Make it easy on yourself tonight
I think I’ve successfully gotten www.seorookie.net to redirect to the front page here. I’ll add it to my masthead/banner/whatever as soon as I can figure out what font and size to use to avoid making it look too cluttered. Apologies to anyone who might have tried to memorize iwamatodjishi!
Well, I did memorize iwamatodjishi, and I don’t speak a word of Japanese (I would like to know where the accents are, for instance, and what does it mean. Yes, I read this and went here. But, not speaking the language, how am I to know wether “iwama todjishi” is “even the ice”, “the ice that shackles”, “the ice [that] the rocks” or anything else?).
I think I’ll keep on keying “iwamatodjishi.com” if just for the exotism/snobbishness factor
(By the way, it coincidentally happens there is an Atsushi Iwama).
Happy, er, holydays, or whatever
That’s funny. We kept the Levitical festivals in the church I grew up in, and I was, in fact, brought up to call them “holy days” and not “holidays.”
Re. my cumbersome URL, here’s the story: It’s made up of 岩(iwa: “rock, rocks”) + 間(ma: “space between”) + 閉ぢし(todjishi: “close, bind”). That means that the first line of the poem (and therefore my URL) is something on the order of “Shackling the rocks,” with the implication that an actual sentence is coming later.
The accents are tougher. Japanese has rising and falling intonation but no stress accents. That makes the differences between words that are the same phonetically a real bitch to learn–at least, if you want to sound as natural as possible. On the other hand, Japanese isn’t tone-dependent the way Chinese and, say, Thai are. If you intone hashi so that it sounds like “chopsticks” instead of “bridge,” you’ll be chuckled at, but no one will have any trouble understanding what you mean. More dangerous is addressing a Japanese with the very common surname Sato (falling intonation, 佐藤: “aid” + “wisteria”) as Sato (rising intonation, 砂糖: “sugar”). If the response is a smouldering look and the line, “Just how sweet are you assuming I am?” consider yourself lucky.
And Happy Holidays to you, too.