{"id":657,"date":"2005-01-05T19:45:11","date_gmt":"2005-01-06T00:45:11","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/unknowngenius.com\/blog\/archives\/2005\/01\/05\/the-future-of-japanese\/"},"modified":"2013-07-30T01:07:39","modified_gmt":"2013-07-29T16:07:39","slug":"the-future-of-japanese","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/unknowngenius.com\/blog\/archives\/2005\/01\/05\/the-future-of-japanese\/","title":{"rendered":"The Future of Japanese"},"content":{"rendered":"<p><!-- picture_glue_start --> <a class=\"pic_link\" href=\"https:\/\/unknowngenius.com\/blog\/pix\/post657\/montreal_street.jpg\" target=\"zoom\"><img loading=\"lazy\" decoding=\"async\" class=\"photo_justified\" src=\"https:\/\/unknowngenius.com\/blog\/pix\/post657\/thumbnails\/montreal_street.jpg\" height=\"150\" width=\"200\" alt=\"Picture montreal_street.jpg\" \/><\/a> <!-- picture_glue_stop --><br \/>\nThe Japanese language has no future.<\/p>\n<p>Literally. <\/p>\n<p>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.<\/p>\n<p>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 &#8220;tomorrow&#8221;, &#8220;later&#8221;, &#8220;after&#8221; clear up ambiguities.<\/p>\n<p>Sometimes, though, it gives strange results.<\/p>\n<p>in Japanese, &#8220;I <em>will<\/em> miss you&#8221; becomes &#8220;I miss you&#8221;.<\/p>\n<p>In fact, because the closest equivalent in Japanese is \u5bc2\u3057\u3044 (<i>samishii<\/i>: lonely, desolate), instead of saying &#8220;I will miss you&#8221; or even &#8220;I will be lonely&#8221;, you say &#8220;I am lonely&#8221;&#8230;<\/p>\n<p>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.<br \/>\n<!--private--><\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"<p>The Japanese language has no future.<br \/>\nLiterally. <\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":4,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"activitypub_content_warning":"","activitypub_content_visibility":"","activitypub_max_image_attachments":4,"activitypub_interaction_policy_quote":"anyone","activitypub_status":"","footnotes":""},"categories":[17,14,25],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-657","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-insignificant-details","category-life","category-25"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/unknowngenius.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/657","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/unknowngenius.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/unknowngenius.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/unknowngenius.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/4"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/unknowngenius.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=657"}],"version-history":[{"count":1,"href":"https:\/\/unknowngenius.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/657\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":6680,"href":"https:\/\/unknowngenius.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/657\/revisions\/6680"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/unknowngenius.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=657"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/unknowngenius.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=657"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/unknowngenius.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=657"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}