#verified by me . native Japanese speaker

[allphatauri]

To whomever this will benefit, I’ve realized that Pierre might be the only person to pronounce “Tsunoda” accurately (TSU^noda not TsuNOda)

[pocasu]

IMPORTANT: Regarding the current PMoon/LCB situation, KJH's history of poor employee treatment

(Edit: Please check my reblog for more employee reviews that were posted to the forum within the past few days.)

As of July 27, 2023 (3 PM PDT), the official LCB Twitter account still hasn't posted English or Japanese translations of the message by Project Moon CEO (Kim Jihoon) announcing their decision to fire story CG artist Vellmori.

In the subsequent chaos following her unjust expulsion, I've seen a significant number of the global fanbase pity KJH/PM and assume that firing Vellmori was a poor but well-intentioned response to protect PM employees.

However, PMoon has long been a less than ideal place to work for both outside contractors (see testimonies from the WonderLab and Leviathan artists) as well as their full-time employees.

Below is a workplace review of Project Moon from September 2022 by a current employee, which talks in depth about KJH's regular temper tantrums in the office and subpar treatment of the PMoon team.

Translation by me, a native Korean speaker. (source here)

This review was posted to a forum that can ONLY be accessed if you have a verified and active employee email address to a game company. While the forum is anonymous, it requires you to reveal your place of employment, which lends credence to its validity.

This, combined with other testimonies, has led people to believe that KJH will not recant his decision, as there's credible evidence that documents his temperamental outbursts, one-sided contract cancellations, and continued refusal to provide a healthy work environment.

TL;DR—Do not pity Kim Jihoon. This situation is shocking, yes—but it is no excuse to coddle a man who refused to protect an innocent employee of his company (knowing it could very well mean death of her future career) just to appease violent misogynists.

[rassicas]

thank you and fia for translating that side order interview! i've been dying to learn more about who or what the hell cypher was. inoue mentions that cypher speaks in an "inconsistent and accented manner" due to being influenced by many consciousnesses, which made me curious if there's a difference in its japanese character voice as i found its english one a bit bland - does it, say, mix up several dialects?

Good question! I looked into Cipher's JP dialogue, as well as the impressions from some japanese users online. my impressions from what i could tell in JP was that the way it puts together sentences feels almost robotic, not in a rude way exactly, but in a 'who talks like this' way. Some comments I saw from JP users was that it spoke in a way that felt impersonal, and comparisons of its speaking style to like. a religious leader or nun or something. my impression is the english localization is pretty faithful to the JP in conveying this sense of "who talks like this." maybe cipher comes off as even more weird to native JP speakers in a way that cant be translated thru its dialogue, but im absolutely Not fluent in JP so i cant verify that

[themostvindictivemind]

Time to brainrot about something I guess since I'm being kept up with a migraine.

Now you probably wouldn't think it from looking at me, but I am actually very, very much deeply obsessed with linguistics. To an unhealthy degree, some might say. And one of my favorite linguistic concepts is "This is a stupidly hilarious pun in Language A, but it makes no sense in Language B" The prime example of this is an old Sumerian/Babylonian joke that at this point has had several thousand video essays written about it. You know the one: "A dog walks into a tavern. 'I can't see anything!' he says. 'I'll open this one.'"

And who could forget the Greek Philosopher Chrysippus? In one of the accounts of his death, it is said that he got a bit too drunk at a party and, upon witnessing a donkey eating figs, he said "someone should get that donkey some pure wine to wash down the figs!". He then fucking died of laughter at his own joke. Beause apparently that was the funniest shit he'd ever seen.

Now neither of those make sense in any living language or modern culture, but the fact that it was written down at all means it made enough people laugh for it to be worth recording. And it's fun to look at living languages and see what makes the native speakers laugh but still utterly baffles everyone else. Even better, digital archeaologists in a thousand years are going to have a field day with this post if they ever stumble upon it, so here are a few of my favorite untranslatable puns: Hungarian: A man is pulled over by the police. The officer asks, "Are you drunk?". The man replies, "No, sir, Ivett is my wife"

Japanese: Why dont Hawaiians go to the dentist? Good teeth.

Finnish: "A bar and a screwdriver". That's the entire joke, by the way. Set up and punchline, apparently both right there, and in the original Finnish it's only two words. Apparently it's a reference to something? I'm just going to assume this is a thing you say and people laugh, much like "omae wa, mou shinderu"

Spanish: What fruit is the most patient? It's a pear. So fun fact, my Aunt is from Mexico, and I decided to tell her this joke in the original Spanish (which as a consequence of having a Mexican aunt, I speak pretty well). And I shit you not that as soon as the words "es pera" left my mouth, she let out the longest, heaviest, most world-weary sigh I have ever heard in my 20 years of life, before returning to the tamales she was making. I guess she now knows that my pun game has transcended to include her native language, and in that moment she was preparing herself for the ensuing decades of Spanish wordplay

Another from Japanese because they are gods of wordplay: "7-Up, Pepsi, Coca-Cola, they're all types of what?" "Soda?" "That's right!"

Chinese: "Who is Mi's mother?" "Hua, because peanuts". I took Chinese in high-school and I can verify that this is the shittiest pun I've ever seen, but the reddit user who posted it says "I am yet to find a single Chinese/Taiwanese person who does not find it hilarious"

Aussie English (which I'm including both for English rep and because Aussie slang is so markedly different that Brits and Americans are still unlikely to get it): "What's the difference between fat and cholesterol? You can't crack a cholesterol".

Danish: One sign says to another, "Are you married?" The other replies, "No, I'm divorced"

AND MY PERSONAL FAVORITE: French: "He wished to be Caesar, but he died as Pompey" -- George Clémenceau, commenting on the death of President Felix Faure (I refuse to explain this one or give any further context, go look it up)

Oh and side note. Obviously, no world leader can speak every language, so interpreters are a necessity for negotiation. And of course, world leaders and diplomats are going to try the lighten the mood occaisionally with humor. But for negotiations between most countries, that's hard to do, because there are very few puns with much cross-linguistic utility. Sure, you have that one joke about where cats go when they die that works in English and most Romance languages, but for some more serious negotiations, the number of puns that would make sense in both languages is pretty close to zero, and may very well BE zero. So the question arises, how do interpreters deal with that? Of course there are a lot of possible methods, not all of which are good or even remotely efficient. You could just translate the pun word for word, but as evidenced by the fact that that's literally what I did above, it's not gonna work that well. Explaining the joke also isn't gonna fly, because as we all know, the second you explain a joke is the seond it becomes Not Funny Anymore. The method I've found that I think works best is just to say "They have said a pun that doesn't translate well to English. Laugh now." Which is funny not just because it works, but because it works amazingly. That person on the other end of the table (who we are assuming doesn't speak a lick of English) has no clue what the interpreter is saying, and so must assume their joke was translated faithfully. Sure, their interpreter might know depending on how the whole thing is set up, but considering the vetting process you have to go through to be an interpreter for the POTUS , I highly doubt anyone is going to risk national security over a joke being left untranslated. Both leaders have a laugh, everything ends on good terms, and we avoid nuclear annihilation for another few weeks.

[anggecity]

Non-Japanese tries to explain the lyrics of "Black Gold" by otetsu ft. Megurine Luka

Note: I am not a Japanese speaker, so I depend on translation engines, and comments are always welcome.

Black Gold is one of otetsu-P's iconic songs featuring Megurine Luka. It's also one of my fave J-pop songs to listen to, so I got curious on what the lyrics meant...

TL;DR I think the song talks about a breakup, in simplest words. But it is not one that ended because of infidelity.

So first off, I'm checking the PVs if they could have highlighted other elements of the song. The original PV by meola is more of a still, exhibiting the sheen of gold, contrasting on a dark background. Meanwhile, Project DIVA's game video features Luka in a railway station, with black-gold motifs.

Down to the lyrics, I looked up one at Vocaloid Lyrics by user @vaffisuco.

On Vaffisuco's, there are some notes, possibly adding more context to the intended message:

1. Not quite sure what the little 'dot' means between 犠牲 and 代償。Here I just assumed these two were connected to one another grammatically and in context. 2. Unsure if the その覚悟 part connects with the next sentence cluster, and can't tell if the intonation is necessarily going down to indicate the end of a sentence. I decided to translate these sentences as such as to avoid a very lengthy English explanation. 3. Here I assume that the singer is verifying her existence/her failed relationship. She grasps the 'love' and the Black gold ring in order to leave her 'mark'. May possibly be referring to the existence of her ex, but I decided to translate this portion in first person.

Those notes aside, comparing it to DeepL and Google Translate, the human and engine translations mostly have the same translation. For comparison on engine translations, I merged lines per phrase, usually into ones or two whole lines. There is also one line-by-line at DeepL, as the line breaks sort of bring a different context, though still similar.

Altogether, the translations at the first verses present a confusing group of lines.

I was asked to decide which way to go, and I lied. The person who told me to go right went left. (from DeepL, merged lines)

As someone who also speaks Tagalog, I might see that "going left" can translate to "pangangaliwa" or a connotation of adultery/cheating. However, I am not sure if this is applicable in Japanese too. So I thought that it implies more of a backsliding, or a reversal of what was once promised.

To be able to breathe / So that I can live / Having to put it into words (from DeepL, line-by-line)

To me this implies that there had been an end of a connection in good terms, that ironically not staying true (lying) to one's initial words would mean being true to the next.

It must have been hard for you to put it into words, but you were still smiling, covered in scars. (from DeepL, merged lines)

There is a slight difference on translated syntax to different engines, but it is pretty consistent with all three presented translations here. However, for the next line, both line-by-line DeepL and merged lines at Google Translate show the same to who is expressing laughter, but differ to who apparently got the injuries:

You're covered in scars/ I was smiling (from DeepL, line-by-line)

It would have been painful to put it into words. I was laughing with all the scratches. (from Google Translate, merged lines)

And so is for Vaffisuco's and merged lines at DeepL, saying it's the other party that did so:

As I became covered in wounds / You laughed. (Vaffisuco's Vocaloid Lyrics translation)

It must have been hard for you to put it into words, but you were still smiling, covered in scars. (from DeepL, merged lines)

I am not sure which among these translations fit the producer's intended message. Perhaps for one, it is open to interpretation. But I also think that the laugh can connote a "hiding the pain" (no reference intended), or it is more of a relief to one that broke the bond, that it had to be a relief for both.

