On light novels and the first-person narrator

[sarsaparilla]

On topic: I am not too familiar with Light Novels as a genre, and comparing the claims of the article to the one series I do know rather well (SHnY) I cannot help feeling that the author of the article misses the mark on most accounts; there certainly are weaknesses and problematic issues with SHnY but the author doesn't even mention those. Especially amusing is the speculation on how the choice of first person narrative allegedly tells something about contemporary zeitgeist ... considering that purplish-leaning first person narrative is pretty much the older-than-pyramids original style of storytelling. I wonder if the author has ever read Robinson Crusoe? Or the great-grandfather of all epistolaries, the story of Sa-nehat, written down around 1800 BC?

Off topic: the Feynman anecdote, while somewhat amusing, still betrays profound ignorance on how natural languages work, and pretty much amounts to language blindness. All languages have idiosyncratic ways to encode knowledge, and this extends to which facets of knowledge are seen as important enough to express through language. Most people should be familiar with the idea that some languages have very specific words for things that are important in the respective culture (like the 'inuit has 50 words for snow' meme) but this phenomenon extends to grammatical constructs as well.

Indo-European languages observe definiteness (expressed through the use of an article) and grammatical gender (though English has mostly lost this feature, there are still remnants like the difference between 'he' and 'she'). Both of these are completely foreign ideas to my own native language (Finnish); on the other hand Finnish observes telicity -- it isn't possible to mention the target of an action without indicating whether the action was complete or not. One of the most interesting and unique idiosyncracies I know is in the Tuyuca language which observes evidentiality -- in Tuyuca it's impossible to state a fact without simultaneously expressing whether the speaker has come to know the fact by seeing it firsthand, observing it through other senses, inferring it from known facts, having been told, or just believing that it is so without substantial evidence. Now, one of the aspects Japanese language observes happens to be social relations (or politeness), and thus whenever a Japanese speaker makes a statement, s/he must also factor in this particular element. There isn't anything unusual or illogical about it, any more than an English speaker must choose between 'he', 'she' and 'it' when referring to an external agent (something that I as a Finnish speaker find bothersome and useless).

[Muphrid]

Yeah, it seems pretty clear that the author was spouting off about first-person reflecting some modern mindset; I thought that was the weakest part of the piece, to the point I didn't even think it worthy of comment initially.

It's interesting that, with that Feynman story, the peculiarities of English aren't pointed out to him in response.  Why should it be we say "go" for most subjects but "goes" for a third-person singular subject?  Why "book" for one book and "books" for several?

I think these elements that are sometimes explicit and sometimes contextual make for even more of a challenge in translation, as some ambiguities in the source language would never be unclear in the destination language.  How many times have we seen people's genders be kept unclear in Japanese when in English you couldn't get away with it without (a) explicitly pointing out some ambiguity, by using "they" for instance, or (b) explicitly misleading the reader by using "he" when the person is really female, which is quite different from merely misleading by omission.

[Jason_Miao]

Regarding the Feynman excerpt, I think you're both right about the language characteristics; I'd cited Feynman because I was wondering if complaints about LNs with "purple prose" might not be based, in part, on the characteristics of Japanese language or cultural components being retained during English translation.  Not that I know enough for this to be more than a hunch, but I have the suspicion in the back of my mind that while the blog writer thinks he's critiquing the LN itself, he may actually be critiquing a translator's decision to retain the prose characteristics of the original work.  If Japanese language or the "proper" literary style itself requires the sort of description that he's complaining about, then his critique really boils down to "Translator tried to keep Japanese literary characteristics in a translated Japanese work."

Also offtopic, that quote is not the worst language-related offense in the autobiography (This part where he speaks Italian is).  Of course, the entire autobiography is about Feynman being generally goofy and irreverent about everything, so I imagine it's all somewhat exaggerated for comedic effect.

Also way offtopic

"in Tuyuca it's impossible to state a fact without simultaneously expressing whether the speaker has come to know the fact by seeing it firsthand, observing it through other senses, inferring it from known facts, having been told, or just believing that it is so without substantial evidence."

I wonder if the common-law based judicial system would have developed differently with this sort of language.

[Arakawa]

Regarding the Feynman excerpt, I think you're both right about the language characteristics; I'd cited Feynman because I was wondering if complaints about LNs with "purple prose" might not be based, in part, on the characteristics of Japanese language or cultural components being retained during English translation.

If I had to describe it quickly and crudely, I would say that languages (to the extent that they're designed by anyone) are designed by poets rather than physicists.

How many times have we seen people's genders be kept unclear in Japanese when in English you couldn't get away with it without (a) explicitly pointing out some ambiguity, by using "they" for instance, or (b) explicitly misleading the reader by using "he" when the person is really female, which is quite different from merely misleading by omission.

It's interesting to ponder how one would get around that in English. The main trick I can think of would be some kind of stilted scene in which everyone is referred to using epithets ("the hunter", "the engineer", etc.), which would obscure the particular ambiguity for one character nicely at the expense of stylistic weirdness.