a lot when trying to get accepted to school, it's really only peripherally related to what I intend to study. We'll see what happens.

I'm back

So, it's been nearly two years. I'm in graduate school now. I've realized what little writing ability I once had has probably vanished after an essay-less, diary-less 2 and a half years. Faced with writing a long thesis next year, I feel I need to get in some kind of shape to write at length.

So I'm going to start doing this blog again.

I'm planning on writing about what I'll be studying; any good ideas or things I'd like to remember, I'll shoot off a quick blog post and it'll be there for me when I need something to write about in my thesis. Sometimes maybe I'll write in Japanese. Mostly it'll be in English. I probably won't post any pictures because posting pictures is a pain.

That's all for today, hopefully I'll hear from me again tomorrow.

Tonight's TV

I just finished watching a short program on how to take good pictures of your pet cat. Some of the pointers they suggested were taking pictures at your cat's eye level, making sure your cat is not afraid of your camera, and speaking gently to the cat while taking pictures.

Cute story

Last weekend I went to a nearby junior high school to root for Izumi's girls' volleyball team. They're quite unbelievable, and I just heard recently that they won the city championship and are going on to the prefectural tournament. Anyway, a couple of my students that had graduated last year were there to watch the games. One had brought her little brother along, and I shook his hand, which I guess meant to him that we were friends for life. So we played together for a little bit, throwing a ball, catching a ball, etc. He forgot my name at one point and called me Jackson. I told him that wasn't my name, and that he should try again. He said Jack Sparrow next, and I told him my name was Jason and that Jack Sparrow was my brother. He was very amazed and didn't doubt me for a second. He asked me if we went on adventures, I said sometimes, and that I saw him every weekend. He kept asking me lots of questions about my brother Jack Sparrow and I was starting to feel bad for lying to the little guy. So we played a weird game the kid made up for a while. I was starting to feel bad about lying, so I told him after our game that he misunderstood what I said earlier and that my brother was Jack Sparrow, but he's not the famous pirate; he's a lawyer. He was very sad, but my conscience felt a little better.

Today in Sports

Hello! Time for an update from my actual life rather than from the wide world of Japanese TV. This time of year, everyone at junior high school is abuzz regarding the upcoming Sports Festival. The Sports Festival is this upcoming Sunday, and in preparation for the upcoming extravaganza, the school schedule for the past two weeks has been rather strange. We had off this past Monday because we have school this Saturday, and likewise we have the following Monday off bc we have to attend the Sports Festival on Monday. Today however was an exceedingly special day. It was the Sports Festival Practice Day. Nearly as big an event as the aforementioned Sports Festival, the Sports Festival Practice Day features everything the Sports Festival does, including all the races, speeches, cheering and award ceremonies, the only differences being the teachers yell a lot more at the students to march straight and dance correctly, and that they only practice the award ceremony, the vice principal only goes through the motions of handing over a certificate and trophy to the winning team. Anyway, it was pretty interesting to watch. I think I've been adopted by the White Team, and was sort of rooting for them today. They looked pretty weak, but somehow they managed to pull out second place in the Practice Day. I participated in the girls dance, and was the only male to do so. Many of the girl students were jealous that I danced with one of the woman teachers, and during the group dance, everyone of the first grade girls that I had to hold hands with was embarrassed out of their minds. So the festival itself involves lots of marching by the boys, followed by a dance and cheering by the girls, and lots and lots of races. They are only the vanilla and relay variety, and after a couple hours of the same thing, they get kind of boring. The monotony is broken at two points by two unique, slightly more dangerous games. The first is something like capture the flag. Each team, of which there are four, has an approx. 10 ft. pole, at the top of which is their team's flag. Around 7 students hold their team's pole up, while around 10 must run to the opposing teams' poles and capture their flag. This can be done two ways: by climbing over everyone and up the pole, or by pushing/pulling the pole over and grabbing the flag. teams get a point for each opposing flag captured, and another point if they retain their own flag after an allotted time. No injuries happened today, but it certainly has potential. The second game involved a different ~10 ft. pole, with five students holding it horizontally. The students then had to run around a couple of cones with everyone holding the pole, then run back to their team and pass the pole off to the next five people. It's quite an interesting race with a fair amount of strategy involved. The whole festival took most of the day. We get to do the whole thing again on Sunday. Hooray. Here are some pictures:

Boys Marching

Students getting yelled at

Doing weird warm up stretches to some weird radio recording that they
play every morning at most offices. Everyone in Japan knows the warm up
routine. It's kind of creepy.

Boys relay race

Happy girl winning a race

Boys capture the flag game.

Students sitting in boxes behind a netting. I have no idea why.

Hisasiburi!

Ok, tonight, I'm finally watching TV again. I've forgotten what a fantastic adventure can be had in TV land. Also, my attempt to blog from my mobile failed. Chris is smarter than me.

Anyway, I don't know what tonight's show is called, but its a common one where a panel of celebrity contestants has to read various obscure kanji and kanji compounds to either win prizes/food or avoid somewhat painful punishments. The first game involved food related kanji, and if the contestant got it right, they were allowed to eat the food associated with that kanji. The second game was pretty strange. The contestants had to guess the long word or phrase that a shortened pair of kanji stood for, kind of like an acronym quiz. They had approx 5 seconds or so to answer. If they got it right, they chose another contestant for the next question. If they got it wrong, however, they were beaten by two small Russian boys wearing white dresses and angel wings/halos, and then taken to 'heaven', a small room offstage. After a little bit, the Russian boys started to go crazy and started beating the old guy named Tamori, and he responded by doing a Russian dance. The next game involved drawing kanji in the correct stroke order. If wrong, two large balloons popped right next to your ears. The next game involved reading the kanji for the names of various hot springs around Japan. If they got it right, they got a small prize. Tamori is a genius and gets nearly all of them right without a hint, while Eiji Wentz of WAT needs to work on his kanji. It would be acceptable if he spoke a language other than Japanese, but he doesn't. Frown on you. I got the last special one right because we went there for our round Kyushu trip. It was Ibusuki, which indeed has a strange reading for its kanji. Also, I'm a genius.