{"id":485,"date":"2009-02-21T23:53:35","date_gmt":"2009-02-22T05:53:35","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/bendreth.com\/?p=485"},"modified":"2009-02-22T07:29:34","modified_gmt":"2009-02-22T13:29:34","slug":"485","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/bendreth.com\/?p=485","title":{"rendered":"To Craunch the Marmoset"},"content":{"rendered":"<p>A bit more than a week ago, Futility Closet had a post concerning a phrasebook from the Borneo Literature Bureau containing <a href=\"http:\/\/www.futilitycloset.com\/2009\/02\/11\/enjoy-your-stay\/\">phrases considered useful when traveling in Borneo<\/a>.<\/p>\n<p>It put me in mind of two things: first, the phrasebook <em><a href=\"http:\/\/en.wikipedia.org\/wiki\/English_As_She_Is_Spoke\">English as She is Spoke<\/a><\/em>, famous (infamous? notorious?) for its ineptitude. <a href=\"http:\/\/books.google.ca\/books?id=TZFZ95l2QtEC\">You can view excerpts from it on Google Books<\/a>.<\/p>\n<p>The second is a book in my personal library, the <em>Handbook of Japanese Conversations<\/em>, by Morio Takahashi. It contains sample conversations on a number of topics, such as:<\/p>\n<ul>\n<li>Greetings, Polite Expression, etc.<\/li>\n<li>How to Apologize<\/li>\n<li>How to Ask Somebody to Do Something<\/li>\n<li>Salutation and Inquiries Concerning Health<\/li>\n<li>Meals<\/li>\n<li>At the Post and Telegraph Office<\/li>\n<\/ul>\n<p>And many more.<\/p>\n<p>This book was published in 1951, but appears to have been written much earlier, or perhaps developed over a number of years with an upper-class Englishman as the reference for the English language. I say that because of some of the references, as well as the style of speech:<\/p>\n<ol>Is there a Marconi apparatus on board?<\/ol>\n<ol>Kono fune ni wa musen denshin ga ari masu ka.<\/ol>\n<p><\/p>\n<ol>Whew! but they make a deuce of noise!<\/ol>\n<ol> Yaa, mattaku oosawagi wo shite i masu ne.<\/ol>\n<p><\/p>\n<ol>Let us hope that it will occasion no shipwrecks.<\/ol>\n<ol>Soonan-sen ga nakereba yoi desu ga ne.<\/ol>\n<p>It also has some interesting vocabulary words that aren&#8217;t used in sample conversations, such as assassin, cutpurse, poaching, contraband, smuggler, and poison. Not to mention this sentence, which is part of a dialogue:<\/p>\n<ol>It will require killing.<\/ol>\n<ol>Koroshite shimawa nakereba nari masen.<\/ol>\n<p>Let us hope that a visit to Japan will occasion no incident requiring the use of such vocabulary.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"<p>A bit more than a week ago, Futility Closet had a post concerning a phrasebook from the Borneo Literature Bureau containing phrases considered useful when traveling in Borneo. It put [&hellip;]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[2,4,14],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-485","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-fun-stuff","category-its-all-about-me","category-reading"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/bendreth.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/485","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/bendreth.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/bendreth.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/bendreth.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/bendreth.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=485"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/bendreth.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/485\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/bendreth.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=485"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/bendreth.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=485"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/bendreth.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=485"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}