The chorus translations are very similar. Vaffisuco's translation brings an imagery of, likely a lost possibility, a path that with this became a dead end.

Scared of the things that could separate us, / I averted my gaze and ran away / I stop in my tracks, my vision flickering / I am not prepared to be, or repay the victim* (Vaffisuco's Vocaloid Lyrics translation) *The words translated were "犠牲" (sacrifice) and "代償" (compensation). Per the note, the translator "assumed these two were connected to one another grammatically and in context."

Vaffisuco's translation strikes me that it was a shock for the person, as if they were caught off-guard. At least as how I see it, the persona talks about how difficult something was to let go, and consequently "repay" the compensation that for one, will mend things altogether. I reckon a line confirms it, that they still have a significant attachment despite the breaking away:

I'm so, so scared of being separated, / I just want to be by your side (Vaffisuco's Vocaloid Lyrics translation)

I'm afraid of being separated from you. I'm afraid.　 I wanted to be there. (from DeepL, merged lines)

Where Vaffisuco's (and another translation at LyricsTranslate) repeats with "or repay the victim", the engine translations seemed to show slight differences:

Stopping, hiding in plain sight The sacrifice, the price, I'm not prepared for [it] (from DeepL, line-by-line)

Stopping, sacrificing and compensating to appear and disappear (from Google Translate, merged lines)

The words may have resulted from completely different ways of extracting context from syntax, so here we are. But even so, the connotations share something in common. "To appear and disappear" presents itself in a way that there could be a sacrifice to begin with, to compensate in keeping, and the "stopping" in "[to] disappear". That's how I can interpret what I got from Google Translate. But for what DeepL showed, it could be reiterating the notion of not being able to accept for whatever had to be lost and "sacrificed".

The bridge builds up with lyrics that give a sense of "spiralling down". It likely, vaguely if anything, references fate being cruel.

So, what is the 'truth'? / Is it cold, hard metal? / Look, look at me walking! / Look, look at me walking! / So who was the one that made the decision? / Just where is our God? / Ah, how unfulfilling! (Vaffisuco's Vocaloid Lyrics translation)

What's the truth, what's cold metal? Look at me, I'm looking at you, I'm walking backwards, When did God decide? I don't know where God is, I can't fill it, I can't fill it. (from DeepL, merged lines) *Without the rest of the lines, "埋まらない　埋まらない" becomes "I can't bury it I can't bury it"

I'm not sure what the "cold metal" is about, but a quick Google search of "冷たい金属だとか" showed this (and another random translation):

Could it mean that that the brink of sincerity becomes no more than gold, but that of silver? Could it be referencing the conductivity of silver? Or maybe it just generally refers to metal left in a cool temperature, that literally feels hard and cold to touch?

And down to the last two choruses... the lines changed, going to the song's conclusion.

Separating from you, I go far, far away / To the people who went left / I'll leave your last act of kindness right here / So it won't lose it's brilliance (Vaffisuco's Vocaloid Lyrics translation)

To the one who went away, far away, to the left The last kindness you gave me, I'll leave it here so it doesn't fade away (from DeepL, merged lines)

Both DeepL and Google Translate shared very similar results. As for this, it bears acknowledgement on the other party, possibly memorializing the pleasant memories to be left behind.

What drives people apart / is that resolve for victims and their compensation I grasped the love dangling from my neck / and a black gold ring / So my footprints won't disappear (Vaffisuco's Vocaloid Lyrics translation) *Quoting the translator: "Here I assume that the singer is verifying her existence/her failed relationship. She grasps the 'love' and the Black gold ring in order to leave her 'mark'. May possibly be referring to the existence of her ex, but I decided to translate this portion in first person."

One of Vaffisuco's notes imply for the second last chorus that in times of trouble, people look for compensation and will do anything for it. It might try to say that at some point, vengeance is what pushes a person to act upon something; sometimes, this can be seen as closures, closing things. This is such that they believe that removing something from their live will make it easier, that it is a resolution on their part. (There definitely are more connotations that only human translators and native speakers can catch!)

To be separated from you The sacrifice, the price, the determination With [the] love around my neck and the black gold ring around my neck I'm trying to keep my footprints (from DeepL, line-by-line)

For the last chorus, I agree with Vaffisuco's note, seconding that the song is about a process of separation, when honesty is still honesty, and the difficulty of acceptance for one end (the persona). As for whose footprints are being kept, if it is decided that it was the persona's footprints, the persona wants to be remembered by one who left her. Otherwise, the persona wants to remember the other half, implied by the footprints.

As for the title "Black Gold", it can be interpreted in many ways. For English speakers, the phrase may be slang for "petroleum" as this resource in deposits had made certain countries rich by importation. But in jewelries, "black gold" refers to processed gold so its surface exhibits a black color.

Overall, the song shows itself as mysterious and poetic (especially that I am no Japanese speaker) with how the words are translated, and the implications I get by looking at how the syntax is processed for a language I am a native speaker of.

[silver-wield]

Are you learning Japanese or would like to? I've been feeling inspired to myself after my friend surprised me with the Kiki's Delivery Service artbook (so thoughtful ❤), but am electing to use a translation app for now.

I'm actually really bad with languages, but I love learning about different cultures, so it sucks being me sometimes lol

I don't mind relying on machine translations or reliable people explaining things cause it's better to acknowledge a weakness than act like I know better than native speakers cause I happened to pick up a few words.

I've used several apps on the AC reunion files and compared them to the official translations and they're pretty decent. I also wouldn't post those machine translations without the original so other people can double check if they like. I think translators who only post their translation without the original are very suspect. It's like they're trying to hoard the info and prevent other people verifying what they've said.

Very sus...

I bet the art book is pretty! Studio Ghibli always makes everything so pretty, it's like watching a moving painting. So wholesome and cute ❤️

[animecat33]

I’m in a mood, so here’s some an extremely long post with shit conflict that happened on deviantart when i was younger that i’m still petty about and i wanna vent about it because if i wasn’t so young i woldn’t have let people step on me like that

No one should read this, tbh, it’s a fucking horror show out here 

oc: Shinju

When i made her it was the first time one of my ocs had like effort put into it, i designed her, make her backstory, put her in kirigakure, and i spent a long time researching names for her, looking up japanese words that i think would fit her, Ren Takeo

One person commented saying that they had an with the same name, from the same village, though they didn’t mean any harm by saying that, and even said it was fine

Here’s where it gets tricky.

I then got comments and private messages from OTHER PEOPLE telling me to change the name

So, like the weak bitch i was, i changed her name 

Oc: Roxy

I’ve talked about this one before, but i have this sonic oc named Roxy, i loved her, she was a bit edgy but like, queen, 10 years ago we were ALL edgy

I really wanted Roxy to be a lesbian, but i didn’t like, put that in the info, at the time gay ocs we’re really taken very well by the community, plus a few of my art friends were very iffy anytime i implied that some of my ocs might not be 100% straight.

now, i WANTED Roxy to be a lesbian but i was guilt tripped by some dude to roleplay with him, no matter now many time i said i didn’t roleplay, he wouldn’t take no for an answer and I was very easily guilt tripped into eventually saying yes

A roleplay starts with Roxy and his Male wolf characer, John, when we started he assured that they were gonna be friends but one thing lead to another and he pressured me into role playing a sex scene, i was 14, i didn’t want to, didn’t even know how to write that. At that age i hadn’t really even seen porn before, but a few days of mowing down my boundries and he guilt trips me into saying yes.

At that point, he essencially took Roxy and did whatever the hell he wanted with her. Next thing i know, Roxy was married to this male character and they had a baby? I even ended up making some art of them because he kept saying how he was tired of making all the artwork himself.

Thank god, eventually he forgot about me and Roxy for a lot time. The last time i talked to him was on a pm where he warned me he was gonna delete all his ocs, including Roxy and Johns child, i think he wanted me to convince him not to do it but by that time i was older and just said “alright man, see ya”

Thank fuck, that problem solved itself, but i’d be better off not going through it in the first place

The cosplay hellhole

When i first started cosplaying, i posted my pictures to DA too, since there was a cosplay community there, didn’t think anything would happen

When i got my first Harley wig and makeup i was so excited i posted them on deviantart, and they did quite well, tbh. Some people asked for fansigns, and i didn’t even know who those were but, once it was explained to me, i did some for people who requested them, from there it was also fine, but stay tuned, cause it’s gonna bite me in the ass later down the line

I start getting wierd dms, very sexual in nature, which grossed me out, since i was already 20 it wasn’t like, illegal or anything, but there was a pattern of people asking for sexual content followed by “it’s okay if you say no, though” and when i said no, they would be pissed at me, calling me a whore, saying if i didn’t want attention, i wouldn’t cosplay Harley.... keep in mind, all of my photos where from the shoulder up at this point, i muscle through this time, i’ve been harrassed enough to have a lil bit thicker skin.

But over time, the pile up of messages from diferent accounts were getting to me, and i was starting to delete photos.

AND THEN

He said he was embarrassed of having to send me these things but if i wanted the photo taken down i’d have to report it myself, thankfully he also found the direct link to the report page so i didn’t have to dig through the website. Thankfully the report worked and the photo was taken down

I receive a pm from a friend that scared the shit out of me. He was going through this porn website called Xhamster, he recognises someone using one of my fansigns as a photo, now he KNOWS this isn’t me, because i’ve been vocal about not wanting to be sexualized while in cosplay. Someone took one of the fansigns, edited out the words, flipped the image, and photoshopped their own signature on to the sign in hopes of like... getting verified or something?. In short this person was using my photo as if it was a photo of them.

That mixed in with the still incoming pms from creeps made me delete every cosplay photo i’ve ever posted on deviantart.

Years later i did post new cosplay stuff again, now giving a warning right at the top of the description and being very okay with using the block button to my leisure.

