Wed – 1.5.2005 – Dave’s Logs

Day: 5 January 2005

The Future of Japanese

Wed - 1.5.2005 by Dave·5 Comments

The Japanese language has no future.

Literally.

It has got a present tense, a past tense, many inflections for each, but absolutely nothing to accentuate a verb in a way that shows it is taking place in the future.

This is not as inconvenient as one might think at first: present tense is used instead, and, when the lack of context calls for it, precisions such as “tomorrow”, “later”, “after” clear up ambiguities.

Sometimes, though, it gives strange results.

in Japanese, “I will miss you” becomes “I miss you”.

In fact, because the closest equivalent in Japanese is 寂しい (samishii: lonely, desolate), instead of saying “I will miss you” or even “I will be lonely”, you say “I am lonely”…

In other news, arguing all day long while walking aimlessly in a city taken over by muddy snow and icy wind chills is about as fun as it sounds.

Spam Armament Race

Wed - 1.5.2005 by Dave·5 Comments

From my childhood readings I remember this particular chapter off Jules Verne‘s visionary masterpiece From the Earth to the Moon.

The first volume would go over the fabrication of a humongous cannon being built to send a few adventurers on the Moon (yea, this is 19th century science-fiction all right, but not as far off as one would think) and included an historical background of both the main character: Impey Barbicane, founder of shots during the Civil war, and his personal nemesis-turned-ally: Captain Nichols, founder of armored plates. That one chapter described extensively the armament race that opposed the two men through their new inventions on the battlefield.

Every time the cannon grew bigger, the armor became thicker, and vice-versa.

Anyway, spam strongly reminds me of that. Just when everybody started enjoying a deceivingly quiet reprieve in the Spam Wars, the filthy baboons come back and hit again, harder, and nastier. This time using a different angle.