Pure functions in D

[Bill Baxter]

On Wed, Sep 24, 2008 at 7:33 AM, Bruno Medeiros
<brunodomedeiros+spam at com.gmail> wrote:

> Hum, seems I got here before Bill Baxter. :P

:-)  Hadn't even occurred to me to chime in.

> And if you go into Japanese, you'll see even more variations. Basically
> Japanese has variations that depend on the tone of the speech (formal or
> not) Like:
>
> watashi - I (genderless and formal)
> atashi - I (used by females and a bit less formal)
> boku - I (used by males and informal)
> ore - I (used by males in vulgar and arrogant-sounding tone)

"ore" is more rough, but it's not really vulgar and arrogant.  Maybe
"macho" is a better description for it.  It's "I with testosterone".

One interesting thing I noticed, just because I happen to have a young
son here, is that often people will substitute "I" for "you" when
talking to children.  For instance people will ask my son "boku
ikutsu?"  literally "how old am I" instead of "how old are you?".
But since they generally wouldn't call themselves "boku" and since
really in Japanese you wouldn't normally need to specify the "you" or
the "I" in that situation, it's clear that they really mean "you" when
they say "I" in this case.

But I guess that's not so different from the "royal we" in English
("Aren't we looking smart today?").  You know from context that the
speaker can't possibly really mean "we", so it must mean either you or
I.

> But even freakier, sometimes, in the case of the 2nd person, they depend not
> on the *target* of the pronoun (the 2nd person), but also the gender of the
> speaker! Like:
>
> anata - you (genderless target, formal)
> kimi - you (genderless target, semi-formal, *used by males*)
> temee - you (genderless target, vulgar and insulting, *used by males*)

temee is actually "temae" with slangy pronunciation.  -ai and -ae
endings get turned into -ee (pronounced like A as in "Kate")

omae - is another one. used by males casually in a non-honorific context.

Then you can put suffixes on some of those, like -san or -chan.  For
instance "omae-chan" is a sort of cutesy way to say "you" to a child.

Then there's "kisama".  It has the very polite -sama ending usually
used for royalty and honored guests, but "kisama" is actually very
insulting for some reason.

> There are probably many other variants, but I'm nowhere near an expert in
> Japanese.

Yeh, I'm no where close to actually knowing how to use all those
properly.  I try to stick with the safest most generic ones for fear
of accidentally insulting someone.

> So basically you can insult someone in Japanese with just one word! So
> "temee" can be translated something like "You bastard!", but I always
> chuckle when I see anime fansubs which translate it to just the more literal
> "You!!!" ^^

"Temee" is pretty much exclusively for insults, but even "omae", which
is used all the time in conversation, is pretty insulting if used on a
superior.

All these things certainly make it very hard to translate certain
Japanese humor into English.

--bb