I’m taking a long as fuck hiatus from posting on deviantart, it’s been over a year now, but i still go on a block spree when someone breaks the rules i’ve set 

The whole “Luís” saga

Sit down for this one, it’s the weirdest one

I had a friend named Luís, we weren’t super close, in fact he was mean to me a lot, making fun of my english, even though neither of us were native speakers, refering to my home country as “Spain’s bitch”. Sending me cartoon porn when i was underaged was a big red flag that i didn’t even think was a big deal until i was older and thought back on it, like that was fucked up.

One day, i had critiques open, Luís sends a super spammy message and then blocks me. I was like “okay, whatever, i’m tired anyway” and i blocked him back.

THAT is when shit hit the fan

He tries to unblock me and talk to me, when that doesn’t work he makes a secondary account and starts sending me very aggressive pms. I’m was tired of how he acted with me, plus something about him being so desperate to be unblocked didn’t sit right, so i just blocked the new accounts

He made 15 separate accounts, getting more and more angry with each one, i block all 15.

Suddenly i’m getting pms in english and spanish from people i’ve never interacted with, but aparently Luís had told them i was being some sort of monster, some of them backed off after seeing the full picture, the others got blocked

Luís girlfriend was friends with me.

He then threatned to leave her if she didn’t block me.... she left HIM, and now I’M being blamed for that

Someone shared some uuuuhhhh fanart he drew of her after that, it was super sus, it was a comic about him seducing her with a kiss in order to make her hate someone, girl you’re better off without him, jesus christ

Now shit starts moving off of deviantart

He finds my personal facebook, which was NOT disclosed to the public, and starts messaging me, from there he found my twitter, youtube, skype, starts messaging my irl friends, quite a lot of them did not even know english at the time.

In the few messages before i blocked him, i warned him to stop, i warned him he was stalking me online and that shit isn’t okay. THIS DUDE 

this dude replied with “it’s not stalking because i’m younger than you”

BOI

this happened over the course of a year, and it was the first time i ever reported someone, hell it’s the first time i’ve seen a report be successful, because i contact deviantart with a list of everything he’s done, screenshots to prove it, links to his separate accounts where all the comments are ONLY about me

a week later they DELETE THIS MAN’S WHOLE ACCOUNT

I have not heard from him in almost a decade

This is like, the ONE TIME i feel like i won

Aaand well, done, those are the most serious one, there’s some minor shit that’s not worth talking about, but looking back, wow, i used to get a lot of sexual harassment on deviantart huh?

[supergirlsattic]

Hello Cycles and Vv! I love your podcast and how in-depth you get, particularly with characterization across the seasons and character motivations. How many times do you each re-watch an episode before getting together to record the podcast? How much outside research (in literature, psychology, military tactics, etc, etc) do you do for each episode to make sure you get the references right and all that? Thank you!

Cycles: We typically rewatch the episode once, and have the outline and research done by Monday night for recording at the next available time. So if you want us to address a question in an episode, try to get it to us before then!

Vv: I tend to make notes after the first watch so I don’t get bogged down in too many details, then I go back to check for thematic threads or content I’ve missed. Meshing our notes is always a trip because we have completely different writing styles— so Cycles usually does hers first and then we add mine.

Cycles: As for research—it’s really whatever the content calls for! Sometimes we’ll follow the trail a reference leaves and sometimes we’ll decide something in the show could benefit from more explanation or real-world context. Then, we’ll use the internet (and Vv, specifically, will sometimes use an actual physical book) to learn more or confirm information we were already familiar with. On occasion, live human people with relevant areas of expertise are involved.

Vv: I am of the belief that it’s silly not to ask your friends for help, so if we’re discussing content we don’t have experience with, I’ll touch base with someone who does just to make sure we’re not saying anything inaccurate. (We also do this with language! Both Manchester’s British slang and the translation of Kara & Alex’s Japanese were verified by native speakers before we recorded.)When it comes to discussing production stuff, we check that as well. THERE’S ALSO A LOT OF SINGING. MOSTLY BY ME.

Cycles: Important production note: there were at least 5 pauses where Vv sang a reference while we were recording the last episode.

[steamedricejournal]

Words

During the years that I have practiced or taught aikido, the physical movements were often clarified, explained, or directed by words.  Some of them were Japanese; most were English translations of Japanese expressions and constructs. 

Blend with your opponent, extend ki, keep maai, practice fudoshin, keep one point, kokyu-nage, take ukemi, uke, nage, hatori waza.  

As a student, I hear them as explanations and directions.  As a teacher, I returned the favor.  They became the lingua franca of the class.  The language bridging the art’s movements with the mystical dimensions of budo. As a student, I assumed that the expressions and translations heard were correct. And the ones I used when I taught were uttered in the absolute belief I understood their meaning. 

In 1991, Dave Lowry, an American martial artist, wrote an article entitled Aiki of Words.  It was published in Aikido Today, the premier magazine for Aikido during that time.  The point of the article was to caution aikidoka about the use of English to understand what Aikido is.

“Morihei Ueshiba never talked about harmony.  The founder of Aikido never spoke either, despite what you’ve been told, about love or the relationship between Aikido and the mechanics of the universe.

By now the reader, if he has recovered from his outrage over these apparently heretical pronouncements, will have guessed that there is a little linguistic sleight of hand at work here.  O’sensei did not mention these things because he did not speak English.  If you think, however, that Ueshiba Sensei and other Japanese speakers were simply using a different language and that there are English translations that mean virtually the same, you are not just mistaken.  You are ignoring one of the most significant and often-overlooked gaps that yawn between Aikido as it is practiced in its native environs and as it is followed in the West…

..unless they are very careful or undertake a serious study of the Japanese language (and its attendant culture) at the same time as learning Aikido, even dedicated enthusiasts may find themselves having slid into a sloppy reliance upon poor or incomplete translations – a reliance that may soon be reflected in a less than accurate understanding of Aikido itself.”

A number of words used in a dojo’s practice, such as maai and ki, have subtle and nuanced meanings. Witness the recent change of extending ki to ki is extending.  While the change seems a slight juggling of word placement, the change in meaning is significant.

All of it reminds me of the old party game, where you whisper a message to one person, and they, in turn, pass it on to another.  Around the room, or down the line, the message is whispered from ear to ear until it arrives at the last person in the room.  It is a good bet that the resulting message is nowhere near what the original was.  The words and their meaning passing from one person to another colored by what I mean when I say them and what you perceive when you hear them.  

So what is the point of all of this?  It is to be cautious.  Understand that unless someone is well versed in the Japanese language and culture, you are depending on a teacher’s best efforts to educate themselves on the meaning of things. Have a healthy skepticism; trust and verify what you told and taught.  Ask questions.

Also, in recent times, Kashiwaya Sensei, the Chief Instructor of our federation of dojos, has started to make more direct statements about what things mean and don’t mean.

自分は心身統一合氣道の指導者ですが、まだ修行中です。なので���合氣道とは」とか「天地とは」等と自分が分��ったような事を言う事は慎んでいます。何故なら、お弟子さん達がそれが答えだと勘違いをしてしまうからです。これらの答えは各自が真剣に修行した上で感じ取れば良い事だと思っています。

I am a Ki-Aikido instructor, but I am still training.  Therefore, I refrain from saying things that I understand, such as "What is Aikido" or "What is Tenchi”. The reason is that the students will misunderstand that is the answer.  I think these answers should be felt after each student has practiced sincerely.

The short answer is to stay critical, open, and practice.  Question authority, especially your own.  That is the practice.  Say hai, I understand, because that is not the same as saying yes.

[parksoogi]

DAY 5 // 2018-06-28

Today, I was still working on my report on Sanskrit loanwords in Indonesian for a class where I am only audit. AND. I. FINALLY. FINISHED. IT!!!! You can consider that I didn’t do something else important so my day was not productive but I really think that I was too desperate to finish this freaking report today that I didn’t felt like adding a lot of tasks to my lists. Nonetheless, one of the tasks today was to publish my first post on the language I am working on in Taipei: Thao. 

Let’s talk about this a bit longer because I am really excited!

Thao: Introducing a very serious endangered language of Taiwan

Thao is a language spoken by only 7 native speakers, in the Central Mountains of Taiwan, precisely in the Sun Moon Lake. Their village is now called “Ita Thao” which means “our Thao” / “our people”.

As I am meant to become an expert of Thao language, I thought that it would be nice to make some posts about it. I think positively about three benefits that this new commitment could bring me: 1. it will permit me to verify if I am able to explain to non-experts clearly the different notions treated by the posts; 2. it will be an overture to more knowledge for everybody; 3. it will be a source of motivation to go back to study on the domain when I don’t feel like it.

A crossroad between culture and languages?

The first post is about something I am very much interested in: Mythology in Thao. When I was taking my Latin, Old Greek and Biblical Hebrew classes in either high school, university or both, I was fascinated by these great creations of the human mind which had, and in a sense still has, a deep and profound impact on our societies nowadays. Mythology hence corresponded to steady categories of values, of heroes, of facts and interdiction which, with much drama, were totally getting out of control (Gods taking side and making wars, people... haha). 

In Thao, the fascination comes from a little different perspective. First, in their mythology we don’t find as much details of epic wars or battles or even epic romance between the protagonists. Everything is very factual, there are even some reserve talking about love life. But as a group of hunters-gatherers for many centuries, they add very surprising details such as how to get back home when you go hunting in a forest, or also on how to cook fishes. Secondly, and maybe the most important in my point of view, the transmission of these myths. Thao is a language of oral tradition, the people were illiterate before the arrival of Japanese colonizers. During the Japanese era, they had to go to school and learn the Japanese writing system. Kilash, one of the most important informants of Thao in his time had try in his private notebooks to adapt the writing system of Japanese to his own language, having realized the crucial importance of writing his dying language down before it is too late. Hence, all the texts of mythology found in Thao society are all a transmission of ancestors. There is no means to verify if what was said 200 years ago was still going in the same direction or if Thao continuously reinvented their history through time.

The first post I made earlier is about the foundation of actual settlement of Thao people and the title of this myth is the white deer. I am also responsible for the graphics/edits you can see before the texts. I thought that everybody (including me of course) love to study with aesthetics or at least like beautiful things and feel more interested in learning the content. 

