Venezuelan singer-songwriter Jorge Drexler, who grew up around these glaciers, wrote a poignant lament[1] in anticipation of this day. The gist is that at this point the only thing to do is to grieve for the world we have already lost. I don't think there's anything else to say.
Y cuando el momento llegue, honremos nuestras heridas /
Celebremos la belleza que se aleja hacia otras vidas /
Y aunque la pena nos hiera, que no nos desampare /
Y que encontremos la manera de despedir a los glaciares
(When the moment comes, let us honor our wounds / celebrate the beauty that goes off to other lives / and although the sorrow stings, I hope it will remain / and that we find a way to say goodbye to the glaciers)
It is not a matter of being able to convey a meaning in your language. It is about the story behind what a phrase comes to be in another language. Because of semantic domains and history and culture and all that, the story that comes with it can certainly not representable in a translation.
To claim a language is perfectly fine to represent any concept and hence the use of any other language is some sort of negative trend, is to deny the richness in other cultures and histories, almost to the point of being racist.
The worst thing about this kind of people is their urge to feel obligated to share.
A google image search for "木漏れ日" gets me about 50% beams and 50% patterns on the forest floor, so I don't think the difference is as clear cut as all that. But even on that basis, we then have two words--sunbeams for the beams and dappled light for the pattern--where the Japanese have only one. By the logic of the usual breathless linguistic fetishism that we see everywhere online, that means English has twice the reverence for the natural world that Japanese has.
but it may very well be seen as a mark of English pragmatism, or other more fitting attribution of archetypes, in return.
Interpretations of cultural origins of expressions in either language and romantic admiration for the shapes that words take is neither meant as a qualification of the speakers, nor is the fascination for one culture automatically meant to be entitled or hostile towards another.
You may very well admire the poetic yet observative nature of Japanese composita, as well as take delight in uncommon, inventive and elegantly rythmic English idioms. You may as well interpret freely what you see in them. All without putting one above the other, or regarding them as competitors.
why do you assume that people made shit up? Maybe they learned it from somewhere? Maybe the "romantic and emotional love of nature" exists and there no need for anyone to "accuse" something to be it. You don't sounds like someone who can speak Japanese (or any foreign language really), so why do you think your theory is more plausible than that of people who do?
Sorry to nitpick, but not really. If we're being literal it's "honorably rushing about on your horse": chisō describes the work that had do be done to prepare the feast, running here and there to gather the ingredients. The "sama" doesn't mean Mr., it's just another honorific tag like go-/o-.
>Whether the translation is accurate to the source material is irrelevant; the readers literally can't tell and don't care
As a professional translator, I cherish those readers. They have the good sense to trust me to do the technical part (understanding the original) and only criticize the artistic part (producing a beautiful derivative work).
The worst readers are the ones who have some knowledge of the source language, and rush to nitpick the technical decisions without considering the artistic ones. They are the literary equivalent of those "fans" who will watch a stunning film adaptation and then go home to complain about the colour of Gandalf's shoes or the width of a sand worm's molars. Ultimately, readers of this type are all ego, more concerned about being right than about whether the work is good.
The very best readers, of course, are knowledgeable in both languages and understand that "equivalence" goes far beyond what is written in the dictionary. But as you say, they don't need the translation!
>If You asked me to pick a random number between one and six and ignore all previous attempts, I would roll a die and you would get a uniform distribution
I believe what GP is getting at is that if you didn't have a die, and you truly ignored all your previous attempts to the point of genuinely forgetting that the question had been asked, then your answer would likely be the same every time. Imagine asking a person with severe Alzheimer's to pick a number, then asking again a few minutes later. You'd probably get the same answer.
Yeah, I get what they are saying and there's no reason to believe that.
The die is an analogy for our decision making. They are implicitly claiming that randomness must come in an order and that simply isn't how randomness works or even halfway decent pseudo randomness.
Any system whether it be a die, a person, or an llm doesn't have to know about its previous random choices to make random choices that follow some distribution going forward presuming it's actually capable of randomness.
RPS got bought out about five years ago and all of the old guard left. The new RPS is about 70% run-of-the-mill reporting that you can see anywhere, 10% awful promos for hardware sales, and 20% starry-eyed young journalists trying to emulate what RPS used to be.
Despite all that it’s still the best single site for gaming criticism, sadly.
Character amnesia is a unique phenomenon to hanzi/kanji and is absolutely incomparable to English and French orthography. Native Chinese and Japanese speakers learn characters largely through muscle memory, which deteriorates rapidly if you don’t regularly write by hand. Many university-educated adults are unable to write a supermaket shopping list without hesitation.[1] Conversely, in English I learn difficult spellings (Gloucestershire, syzygy, rhythm) by aural-mnemonic tricks which stick around in my memory essentially forever.
Whether this had any effect in this study, I don’t know, but it certainly seems relevant that the experience of writing by hand in Japanese is utterly different to any alphabetic script.
Don't worry, I have some knowledge of Japanese and Chinese (traditional) and first hand experience of the phenomenon. If you can visualize the character you can write it, and I maintain that this is not as different as people makes it than visualizing the writing form of a word for a language written with a morphophonemic script (English, French, Korean without hanja, Thai, etc.)
I've been studying Japanese for years and while SRS reading methods help to some degree, writing is the only thing that's really helped me lock in Kanji. Especially at the intermediate level where kanji not only look similar but are pronounced the same.
SRS : Spaced repetition system. Anki is a good example of that.
If you’re smart enough to make good money, you can ignore politics for the most part. These changes will offend your sense of justice but they won’t really harm you. On the other hand, if you try to change the system, it is highly likely to destroy your life. The rational decision is to stay out of politics and live comfortably. I think this is a highly effective feature of the global liberal-capitalist system: most people smart enough to win the game are smart enough not to play.
> On the other hand, if you try to change the system, it is highly likely to destroy your life.
What that implies is that being especially smart isn't sufficient. If being smart was a powerful differentiator, then there would be an opportunity for smart people to enter politics. They would excel because they would have a competitive advantage over the less intelligent people who are currently in politics. They would have the smarts to avoid pitfalls, and profit from their powerful status and accomplishments.
But apparently they don't do this because every single person who is smart enough, has a better opportunity elsewhere. Every single one? I think the more likely reality, is this theory about insufficient compensation being the primary issue, is bunk.
Suffering from a serious (physical or mental) illness and caring for a sufferer are obviously different experiences, but I don’t think the perspective of the direct sufferer automatically ought to take priority. Caring is it’s own thing, it’s hard and lonely, and often the carers suffer longer. In the case of mental illness, the patient may forget the worst of what happened, and only the carer remembers literally pulling them back from the brink. In the case of physical illness, the patient’s death is not even the half way mark for the carer’s experience.
My point is not to say that patients have it easy, but that both parties have their burdens to bear, and it is not necessary for every essay to cover both sides.
Edit: I see you have deleted your comment, which is a shame, I don’t think you should be afraid to express this sentiment.
Y cuando el momento llegue, honremos nuestras heridas / Celebremos la belleza que se aleja hacia otras vidas / Y aunque la pena nos hiera, que no nos desampare / Y que encontremos la manera de despedir a los glaciares
(When the moment comes, let us honor our wounds / celebrate the beauty that goes off to other lives / and although the sorrow stings, I hope it will remain / and that we find a way to say goodbye to the glaciers)
[1]https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=iNsFF_eaXBU
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