Would it be so wrong

[james_davis_nicoll]

To try to convince people that Japanese SF novels tend to be shorter than Anglospheric SF novels because Japanese has fewer words than English? And a lot of Japanese consists of words borrowed from other languages.

Comments

[nelc.livejournal.com]

Why would you want to do that?

[jhetley.livejournal.com]

Because one "Nicoll Effect" is poking things with a stick . . .

[http://users.livejournal.com/krin_o_o_/]

The grammar nasti in me has requested that I ask "don't you mean 'Nicoll Affect?'"

[james-nicoll.livejournal.com]

Convincing people of things that are obviously, hilariously wrong so I can mock them for falling for it builds character and maybe even fact checking in the subject. They should thank me.

Seriously, it's an old Nicoll tradition. I think it's what we replaced hitting people in the face with an ax with.

[http://users.livejournal.com/krin_o_o_/]

Would this be using you powers for evil?

Or for the greater good through Darwinian mechanics?

[maruad.livejournal.com]

are these goals mutually exclusive?

[refugee50s.livejournal.com]

Certainly, I think you are free to try to convince people of anything you please, but I'm not certain there's a reasonable case to be made for cause and effect here.

I would guess that the length of a story would have more to do with the length of the sequence of events, and the level of detail you describe, than the number of words in your vocabulary.

I do see an argument that there might be a Japanese tendency to be as elegantly spare in their storytelling as they are with, say, their architecture.

I'm currently slogging through Hard Boiled Wonderland, and I have to say that I don' find all that spare, or all that elegant. It's a style of storytelling I've also seen in English, and I don't much like it there, either.

[refugee50s.livejournal.com]

Ah. I see that I've taken the bait -- although I was not exactly "convinced".

I'm not certain there's a reasonable case to be made for cause and effect here.

[james-nicoll.livejournal.com]

People in North America (and probably elsewhere but NorAm is what I deal with most of the time) often believe insanely stupid, clearly incorrect things about people from Asia and people who appear to be from Asia. A reasonable case does not have to be made.

Re: I'm not certain there's a reasonable case to be made for cause and effect here.

[nelc.livejournal.com]

Ah, right, I'm getting it now.

For example

[james-nicoll.livejournal.com]

Gregory Benford:

"These two vast, ancient societies [China and India] withstood the centuries by keeping down innovation, so life was much the same from one millennium to the next. Centuries slid by with little to mark them beyond the feuding of maharajahs."

Re: I'm not certain there's a reasonable case to be made for cause and effect here.

[refugee50s.livejournal.com]

I can't help but to think that "People often believe insanely stupid, clearly incorrect things about other people from other societies" is probably just as accurate a statement. In fact, I suspect that believing one's culture to be uniquely stupid is as ignorant and arrogant in its way as thinking that one's culture is uniquely superior.

This Conan O'Brian ad seems relevant, although I can't pin down exactly why:


Somehow, it strikes me as simultaneously implying the cultural superiority of the Orient (India, yes?), while purveying the Tarzan myth that western white folk can beat quaint natives at their own game, except possibly bargaining.

(That said, I love this ad, particularly the shot of Conan at his loom.)

Re: I'm not certain there's a reasonable case to be made for cause and effect here.

[james-nicoll.livejournal.com]

I am not saying "People often believe insanely stupid, clearly incorrect things about other people from other societies" isn't generally true, just that I tend to deal with a specific version of it.

Really specific. The Anglospheric SFnal and to a lesser extent only because so much of it is set in secondary worlds with extremely limited cultural palates, not because of any inherent superiority of the writers involved Fantasy version.

[houseboatonstyx.livejournal.com]

Well, of course their rule of thumb for accomplishing elegance is that each word in their language may only be used a limited number of times in each work.

No repetitions in haiku, are there? Thought not.

[cmattg.livejournal.com]

(*eyes you suspiciously*)

Is that tag a Tom Lehrer quote?

[james-nicoll.livejournal.com]

Of course it is.

Getting in the spirit!

[http://users.livejournal.com/krin_o_o_/]

Well, "wrong" is such a subjective word...

You almost certainly have success convincing people that kanji has a very high rate of data compression and that the rate of data input would be faster because of that.

And as you can see, the above would be much shorter:
"この例を与えれば、何人かの人々は何を信じるようになる。であっても、彼らはそれを読み取ることができない場合。"

- Krin * I -like- this game! *

Re: Getting in the spirit!