If you are interested, I give you the link of my post here again.

I thank you for the warm support I received these past few days, you guys are awesome!! I was really touched!

xx

Eloo.

[sonitavalentine]

I do hope that when you were researching thoroughly about the difference between ai and koi that you did notice how koi is "sexual interest" and that Ren'Ai together is "romantic love" so in order to have that you HAVE TO have koi. I mean Interpret how you like, but having all the details helps I think.

I agree with you anon! Having all the details will help.

If you google the websites with posts of the native Japanese speakers talking about this question you will find the following info:

- Ai still means the same as koi (NOTICE ME IT SEMPAI!), but includes other meanings of love as well.

- Koi is supposed by many speakers to be a selfish type of love, the one where you want to take, which confirms your statement about koi dealing more with sexual interest.

- Meanwhile Ai is talked to be true/real love, the one where you want to give.

- Renai thing, from what I see in those sources, is indeed something that includes in it physical/sexual desire (koi) and feelings of true love which can also perform sexual actions but at the same time doesn’t really need them to show how strong the feelings are (ai).

- I also noticed that koi has more to do with a new love, like a teenage style (this is why sexual interest included), while ai is used towards mature love between wives and husbands, or those who have really strong feelings. For example, when their love is verified by time and won’t disappear after sexual interest is diminished. Because love is not based on lust only - it needs support by feelings of a higher basis. Right, anon? :) 

Now, when we look at VK, I think, we have nothing to argue about?

In the end of the manga Yuuki declares that she:

- got happiness from Zero while she was taking his feelings (koi)

- loves Kaname while she is giving her life to him (ai)

So I don’t feel awkward about Ai being the personification of my ship because on the side of the love that includes everything and lasts forever no matter what I feel very much safe. And I believe you shouldn’t feel inconvenient about your ship being based on sole sexual interest too, because why not.

So it seems everybody gets what they want? You need lust - you get it. We need not only lust, but deep and eternal feelings - we get it. 

All in all, I think we can continue having fun shipping what we want in this goddamn wonderful fandom.

[hawaiiwilliam-blog]

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[pale-eastern-star]

Hingan and Eorzean are not the same langauge

A few months ago Hingan === Eorzean was a thin theory at best, but now the evidence is so overwhelming that continuing to push the idea makes me wonder if there isn't a racist or hate-filled motivation fueled by a dislike for anime or Japanese culture.

To be clear, if you don't like Hingan in your RP that's just like your opinion man, but to deny its existence in the lore given what we know and what the devs have said and good logical deduction skills would make me question your motivation as to why you're doing it at this point.

Here is a list of why the idea doesn't work particularly in the context of the western localization - but really it doesn't work in any localization.

The game script is loaded with moments like this verifying that Hingan is both romanized Japanese AND a different language from Eorzean

Hingan is not a dead language either, as Oboro would not make this statement if it were

All localizations are valid, the Japanese version of the game isn't any more "true" than any other version. This is word of God (devs)

Eorzea is a setting based on western fantasy tropes, a Europe style continent, complete with European culture analogs and appropriately appropriated naming conventions. None of this works if Eorzean === Japanese.

Developers have confirmed that there were many languages in Eorzea that fell out of use, this perfectly explains why Elezen have French names but don't speak French. Note this doesn't confirm that Hingan is dead, that would be bad deductive reasoning.

In media the language of the actors and characters is almost always the same as the target audience. This doesn't mean that in an American made World War II French occupation drama the native language of all the speakers is English, in much the same way that the Japanese version of Final Fantasy XIV doesn't mean that Eorzean === Japanese.

Eorzean script is "olde English" - with just a few minutes of exposure English competent readers can read it, easily. How could this be if Eorzean === Japanese because of the Japanese localization speaking to its audience in Japanese? Spoilers: The Japanese localization is in Japanese so that Japanese people can understand it. At this point would we argue from a position of good faith that Eorzeans are reading this writing, mentally translating it to Hingan/Japanese, then translating back to "olde English" when they need to write something? This is a ridiculous idea but necessary if we thought that Eorzean === Japanese or that Eorzean === Hingan

Notably, all of the writing in Doma/Kugane uses the Japanese style characters we see in game, none of it is the Eorzean script. If Eorzean === Hingan then one culture here is really going out of its way to make it easy for the other at their own expense. For no reason at all.

The Au Ra Raen naming conventions lore shows us a complex name meaning system that uses Japanese characters. This simply could not be if Hingan was not a distinct language from Eorzean, because it would mean that Eorzean was also Japanese. Refer to earlier list points for why that doesn't fly

The lore book did a really bad job of explaining itself. What it means to say is that Doman and Hingan are different dialects of the same language, not that Eorzean === Hingan

Here's a breakdown of all the models that have been passed around for months regarding this issue.

Eorzean and Hingan are distinct languages, both living (strongest model, only one that works in the setting completely)

Eorzean and Hingan are distinct languages, but one of them is dead (this results in a broken setting)

Eorzean and Hingan are the same language, and that language is "common" or English or some other magically undefinable language that somehow makes all of this work (this results in a broken setting)

Eorzean and Hingan are the same language, and that language is Japanese (this results in a broken setting)

To be clear... if you don't like Hingan in your role play as a separate language, fine, but to continue to push the idea that it doesn't exist in lore is simply wrong and bad logic. It requires cherry picking, bad conclusions, or petty hatred to uphold.

I can help but think that the reason the bad theory that Doman/Hingan is the same language as Eorzean is pushed to this day is because people have such a blind hatred towards anything perceived as weeaboo that they deem Japanese itself to be weeaboo and aim to prevent its in character usage and in doing so unwittingly court erasure, racism, and white-washing.

Newsflash for those people: the erasure of culture is far worse than some kid using kawaii in a sentence.

Don't do it.

[thumbkenya76-blog]

The Mystery of People Who Speak Dozens of Languages

Last May, Luis Miguel Rojas-Berscia, a doctoral candidate at the Max Planck Institute for Psycholinguistics, in the Dutch city of Nijmegen, flew to Malta for a week to learn Maltese. He had a hefty grammar book in his backpack, but he didn’t plan to open it unless he had to. “We’ll do this as I would in the Amazon,” he told me, referring to his fieldwork as a linguist. Our plan was for me to observe how he went about learning a new language, starting with “hello” and “thank you.”

Rojas-Berscia is a twenty-seven-year-old Peruvian with a baby face and spiky dark hair. A friend had given him a new pair of earrings, which he wore on Malta with funky tank tops and a chain necklace. He looked like any other laid-back young tourist, except for the intense focus—all senses cocked—with which he takes in a new environment. Linguistics is a formidably cerebral discipline. At a conference in Nijmegen that had preceded our trip to Malta, there were papers on “the anatomical similarities in the phonatory apparati of humans and harbor seals” and “hippocampal-dependent declarative memory,” along with a neuropsychological analysis of speech and sound processing in the brains of beatboxers. Rojas-Berscia’s Ph.D. research, with the Shawi people of the Peruvian rain forest, doesn’t involve fMRI data or computer modelling, but it is still arcane to a layperson. “I’m developing a theory of language change called the Flux Approach,” he explained one evening, at a country inn outside the city, over the delicious pannenkoeken (pancakes) that are a local specialty. “A flux is a dynamism that involves a social fact and an impact, either functionally or formally, in linguistic competence.”

Linguistic competence, as it happens, was the subject of my own interest in Rojas-Berscia. He is a hyperpolyglot, with a command of twenty-two living languages (Spanish, Italian, Piedmontese, English, Mandarin, French, Esperanto, Portuguese, Romanian, Quechua, Shawi, Aymara, German, Dutch, Catalan, Russian, Hakka Chinese, Japanese, Korean, Guarani, Farsi, and Serbian), thirteen of which he speaks fluently. He also knows six classical or endangered languages: Latin, Ancient Greek, Biblical Hebrew, Shiwilu, Muniche, and Selk’nam, an indigenous tongue of Tierra del Fuego, which was the subject of his master’s thesis. We first made contact three years ago, when I was writing about a Chilean youth who called himself the last surviving speaker of Selk’nam. How could such a claim be verified? Pretty much only, it turned out, by Rojas-Berscia.

Superlative feats have always thrilled average mortals, in part, perhaps, because they register as a victory for Team Homo Sapiens: they redefine the humanly possible. If the ultra-marathoner Dean Karnazes can run three hundred and fifty miles without sleep, he may inspire you to jog around the block. If Rojas-Berscia can speak twenty-two languages, perhaps you can crank up your high-school Spanish or bat-mitzvah Hebrew, or learn enough of your grandma’s Korean to understand her stories. Such is the promise of online language-learning programs like Pimsleur, Babbel, Rosetta Stone, and Duolingo: in the brain of every monolingual, there’s a dormant polyglot—a genie—who, with some brisk mental friction, can be woken up. I tested that presumption at the start of my research, signing up on Duolingo to learn Vietnamese. (The app is free, and I was curious about the challenges of a tonal language.) It turns out that I’m good at hello—chào—but thank you, cảm ơn, is harder.

The word “hyperpolyglot” was coined two decades ago, by a British linguist, Richard Hudson, who was launching an Internet search for the world’s greatest language learner. But the phenomenon and its mystique are ancient. In Acts 2 of the New Testament, Christ’s disciples receive the Holy Spirit and can suddenly “speak in tongues” (glōssais lalein, in Greek), preaching in the languages of “every nation under heaven.” According to Pliny the Elder, the Greco-Persian king Mithridates VI, who ruled twenty-two nations in the first century B.C., “administered their laws in as many languages, and could harangue in each of them.” Plutarch claimed that Cleopatra “very seldom had need of an interpreter,” and was the only monarch of her Greek dynasty fluent in Egyptian. Elizabeth I also allegedly mastered the tongues of her realm—Welsh, Cornish, Scottish, and Irish, plus six others.

