fandomsecrets | [ SECRET POST #2596 ]

⌈ Secret Post #2596 ⌋

Warning: Some secrets are NOT worksafe and may contain SPOILERS.

01.

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02.

[Star Trek: The Next Generation]

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03.

[The Croods]

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04.

[Elementary]

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05.

[Final Fantasy XIII]

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06.

[SCP Foundation]

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07.

[Philip Seymour Hoffman]

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08.

[Twin Peaks]

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[Richard Armitage]

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[Reign]

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11.

[The Hobbit]

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12.

[Hunger Games]

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13.

[Don't Hug Me I'm Scared]

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14.

[Teen Wolf]

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15.

[Panic! at The Disco/Dallon Weekes]

Notes:

Secrets Left to Post: 03 pages, 063 secrets from Secret Submission Post #371.
Secrets Not Posted: [ 0 - broken links ], [ 0 - not!secrets ], [ 0 - not!fandom ], [ 0 - too big ], [ 0 - repeat ].
Current Secret Submissions Post: here.
Suggestions, comments, and concerns should go here.

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Now, I want to qualify this by saying that it's not something I really understand intimately either, so one or more of my points about language might be wrong here. I'm much more knowledgeable about the cuisine than I am about the linguistics in question, but nevertheless I'll try to provide what I understand to be part of the explanation.

It's very, very useful to realize that India was a British colony for a large part of its history. Essentially all of its industrialization can be attributed to that, so it isn't hard to see where certain English words such as terms for technology and engineering would have made their way into the language. It's also useful for the particular instance of the usage of "teaspoon" to realize that traditional Indian cuisine doesn't actually employ volumetric measurements. In ayurveda - the practice of traditional medicine - measures exist, but they are measurements by weight, not by volume. To imagine that introducing people to the concept of recipes that originated from Britain (such as yeast breads, cookies, etc.) necessitated the use of such language isn't difficult.

As for the last point, I'm not sure the concept of language purity is as strong in India as it is in some other countries. I may just be talking out of my ass on this one, but I've never heard any complaints about it in my limited experience, which definitely differentiates it from languages like Japanese and Russian.

Now, see, that's very interesting. I can understand tech words, since a lot of them are new to us, too, but....

(Sorry if i seem dense....) Surely in India there are recipes, and yes, if you're going to make a sponge cake for the English family, you'd have to use English measurements. But surely there would have to be a sort of...mental translation, and there must be an Indian equivalent of 'teaspoon', even if it's a measure of weight.

It's all very odd to me - which isn't to say bad, or wrong, or stupid - just odd, and interesting.

Well, yes. In traditional cooking there are recipes, but they aren't recipes like you would think of today. They are more like lists of ingredients, which one is expected to be able to put together by taste. ...Which actually isn't unlike a lot of the older recipes in European tradition either. Standardized measurements in cooking didn't really come about until the 1700's.

In India the sort of weight measurements that come from Ayurvedic medicine are not made with the kind of equipment a cook would have had access to back then.

I don't know what to tell you. Most of this information is just stuff I have gleaned from watching entirely too many youtube videos about Indian food since I happen to really like it and like to learn how to do things the proper way.

Heee. Youtube, the new University of the World!

Actually, Japanese is rife with loanwords from all different languages, not just English. It's a huge part of their language in general - for instance, the Japanese word for bread is "pan," which comes from the Portuguese "pão." Likewise, their word for hideout, "ajito," is from the Russian "agitpunkt." The Japanese language borrows from all over the place; English is just a small subset.

Not only that, but they've taken loanwords and given them their own meanings. In English, we think of " high tension" in the sense of a tense situation or a strong pulling force, but in Japanese it's used to refer to a state of intense excitement and has positive connotations rather than negative ones. For a country that's so traditional in a lot of ways, it really likes to borrow words!

I know all of that; I lived there for a year and studied the language for several. But there's still a national (read: government enabled) push to replace those words with ones that are entirely Japanese-derived. It's silly to the point of ridiculousness that there are departments that exist to try to essentially erase the need for katakana.

As far as I know this isn't the case for India, but I could be off base.

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