[james-nicoll.livejournal.com]

And that's another thing. Japanese writing is nothing but a series of question marks. What are they so puzzled about?

Re: Getting in the spirit!

[elsue.livejournal.com]

Following the link, it says....

"If you give an example, some people will believe anything. Even if they can't read it."

Re: Getting in the spirit!

[mmcirvin.livejournal.com]

The Mac OS Last Resort font is so much more fun.

At one point, the glyph representing the private-use area had a letter from Dr. Seuss's "On Beyond Zebra". They seem to have changed that to pictures of Greys and ringed planets.

Re: Getting in the spirit!

[dewline.livejournal.com]

BWAH!!!

[mmcirvin.livejournal.com]

Obviously the problem here is those inconvenient hiragana. We need to use Chinese writing, [BAIT]where every symbol stands for a single idea![/BAIT]

[ross-teneyck.livejournal.com]

You just made me think of the scene in that one Dan Brown book where our hero is being given Chinese characters to translate -- but out of sequence, because for security reasons they don't want him to know what he's translating. So thanks for that.

[dagbrown.livejournal.com]

NNNGGGGGGGGGGGGGGG

[(Anonymous)]

That's Digital Fortress you're thinking of.

It's the first Dan Brown book I read, so I knew how execrably vile his writing was long before he was famous.

Its extraordinary badness, is the reason I haven't read a Dan Brown book since. (I guess that makes it a sort of vaccination.)

TSM_in_Toronto

I forget

[mme-hardy.livejournal.com]

Which SF author posited a future in which the Chinese ruled themselves by some sort of divination involving Chinese characters, which was impossible for everybody else because nothing is as compact or as ambiguous as characters?

Re: I forget

[james-nicoll.livejournal.com]

John Brunner, The Shockwave Rider:

In China, too, the sheer pressure of population had forced an advance from ad hoc improvisation along predetermined Marxist-Maoist guidelines to a deliberate search for optimal administrative techniques, employing a form of cross-impact matrix analysis for which the Chinese language was peculiarly well adapted. Well before the turn of the century a pattern had been systematized that proved immensely successful. To every commune and small village was sent a deck of cards bearing ideograms relevant to impending changes, whether social or technical. By shuffling and dealing the symbols into fresh combinations, fresh ideas could automatically be generated, and the people at a series of public meetings discussed the implications at length and appointed one of their number to summarize their views and report back to Peking. It was cheap and amazingly efficient.

But it didn't work in any Western language except Esperanto.

Re: I forget

[mme-hardy.livejournal.com]

Thank you! I knew I could rely on you (Why, one wonders, would it work in Esperanto? No conjugations and people are too dumb to infer them?)

Re: I forget

[martin-wisse.livejournal.com]

Because Brunner loved him some Esperanto?

Re: I forget

[ross-teneyck.livejournal.com]

This seems like an isomeme to the bit in Snow Crash where Sumerian is human brain machine code.

[thomasyan.livejournal.com]

No no, try telling people it's because Japanese/Chinese characters are more compact than letters.

[nelc.livejournal.com]

Which by at least one measure they are. The Japanese for "computronium", for example, is only three characters: 滰算素.

And Japanese paperbacks are half the size of the same books in English. (Okay, I couldn't lay my hands on the English Singularity Sky, but Iron Sunrise is a similar size, as I recall.)

[dhole.livejournal.com]

Maybe you should try suggesting that it's because Japanese people have smaller hands than Americans.

[nihilistic-kid.livejournal.com]

No, because next month I publish a 768-page Japanese SF novel.

[james-nicoll.livejournal.com]

I did say "tend".

[mmcirvin.livejournal.com]

So, if the downfall of American SF is due to the pervasive sense of dyspepsia and doom in American culture, how does this map onto post-Lost Decade Japan, which by all accounts is mired in an endless cultural malaise deeper than that of the US?

[kingwalters.livejournal.com]

The argument doesn't relate to American culture generally, but rather to American SF fandom. The latter is definitely full of dyspepsia and doom, for obvious reasons. I don't know anything about Japanese SF fans, but given the histories of the two countries, I wuld be surprised if the same problem was occuring there.

[bwross.livejournal.com]

Actually, a language with fewer words has a lower entropy of texts for the same length. Therefore, for Japanese novels to cover the same range of material (ie SF genre), Japanese novels must be longer. :)

Also...

[(Anonymous)]

Not only has Japanese fewer words, but the Japanese government also publishes a list of appropriate words to use, with a special suppelement for those approved for use in proper names.

:)