With a mere ten languages, Shakespeare’s Queen does not qualify as a hyperpolyglot; the accepted threshold is eleven. The prowess of Giuseppe Mezzofanti (1774-1849) is more astounding and better documented. Mezzofanti, an Italian cardinal, was fluent in at least thirty languages and studied another forty-two, including, he claimed, Algonquin. In the decades that he lived in Rome, as the chief custodian of the Vatican Library, notables from around the world dropped by to interrogate him in their mother tongues, and he flitted as nimbly among them as a bee in a rose garden. Lord Byron, who is said to have spoken Greek, French, Italian, German, Latin, and some Armenian, in addition to his immortal English, lost a cursing contest with the Cardinal and afterward, with admiration, called him a “monster.” Other witnesses were less enchanted, comparing him to a parrot. But his gifts were certified by an Irish scholar and a British philologist, Charles William Russell and Thomas Watts, who set a standard for fluency that is still useful in vetting the claims of modern Mezzofantis: Can they speak with an unstilted freedom that transcends rote mimicry?

Mezzofanti, the son of a carpenter, picked up Latin by standing outside a seminary, listening to the boys recite their conjugations. Rojas-Berscia, by contrast, grew up in an educated trilingual household. His father is a Peruvian businessman, and the family lives comfortably in Lima. His mother is a shop manager of Italian origin, and his maternal grandmother, who cared for him as a boy, taught him Piedmontese. He learned English in preschool and speaks it impeccably, with the same slight Latin inflection—a trill of otherness, rather than an accent—that he has in every language I can vouch for. Maltese had been on his wish list for a while, along with Uighur and Sanskrit. “What happens is this,” he said, over dinner at a Chinese restaurant in Nijmegen, where he was chatting in Mandarin with the owner and in Dutch with a server, while alternating between French and Spanish with a fellow-student at the institute. “I’m an amoureux de langues. And, when I fall in love with a language, I have to learn it. There’s no practical motive—it’s a form of play.” An amoureux, one might note, covets his beloved, body and soul.

My own modest competence in foreign languages (I speak three) is nothing to boast of in most parts of the world, where multilingualism is the norm. People who live at a crossroads of cultures—Melanesians, South Asians, Latin-Americans, Central Europeans, sub-Saharan Africans, plus millions of others, including the Maltese and the Shawi—acquire languages without considering it a noteworthy achievement. Leaving New York, on the way to the Netherlands, I overheard a Ghanaian taxi-driver chatting on his cell phone in a tonal language that I didn’t recognize. “It’s Hausa,” he told me. “I speak it with my father, whose family comes from Nigeria. But I speak Twi with my mom, Ga with my friends, some Ewe, and English is our lingua franca. If people in Chelsea spoke one thing and people in SoHo another, New Yorkers would be multilingual, too.”

Linguistically speaking, that taxi-driver is a more typical citizen of the globe than the average American is. Consider Adul Sam-on, one of the teen-age soccer players rescued last July from the cave in Mae Sai, Thailand. Adul grew up in dire poverty on the porous Thai border with Myanmar and Laos, where diverse populations intersect. His family belongs to an ethnic minority, the Wa, who speak an Austroasiatic language that is also widespread in parts of China. In addition to Wa, according to the Times, Adul is “proficient” in Thai, Burmese, Mandarin, and English—which enabled him to interpret for the two British divers who discovered the trapped team.

Nearly two billion people study English as a foreign language—about four times the number of native speakers. And apps like Google Translate make it possible to communicate, almost anywhere, by typing conversations into a smartphone (presuming your interlocutor can read). Ironically, however, as the hegemony of English decreases the need to speak other languages for work or for travel, the cachet attached to acquiring them seems to be growing. There is a thriving online community of ardent linguaphiles who are, or who aspire to become, polyglots; for inspiration, they look to Facebook groups, YouTube videos, chat rooms, and language gurus like Richard Simcott, a charismatic British hyperpolyglot who orchestrates the annual Polyglot Conference. This gathering has been held, on various continents, since 2009, and it attracts hundreds of aficionados. The talks are mostly in English, though participants wear nametags listing the languages they’re prepared to converse in. Simcott’s winkingly says “Try Me.”

No one becomes a hyperpolyglot by osmosis, or without sacrifice—it’s a rare, herculean feat. Rojas-Berscia, who gave up a promising tennis career that interfered with his language studies, reckons that there are “about twenty of us in Europe, and we all know, or know of, one another.” He put me in touch with a few of his peers, including Corentin Bourdeau, a young French linguist whose eleven languages include Wolof, Farsi, and Finnish; and Emanuele Marini, a shy Italian in his forties, who runs an export-import business and speaks almost every Slavic and Romance language, plus Arabic, Turkish, and Greek, for a total of nearly thirty. Neither willingly uses English, resenting its status as a global bully language—its prepotenza, as Marini put it to me, in Italian. Ellen Jovin, a dynamic New Yorker who has been described as the “den mother” of the polyglot community, explained that her own avid study of languages—twenty-five, to date—“is almost an apology for the dominance of English. Polyglottery is an antithesis to linguistic chauvinism.”

Much of the data on hyperpolyglots is still sketchy. But, from a small sample of prodigies who have been tested by neurolinguists, responded to online surveys, or shared their experience in forums, a partial profile has emerged. An extreme language learner has a more-than-random chance of being a gay, left-handed male on the autism spectrum, with an autoimmune disorder, such as asthma or allergies. (Endocrine research, still inconclusive, has investigated the hypothesis that these traits may be linked to a spike in testosterone during gestation.) “It’s true that L.G.B.T. people are well represented in our community,” Simcott told me, when we spoke in July. “And a lot identify as being on the spectrum, some mildly, others more so. It was a subject we explored at the conference last year.”

Simcott himself is an ambidextrous, heterosexual, and notably outgoing forty-one-year-old. He lives in Macedonia with his wife and daughter, a budding polyglot of eleven, who was, he told me, trilingual at sixteen months. His own parents were monolingual, though he was fascinated, as a boy, “by the different ways people spoke English.” (Like Henry Higgins, Simcott can nail an accent to a precise point on the map, not only in the British Isles but all over Europe.) “I’m mistaken for a native in about six languages,” he told me, even though he started slow, learning French in grade school and Spanish as a teen-ager. At university, he added Italian, Portuguese, Swedish, and Old Icelandic. His flawless German, acquired post-college, as an au pair, made Dutch a cinch.

As Simcott entered late adolescence, he said, “the Internet was starting up,” so he could practice his languages in chat rooms. He also found a sense of identity that had eluded him. There was, in particular, a mysterious polyglot who haunted the same rooms. “He was the first person who really encouraged me,” Simcott said. “Everyone else either warned me that my brain would burst or saw me as a talking horse. Eventually, I made a video using bits and bobs of sixteen languages, so I wouldn’t have to keep performing.” But the stranger gave Simcott a validation that he still recalls with emotion. He founded the conference partly to pay that debt forward, by creating a clubhouse for the kind of geeky kid he had been, to whom no tongue was foreign but no place was home.

A number of hyperpolyglots are reclusive savants who bank their languages rather than using them to communicate. The more extroverted may work as translators or interpreters. Helen Abadzi, a Greek educator who speaks nineteen languages “at least at an intermediate level” spent decades at the World Bank. Kató Lomb, a Hungarian autodidact, learned seventeen tongues—the last, Hebrew, in her late eighties—and in middle age became one of the world’s first simultaneous interpreters. Simcott joined the British Foreign Service. On tours of duty in Yemen, Bosnia, and Moldova, he picked up some of the lingo. Every summer, he set himself the challenge of learning a new tongue more purposefully, either by taking a university course—as he did in Mandarin, Japanese, Czech, Arabic, Finnish, and Georgian—or with a grammar book and a tutor.

However they differ, the hyperpolyglots whom I met all winced at the question “How many languages do you speak?” As Rojas-Berscia explained it, the issue is partly semantic: What does the verb “to speak” mean? It is also political. Standard accents and grammar are usually those of a ruling class. And the question is further clouded by the “chauvinism” that Ellen Jovin feels obliged to resist. The test of a spy, in thrillers, is to “pass for a native,” even though the English-speaking natives of Glasgow, Trinidad, Delhi, Lagos, New Orleans, and Melbourne (not to mention Eliza Doolittle’s East End) all sound foreign to one another. “No one masters all the nuances of a language,” Simcott said. “It’s a false standard, and one that gets raised, ironically, mostly by monoglots—Americans in particular. So let’s just say that I have studied more than fifty, and I use about half of them.”

Richard Hudson’s casual search for the ultimate hyperpolyglot was inconclusive, but it led him to an American journalist, Michael Erard, who had embarked on the same quest more methodically. Erard, who has a doctorate in English, spent six years reading the scientific literature and debriefing its authors, visiting archives (including Mezzofanti’s, in Bologna), and tracking down every living language prodigy he had heard from or about. It was his online survey, conducted in 2009, that generated the first systematic overview of linguistic virtuosity. Some four hundred respondents provided information about their gender and their orientation, among other personal details, including their I.Q.s (which were above average). Nearly half spoke at least seven languages, and seventeen qualified as hyperpolyglots. The distillation of this research, “Babel No More,” published in 2012, is an essential reference book—in its way, an ethnography of what Erard calls a “neural tribe.”

The awe that tribe members command has always attracted opportunists. There are, for example, “bizglots” and “broglots,” as Erard calls them. The former hawk tutorials with the dubious promise that anyone can become a prodigy, while the latter engage in online bragfests, like “postmodern frat boys.” And then there are the fauxglots. My favorite is “George Psalmanazar” (his real name is unknown), a vagabond of mysterious provenance and endearing chutzpah who wandered through Europe in the late seventeenth century, claiming, by turns, to be Irish, Japanese, and, ultimately, Formosan. Samuel Johnson befriended him in London, where Psalmanazar published a travelogue about his “native” island which included translations from its language—an ingenious pastiche of his invention. Erard pursued another much hyped character, Ziad Fazah, a Guinness-record holder until 1997, who claimed to speak fifty-eight languages fluently. Fazah flamed out spectacularly on a Chilean television show, failing to answer even simple questions posed to him by native speakers.

Rojas-Berscia derides such theatrics as “monkey business,” and dismisses prodigies who monetize their gifts. “Where do they get the time for it?” he wonders. Erard, in his survey for “Babel No More,” queried his subjects on their learning protocols, and, while some were vague (“I accept mistakes and uncertainty; I listen and read a lot”), others gave elaborate accounts of drawing “mind maps” and of building “memory anchors,” or of creating an architectural model for each new language, to be furnished with vocabulary as they progressed. When I asked Simcott if he had any secrets, he paused to think about it. “Well, I don’t have an amazing memory,” he said. “At many tasks, I’m just average. A neurolinguist at the City University of New York, Loraine Obler, ran some tests on me, and I performed highly on recalling lists of nonsense words.” (That ability, Obler’s research suggests, strongly correlates with a gift for languages.) “I was also a standout at reproducing sounds,” he continued. “But, the more languages you learn, in the more families, the easier it gets. Each one bangs more storage hooks into the wall.”

Alexander Argüelles, a legendary figure in the community, warned Erard that immodesty is the hallmark of a charlatan. When Erard met him, ten years ago, Argüelles, an American who lives in Singapore, started his day at three in the morning with a “scriptorium” exercise: “writing two pages apiece in Arabic, Sanskrit, and Chinese, the languages he calls the ‘etymological source rivers.’ ” He continued with other languages, from different families, until he had filled twenty-four notebook pages. As dawn broke, he went for a long run, listening to audiobooks and practicing what he calls “shadowing”: as the foreign sounds flowed into his headphones, he shouted them out at the top of his lungs. Back at home, he turned to drills in grammar and phonetics, logging the time he had devoted to each language on an Excel spreadsheet. Erard studied logs going back sixteen months, and calculated that Argüelles had spent forty per cent of his waking life studying fifty-two languages, in increments that varied from four hundred and fifty-six hours (Arabic) to four hours (Vietnamese). “The way I see it, there are three types of polyglots,” he told Erard. There were the “ultimate geniuses . . . who excel at anything they do”; the Mezzofantis, “who are only good at languages”; and the “people like me.” He refused to consider himself a special case—he was simply a Stakhanovite.

Erard is a pensive man of fifty, still boyish-looking, with a gift for listening that he prizes in others. We met in Nijmegen, at the Max Planck Institute, where he was finishing a yearlong stint as the writer-in-residence, and looking forward to moving back to Maine with his family. “I saw only when the book was finished that many of the stories had a common thread,” he told me. We had been walking through the woods that surround the institute, listening to the vibrant May birdsong, a Babel of voices. His subjects, he reflected, had been cut from the herd of average mortals by their wiring or by their obsession. They had embraced their otherness, and they had cultivated it. Yet, if speech defines us as human, a related faculty had eluded them: the ability to connect. Each new language was a potential conduit—an escape route from solitude. “I hadn’t realized that was my story, too,” he said.

Rojas-Berscia and I took a budget flight from Brussels to Malta, arriving at midnight. The air smelled like summer. Our taxi-driver presumed we were mother and son. “How do you say ‘mother’ in Maltese?” Rojas-Berscia asked him, in English. By the time we had reached the hotel, he knew the whole Maltese family. Two local newlyweds, still in their wedding clothes, were just checking in. “How do you say ‘congratulations’?” Rojas-Berscia asked. The answer was nifrah.

We were both starving, so we dropped our bags and went to a local bar. It was Saturday night, and the narrow streets of the quarter were packed with revellers grooving to deafening music. I had pictured something a bit different—a quaint inn on a quiet square, perhaps, where a bronze Knight of Malta tilted at the bougainvillea. But Rojas-Berscia is not easily distracted. He took out his notebook and jotted down the kinship terms he had just learned. Then he checked his phone. “I texted the language guide I lined up for us,” he explained. “He’s a personal trainer I found online, and I’ll start working out with him tomorrow morning. A gym is a good place to get the prepositions for direction.” The trainer arrived and had a beer with us. He was overdressed, with a lacquered mullet, and there was something shifty about him. Indeed, Rojas-Berscia prepaid him for the session, but he never turned up the next day. He had, it transpired, a subsidiary line of work.

I didn’t expect Rojas-Berscia to master Maltese in a week, but I was surprised at his impromptu approach. He spent several days raptly eavesdropping on native speakers in markets and cafés and on long bus rides, bathing in the warm sea of their voices. If we took a taxi to some church or ruin, he would ride shotgun and ask the driver to teach him a few common Maltese phrases, or to tell him a joke. He didn’t record these encounters, but in the next taxi or shop he would use the new phrases to start a conversation. Hyperpolyglots, Erard writes, exhibit an imperative “will to plasticity,” by which he means plasticity of the brain. But I was seeing plasticity of a different sort, which I myself had once possessed. In my early twenties, I had learned two languages simultaneously, the first by “sleeping with my dictionary,” as the French put it, and the other by drinking a lot of wine and being willing to make a fool of myself jabbering at strangers. With age, I had lost my gift for abandon. That had been my problem with Vietnamese. You have to inhabit a language, not only speak it, and fluency requires some dramatic flair. I should have been hanging out in New York’s Little Saigon, rather than staring at a screen.

The Maltese were flattered by Rojas-Berscia’s interest in their language, but dumbfounded that he would bother to learn it—what use was it to him? Their own history suggests an answer. Malta, an archipelago, is an almost literal stepping stone from Africa to Europe. (While we were there, the government turned away a boatload of asylum seekers.) Its earliest known inhabitants were Neolithic farmers, who were succeeded by the builders of a temple complex on Gozo. (Their mysterious megaliths are still standing.) Around 750 B.C., Phoenician traders established a colony, which was conquered by the Romans, who were routed by the Byzantines, who were kicked out by the Aghlabids. A community of Arabs from the Muslim Emirate of Sicily landed in the eleventh century and dug in so deep that waves of Christian conquest—Norman, Swabian, Aragonese, Spanish, Sicilian, French, and British—couldn’t efface them. Their language is the source of Maltese grammar and a third of the lexicon, making Malti the only Semitic language in the European Union. Rojas-Berscia’s Hebrew helped him with plurals, conjugations, and some roots. As for the rest of the vocabulary, about half comes from Italian, with English and French loanwords. “We should have done Uighur,” I teased him. “This is too easy for you.”

Linguistics gave Rojas-Berscia tools that civilians lack. But he was drawn to linguistics in part because of his aptitude for systematizing. “I can’t remember names,” he told me, yet his recall for the spoken word is preternatural. “It will take me a day to learn the essentials,” he had reckoned, as we planned the trip. The essentials included “predicate formation, how to quantify, negation, pronouns, numbers, qualification—‘good,’ ‘bad,’ and such. Some clausal operators—‘but,’ ‘because,’ ‘therefore.’ Copular verbs like ‘to be’ and ‘to seem.’ Basic survival verbs like ‘need,’ ‘eat,’ ‘see,’ ‘drink,’ ‘want,’ ‘walk,’ ‘buy,’ and ‘get sick.’ Plus a nice little shopping basket of nouns. Then I’ll get our guide to give me a paradigm—‘I eat an apple, you eat an apple’—and voilà.” I had, I realized, covered the same ground in Vietnamese—tôi ăn một quả táo—but it had cost me six months.

It wasn’t easy, though, to find the right guide. I suggested we try the university. “Only if we have to,” Rojas-Berscia said. “I prefer to avoid intellectuals. You want the street talk, not book Maltese.” How would he do this in the Amazon? “Monolingual fieldwork on indigenous tongues, without the reference point of a lingua franca, is harder, but it’s beautiful,” he said. “You start by making bonds with people, learning to greet them appropriately, and observing their gestures. The rules of behavior are at least as important in cultural linguistics as the rules of grammar. It’s not just a matter of finding the algorithm. The goal is to become part of a society.”

After the debacle with the “trainer,” we went looking for volunteers willing to spend an hour or so over a drink or a coffee. We auditioned a tattoo artist with blond dreadlocks, a physiology student from Valletta, a waiter on Gozo, and a tiny old lady who sold tickets to the catacombs outside Mdina (a location for King’s Landing in “Game of Thrones”). Like nearly all Maltese, they spoke good English, though Rojas-Berscia valued their mistakes. “When someone says, ‘He is angry for me,’ you learn something about his language—it represents a convention in Maltese. The richness of a language’s conventions is the highest barrier to sounding like a native in it.”

On our third day, Rojas-Berscia contacted a Maltese Facebook friend, who invited us to dinner in Birgu, a medieval city fortified by the Knights of Malta in the sixteenth century. The sheltered port is now a marina for super-yachts, although a wizened ferryman shuttles humbler travellers from the Birgu quays to those of Senglea, directly across from them. The waterfront is lined with old palazzos of coralline limestone, whose façades were glowing in the dusk. We ordered some Maltese wine and took in the scene. But the minute Rojas-Berscia opened his notebook his attention lasered in on his task. “Please don’t tell me if a verb is regular or not,” he chided his friend, who was being too helpful. “I want my brain to do the work of classifying.”

Rojas-Berscia’s brain is of great interest to Simon Fisher, his senior colleague at the institute and a neurogeneticist of international renown. In 2001, Fisher, then at Oxford, was part of a team that discovered the FOXP2 gene and identified a single, heritable mutation of it that is responsible for verbal dyspraxia, a severe language disorder. In the popular press, FOXP2 has been mistakenly touted as “the language gene,” and as the long-sought evidence for Noam Chomsky’s famous theory, which posits that a spontaneous mutation gave Homo sapiens the ability to acquire speech and that syntax is hard-wired. Other animals, however, including songbirds, also bear a version of the gene, and most of the researchers I met believe that language is probably, as Fisher put it, a “bio-cultural hybrid”—one whose genesis is more complicated than Chomsky would allow. The question inspires bitter controversy.

Fisher’s lab at Nijmegen focusses on pathologies that disrupt speech, but he has started to search for DNA variants that may correlate with linguistic virtuosity. One such quirk has already been discovered, by the neuroscientist Sophie Scott: an extra loop of gray matter, present from birth, in the auditory cortex of some phoneticians. “The genetics of talent is unexplored territory,” Fisher said. “It’s a hard concept to frame for an experiment. It’s also a sensitive topic. But you can’t deny the fact that your genome predisposes you in certain ways.”

The genetics of talent may thwart average linguaphiles who aspire to become Mezzofantis. Transgenerational studies are the next stage of research, and they will seek to establish the degree to which a genius for language runs in the family. Argüelles is the child of a polyglot. Kató Lomb was, too. Simcott’s daughter might contribute to a science still in its infancy. In the meantime, Fisher is recruiting outliers like Rojas-Berscia and collecting their saliva; when the sample is broad enough, he hopes, it will generate some conclusions. “We need to establish the right cutoff point,” he said. “We tend to think it should be twenty languages, rather than the conventional eleven. But there’s a trade-off: with a lower number, we have a bigger cohort.”

I asked Fisher about another cutoff point: the critical period for acquiring a language without an accent. The common wisdom is that one loses the chance to become a spy after puberty. Fisher explained why that is true for most people. A brain, he said, sacrifices suppleness to gain stability as it matures; once you master your mother tongue, you don’t need the phonetic plasticity of childhood, and a typical brain puts that circuitry to another use. But Simcott learned three of the languages in which he is mistaken for a native when he was in his twenties. Corentin Bourdeau, who grew up in the South of France, passes for a local as seamlessly in Lima as he does in Tehran. Experiments in extending or restoring plasticity, in the hope of treating sensory disabilities, may also lead to opportunities for greater acuity. Takao Hensch, at Harvard, has discovered that Valproate, a drug used to treat epilepsy, migraines, and bipolar disorder, can reopen the critical period for visual development in mice. “Might it work for speech?” Fisher said. “We don’t know yet.”

Rojas-Berscia and I parted on the train from Brussels to Nijmegen, where he got off and I continued to the Amsterdam airport. He had to finish his thesis on the Flux Approach before leaving for a research job in Australia, where he planned to study aboriginal languages. I asked him to assess our little experiment. “The grammar was easy,” he said. “The orthography is a little difficult, and the verbs seemed chaotic.” His prowess had dazzled our consultants, but he wasn’t as impressed with himself. He could read bits of a newspaper; he could make small talk; he had learned probably a thousand words. When a taxi-driver asked if he’d been living on Malta for a year, he’d laughed with embarrassment. “I was flattered, of course,” he added. “And his excitement for my progress excited him to help us.” “Excitement about your progress,” I clucked. It was a rare lapse.

A week later, I was on a different train, from New York to Boston. Fisher had referred me to his collaborator Evelina Fedorenko. Fedorenko is a cognitive neuroscientist at Massachusetts General Hospital who also runs what her postdocs call the EvLab, at M.I.T. My first e-mail to her had bounced back—she was on maternity leave. But then she wrote to say that she would be delighted to meet me. “Are you claustrophobic?” she added. If not, she said, I could take a spin in her fMRI machine, to see what she does with her hyperpolyglots.

Fedorenko is small and fair, with delicate features. She was born in Volgograd in 1980. “When the Soviet Union fell apart, we were starving, and it wasn’t fun,” she said. Her father was an alcoholic, but her parents were determined to help her fulfill her exceptional promise in math and science, which meant escaping abroad. At fifteen, she won a place in an exchange program, sponsored by Senator Bill Bradley, and spent a year in Alabama. Harvard gave her a full scholarship in 1998, and she went on to graduate school at M.I.T., in linguistics and psychology. There, she met the cognitive scientist Ted Gibson. They married, and they now have a one-year-old daughter.

One afternoon, I visited Fedorenko at her home, in Belmont. (She spends as much time as she can with her baby, who was babbling like a songbird.) “Here is my basic question,” she said. “How do I get a thought from my mind into yours? We begin by asking how language fits into the broader architecture of the mind. It’s a late invention, evolutionarily, and a lot of the brain’s machinery was already in place.”

She wondered: Does language share a mechanism with other cognitive functions? Or is it autonomous? To seek an answer, she developed a set of “localizer tasks,” administered in an fMRI machine. Her first goal was to identify the “language-responsive cortex,” and the tasks involved reading or listening to a sequence of sentences, some of them garbled or composed of nonsense words.

The responsive cortex proved to be separate from regions involved in other forms of complex thought. We don’t, for example, use the same parts of our brains for music and for speech, which seems counterintuitive, especially in the case of a tonal language. But pitch, Fedorenko explained, has its own neural turf. And life experience alters the picture. “Literate people use one region of their cortex in recognizing letters,” she said. “Illiterate people don’t have that region, though it develops if they learn to read.”

In order to draw general conclusions, Fedorenko needed to study the way that language skills vary among individuals. They turned out to vary greatly. The intensity of activity in response to the localizer tests was idiosyncratic; some brains worked harder than others. But that raised another question: Did heightened activity correspond to a greater aptitude for language? Or was the opposite true—that the cortex of a language prodigy would show less activity, because it was more efficient?

I asked Fedorenko if she had reason to believe that gay, left-handed males on the spectrum had some cerebral advantage in learning languages. “I’m not prepared to accept that reporting as anything more than anecdotal,” she said. “Males, for one thing, get greater encouragement for intellectual achievement.”

Fedorenko’s initial subjects had been English-speaking monolinguals, or bilinguals who also spoke Spanish or Mandarin. But, in 2013, she tested her first prodigy. “We heard about a local kid who spoke thirty languages, and we recruited him,” she said. He introduced her to other whizzes, and as the study grew Fedorenko needed material in a range of tongues. Initially, she used Bible excerpts, but “Alice’s Adventures in Wonderland” came to seem more congenial. The EvLab has acquired more than forty “Alice” translations, and Fedorenko plans to add tasks in sign language.

Twelve years on, Fedorenko is confident of certain findings. All her subjects show less brain activity when working in their mother tongue; they don’t have to sweat it. As the language in the tests grows more challenging, it elicits more neural activity, until it becomes gibberish, at which point it elicits less—the brain seems to give up, quite sensibly, when a task is futile. Hyperpolyglots, too, work harder in an unfamiliar tongue. But their “harder” is relaxed compared with the efforts of average people. Their advantage seems to be not capacity but efficiency. No matter how difficult the task, they use a smaller area of their brain in processing language—less tissue, less energy.

All Fedorenko’s guinea pigs, including me, also took a daunting nonverbal memory test: squares on a grid flash on and off as you frantically try to recall their location. This trial engages a neural network separate from the language cortex—the executive-function system. “Its role is to support general fluid intelligence,” Fedorenko said. What kind of boost might it give to, say, a language prodigy? “People claim that language learning makes you smarter,” she replied. “Sadly, we don’t have evidence for it. But, if you play an unfamiliar language to ‘normal’ people, their executive-function systems don’t show much response. Those of polyglots do. Perhaps they’re striving to grasp a linguistic signal.” Or perhaps that’s where their genie resides.

Barring an infusion of Valproate, most of us will never acquire Rojas-Berscia’s twenty-eight languages. As for my own brain, I reckoned that the scan would detect a lumpen mass of mac and cheese embedded with low-wattage Christmas lights. After the memory test, I was sure that it had. “Don’t worry,” Matt Siegelman, Fedorenko’s technician, reassured me. “Everyone fails it—well, almost.”

Siegelman’s tactful letdown woke me from my adventures in language land. But as I was leaving I noticed a copy of “Alice” in Vietnamese. I report to you with pride that I could make out “white rabbit” (thỏ trắng), “tea party” (tiệc trà), and ăn tôi, which—you knew it!—means “eat me.” ♦

Source: https://www.newyorker.com/magazine/2018/09/03/the-mystery-of-people-who-speak-dozens-of-languages

[mshoji-blog]

A lesser known, yet uniquely compelling candidate for the real Satoshi Nakamoto is Japanese mathematician and number theorist Shinichi Mochizuki. With a long history of mathematical innovation, and purportedly proving conjectures thought to be near impossible to verify, he seems to almost come from an alien world. Mochizuki further painstakingly avoids the spotlight. Some, like American computer scientist and co-inventor of hypertext, Ted Nelson, go so far as to call him Satoshi.

Also Read: “I Designed Bitcoi… Gold” – The Many Facts Pointing to Nick Being Satoshi

The Coolness Outside

As Paul Rosenberg states in his blog post “Be the Outsider,” everything that ultimately innovates comes from a private space, on the fringes of society: “Please believe me that the coolest things happen outside, and not within the hierarchies of the status quo … Outside is where personal computers came from. It’s where the Internet came from. It’s where Bitcoin came from … Nearly everything cool comes from outside.”

Japanese mathematician Shinichi Mochizuki fits this unorthodox form as well. Attempting to solve “impossible” problems, focused only on his work and hiding from the spotlight, the 50-year-old professor Mochizuki has chosen not to submit his most revolutionary ideas for formal review. He has instead — much like Satoshi Nakamoto — surreptitiously placed them on the internet, and walked away.

Shinichi Stats

A Mathematics Prodigy

Child of an international marriage, Mochizuki moved with his family from Japan to the United States at age five, and would go on to graduate Philips Exeter Academy in New Hampshire at age 16. From there it was Princeton University for a bachelor’s degree and Ph.D in mathematics, lecturing at Harvard for two years, and then a return to Japan in 1994. Mochizuki is currently a full professor at Japan’s prestigious Kyoto University.

In spite of impressive accomplishments and accolades such as proving Grothendieck’s conjecture on anabelian geometry in 1996, and being invited to speak at the International Congress of Mathematicians, nothing would cause such a stir as his alleged proof of the ABC Conjecture in 2012. The conjecture is described as a “beguilingly simple number theory problem that had stumped mathematicians for decades.”

What math experts found in reviewing the proof, however, was that they couldn’t even understand it, and Mochizuki couldn’t be bothered to explain. Caroline Chen notes in her article The Paradox of the Proof:

Usually, they said, mathematicians discuss their findings with their colleagues. Normally, they publish pre-prints to widely respected online forums. Then they submit their papers to the Annals of Mathematics, where papers are refereed by eminent mathematicians before publication. Mochizuki was bucking the trend. He was, according to his peers, “unorthodox.” But what roused their ire most was Mochizuki’s refusal to lecture.

Much like Bitcoin had been carefully dropped off as an alien creation on obscure corners of the internet at its inception, Mochizuki had dropped off a supposed bombshell in the field of mathematics and stepped back. He had even created his own terminology over a decade of isolated research which other mathematicians couldn’t parse.

Chen explains: “Then Mochizuki walked away. He did not send his work to the Annals of Mathematics. Nor did he leave a message on any of the online forums frequented by mathematicians around the world. He just posted the papers, and waited.”

An American Background in British English

Critics of Satoshi theories placing a Japanese as Nakamoto often cite Satoshi’s impeccable command of the English language and grammar in correspondence, and the cleanliness of his writing style. As a native speaker, this would have been a non-issue for Princeton salutatorian Mochizuki.

Also frequently cited is Satoshi’s use of typically British English expressions and spellings such as “bloody” and “colour.” Interestingly, Mochizuki’s mentor and doctoral advisor from Princeton, Gerd Faltings, is a German national. The two would have presumably communicated in English at Princeton in an academic setting, and the English formally taught in Germany is typically British English. Mochizuki would have also undoubtedly been exposed to the British usages at his prestigious boarding school, Philips Exeter Academy.

Hyper-Endorsement from Ted Nelson

The inventor of hypertext, computer scientist and philosopher Ted Nelson feverishly rushed to produce an entertaining and insightful video on Mochizuki in 2013 after reading an article about him and deciding that Shinichi Mochizuki was indeed “the one.”

Lack of Explanation and Evasion of the Spotlight

Sorry to be a wet blanket. Writing a description for this thing for general audiences is bloody hard. There’s nothing to relate it to.

So read the words of Satoshi Nakamoto from a July 5, 2010 post to Bitcointalk.org, in attempting to define Bitcoin for a wider audience. Like Bitcoin, Mochizuki’s purported proof of the ABC Conjecture was a novel contribution not readily grasped by the public, or even experts. With a stated goal of establishing “an arithmetic version of Teichmüller theory for number fields equipped with an elliptic curve … by applying the theory of semi-graphs of anabelioids, Frobenioids, the etale theta function, and log-shells,” even the world’s premier mathematicians were stumped, and Mochizuki couldn’t be bothered to explain.

When asked by a well-known university to visit and expound on the proof, Mochizuki reportedly stated “I couldn’t possibly do that in one talk.” He then refused even when offered more time. Friend and colleague of Mochizuki, Oxford professor Minhyong Kim, states that Shinichi is a “slightly shy character,” noting:

He’s a very hard working guy and he just doesn’t want to spend time on airplanes and hotels and so on.

Japanese Background

Japanese culture is quiet, reserved, and hardworking, generally speaking. Humility and politeness go hand-in-hand with and an almost painful aversion to being the center of attention. In Japan it is viewed as graceful and appropriate to do one’s work quietly, complete the task, and not make much of a fuss about it. This can be very different from the general Western individualist ethos, which often calls for flashy attention or a prize in the face of groundbreaking accomplishment.

On a linguistic aside, the name Shinichi means “new one” in Japanese, and interestingly shares a syllable count with Satoshi. The surnames line up syllabically as well, but this could be nothing more than mere coincidence.

Skepticism and Summary

The most obvious argument against Shinichi Mochizuki being Satoshi Nakamoto is a glaring lack of known background in computers, coding, and cypherpunk ethos and knowledge. It’s hard to imagine though, that a scholar of his caliber in the field of mathematics would not have at least some working familiarity with these fields. Critics have pulled no punches in attempting to put the Mochizuki as Satoshi theory into the cultural paper shredder, even leveraging insult to do so. Still, like the other candidates in this series so far, Mochizuki merits examination on a variety of counts, and further adds to the mystery of the hunt for Bitcoin’s pseudonymous creator.

Who do you think is Satoshi? One person? Many? Let us know in the comments section below.

[coin-news-blog]

The Many Facts Pointing to Shinichi Being Satoshi

New Post has been published on https://coinmakers.tech/news/the-many-facts-pointing-to-shinichi-being-satoshi

The Many Facts Pointing to Shinichi Being Satoshi

The Many Facts Pointing to Shinichi Being Satoshi

A lesser known, yet uniquely compelling candidate for the real Satoshi Nakamoto is Japanese mathematician and number theorist Shinichi Mochizuki. With a long history of mathematical innovation, and purportedly proving conjectures thought to be near impossible to verify, he seems to almost come from an alien world. Mochizuki further painstakingly avoids the spotlight. Some, like American computer scientist and co-inventor of hypertext, Ted Nelson, go so far as to call him Satoshi.

The Coolness Outside

As Paul Rosenberg states in his blog post “Be the Outsider,” everything that ultimately innovates comes from a private space, on the fringes of society: “Please believe me that the coolest things happen outside, and not within the hierarchies of the status quo … Outside is where personal computers came from. It’s where the Internet came from. It’s where Bitcoin came from … Nearly everything cool comes from outside.”

Japanese mathematician Shinichi Mochizuki fits this unorthodox form as well. Attempting to solve “impossible” problems, focused only on his work and hiding from the spotlight, the 50-year-old professor Mochizuki has chosen not to submit his most revolutionary ideas for formal review. He has instead — much like Satoshi Nakamoto — surreptitiously placed them on the internet, and walked away.

Shinichi Mochizuki

Shinichi Stats

A Mathematics Prodigy

Child of an international marriage, Mochizuki moved with his family from Japan to the United States at age five, and would go on to graduate Philips Exeter Academy in New Hampshire at age 16. From there it was Princeton University for a bachelor’s degree and Ph.D in mathematics, lecturing at Harvard for two years, and then a return to Japan in 1994. Mochizuki is currently a full professor at Japan’s prestigious Kyoto University.

In spite of impressive accomplishments and accolades such as proving Grothendieck’s conjecture on anabelian geometry in 1996, and being invited to speak at the International Congress of Mathematicians, nothing would cause such a stir as his alleged proof of the ABC Conjecture in 2012. The conjecture is described as a “beguilingly simple number theory problem that had stumped mathematicians for decades.”

What math experts found in reviewing the proof, however, was that they couldn’t even understand it, and Mochizuki couldn’t be bothered to explain. Caroline Chen notes in her article The Paradox of the Proof:

Usually, they said, mathematicians discuss their findings with their colleagues. Normally, they publish pre-prints to widely respected online forums. Then they submit their papers to the Annals of Mathematics, where papers are refereed by eminent mathematicians before publication. Mochizuki was bucking the trend. He was, according to his peers, “unorthodox.” But what roused their ire most was Mochizuki’s refusal to lecture.

Much like Bitcoin had been carefully dropped off as an alien creation on obscure corners of the internet at its inception, Mochizuki had dropped off a supposed bombshell in the field of mathematics and stepped back. He had even created his own terminology over a decade of isolated research which other mathematicians couldn’t parse.

Chen explains: “Then Mochizuki walked away. He did not send his work to the Annals of Mathematics. Nor did he leave a message on any of the online forums frequented by mathematicians around the world. He just posted the papers, and waited.”

An American Background in British English

Critics of Satoshi theories placing a Japanese as Nakamoto often cite Satoshi’s impeccable command of the English language and grammar in correspondence, and the cleanliness of his writing style. As a native speaker, this would have been a non-issue for Princeton salutatorian Mochizuki.

Also frequently cited is Satoshi’s use of typically British English expressions and spellings such as “bloody” and “colour.” Interestingly, Mochizuki’s mentor and doctoral advisor from Princeton, Gerd Faltings, is a German national. The two would have presumably communicated in English at Princeton in an academic setting, and the English formally taught in Germany is typically British English. Mochizuki would have also undoubtedly been exposed to the British usages at his prestigious boarding school, Philips Exeter Academy.

Hyper-Endorsement from Ted Nelson

The inventor of hypertext, computer scientist and philosopher Ted Nelson feverishly rushed to produce an entertaining and insightful video on Mochizuki in 2013 after reading an article about him and deciding that Shinichi Mochizuki was indeed “the one.”

Lack of Explanation and Evasion of the Spotlight

Sorry to be a wet blanket. Writing a description for this thing for general audiences is bloody hard. There’s nothing to relate it to.

So read the words of Satoshi Nakamoto from a July 5, 2010 post to Bitcointalk.org, in attempting to define Bitcoin for a wider audience. Like Bitcoin, Mochizuki’s purported proof of the ABC Conjecture was a novel contribution not readily grasped by the public, or even experts. With a stated goal of establishing “an arithmetic version of Teichmüller theory for number fields equipped with an elliptic curve … by applying the theory of semi-graphs of anabelioids, Frobenioids, the etale theta function, and log-shells,” even the world’s premier mathematicians were stumped, and Mochizuki couldn’t be bothered to explain.

When asked by a well-known university to visit and expound on the proof, Mochizuki reportedly stated “I couldn’t possibly do that in one talk.” He then refused even when offered more time. Friend and colleague of Mochizuki, Oxford professor Minhyong Kim, states that Shinichi is a “slightly shy character,” noting:

He’s a very hard working guy and he just doesn’t want to spend time on airplanes and hotels and so on.

Japanese Background

Japanese culture is quiet, reserved, and hardworking, generally speaking. Humility and politeness go hand-in-hand with and an almost painful aversion to being the center of attention. In Japan it is viewed as graceful and appropriate to do one’s work quietly, complete the task, and not make much of a fuss about it. This can be very different from the general Western individualist ethos, which often calls for flashy attention or a prize in the face of groundbreaking accomplishment.

On a linguistic aside, the name Shinichi means “new one” in Japanese, and interestingly shares a syllable count with Satoshi. The surnames line up syllabically as well, but this could be nothing more than mere coincidence.

Skepticism and Summary

The most obvious argument against Shinichi Mochizuki being Satoshi Nakamoto is a glaring lack of known background in computers, coding, and cypherpunk ethos and knowledge. It’s hard to imagine though, that a scholar of his caliber in the field of mathematics would not have at least some working familiarity with these fields. Critics have pulled no punches in attempting to put the Mochizuki as Satoshi theory into the cultural paper shredder, even leveraging insult to do so. Still, like the other candidates in this series so far, Mochizuki merits examination on a variety of counts, and further adds to the mystery of the hunt for Bitcoin’s pseudonymous creator.

Source: news.bitcoin