I know it's written as "Dragon Horse", but as my chosen favorite and wife, I refuse to use that one and instead go with the much more widespread and popular "Prancing Dragon".
Going by the Japanese wiki page; the name's meaning, as given by the IJN themselves is 『龍の空に上ぼるが如く威勢がよい』. The name came from the original Ryuujou, an ironclad from down here in Kumamoto; but there's no reason for the meaning behind it to change.
Fun fact - the old RJ was the most powerful vessel, and flagship for the IJN until the ironclad Fusou was completed a mere 8 years later.
That's one of the reasons for RJ having an old-fashioned kanji in her name, it comes from 1870.
Going by the Japanese wiki page; the name's meaning, as given by the IJN themselves is 『龍の空に上ぼるが如く威勢がよい』. The name came from the original Ryuujou, an ironclad from down here in Kumamoto; but there's no reason for the meaning behind it to change.
Fun fact - the old RJ was the most powerful vessel, and flagship for the IJN until the ironclad Fusou was completed a mere 8 years later.
That's one of the reasons for RJ having an old-fashioned kanji in her name, it comes from 1870.
Seems like the inaccurate translation pops up quite often around the Internet. Tracing yields Wikipedia's article on RJ, which also lists that translation of her name (along with "Prancing Dragon"). "Dragon Horse", specifically, seems to come from Paul H. Silverstone's Directory of the World's Capital Ships (1984).
--
Side note, RJ's name has always been easy for me to write, because of the Chinese proverbs 龍驤虎視 and 龍驤虎步, both originating from the Records of the Three Kingdoms (not the same book as Romance of the Three Kingdoms). In this context the 驤 means something along the lines of "head raised high".
The Japanese version of the proverb has the same general meaning, but they interpret 驤 as "躍り上がり", leaping upwards (with joy, like dancing, or more precisely, "prancing") instead.
In both languages 驤 has the literal meaning of referring to the rising motion of a horse's head in gallop, but the nuances does seem to differ a bit.
So, I guess, if I were to translate Ryuujou's name as one in Chinese, I would go with "Prideful Dragon". But, as her name, is well, Japanese, "Prancing Dragon" nails it exactly.
The Japanese version of the proverb has the same general meaning, but they interpret 驤 as "躍り上がり", leaping upwards (with joy, like dancing, or more precisely, "prancing") instead.
Not really what I'd call 'prancing', but to each their own.
Not really what I'd call 'prancing', but to each their own.
Well, I guess when I picture an 'Oriental' dragon rising or 'leaping' into the sky, the motions seem... well, undulating to me, as 'though the dragon is swimming or dancing through the sky instead of simply flying through it ala Skyrim.
It's... hard for me to describe the movement clearly in words. It's sorta snake-like but not quite like a snake either (less... 'repulsive'?). Not quite like an eel either. Oarfishes come to closest, I guess.
Can't find any good animations to illustrate this, so I suppose this clip would have to do. Sucky animation from a sucky movie yes, but it does have its moment where the dragon sorts of looks like the 龍 ideograph.
This 'balloon' might also work. Or maybe something like the dragon dance, which is supposed to imitate the undulating movements of the dragons of legend.
I'll admit that was an assumption on my part since I can't actually read the runes, so my bad. It's just that aside from the TvTropes entry on KanColle, and Ryuujou specifically (which uses Prancing Dragon), everywhere else I see her name translated is always "Dragon Horse".
That said, don't kanji/hanzi representing abstract concepts like 一 二 三, or even logographs derived from compound pictographs like 明 qualify as ideograms? 一 二 三 do have meaning beyond the language itself (one stroke, two stroke, three strokes), and represent abstract concepts.
That said, don't kanji/hanzi representing abstract concepts like 一 二 三, or even logographs derived from compound pictographs like 明 qualify as ideograms? 一 二 三 do have meaning beyond the language itself (one stroke, two stroke, three strokes), and represent abstract concepts.
You could argue that 一二三, and say 上 and 下 could be logograms.
But 明 - certainly not. What's a box and a chair facing me have to do with anything? It needs to be language independent. It's ideographic in nature, certainly - Moon + Sun = Bright, but cannot really represent 'brightness' without prior knowledge of the components.
You could argue that 一二三, and say 上 and 下 could be logograms.
But 明 - certainly not. What's a box and a chair facing me have to do with anything? It needs to be language independent. It's ideographic in nature, certainly - Moon + Sun = Bright, but cannot really represent 'brightness' without prior knowledge of the components.
It sort of looks like a uh, picture of the sun right next to a picture of the moon? Two sources of light = bright? Okay, kinda stretching it, but it's not one of those compound logograms formed by rebus either, since the pronunciation is highly distinct from any of the pictographic components. Plus it makes more sense than the radiation trefoil (that counts as an ideogram, right?).
Or do ideograms and pictograms no longer count as either once they're simplified past a certain level? Or, perhaps, do compound pictograms no longer count as ideograms once their component pictograms become associated with specific words?
(To clarify, this particular field of linguistics is one I'm not quite familiar with [and I'm hardly qualified in any field of linguistics anyway, unlike you], so I'm mostly asking to satisfy my curiosity. I'll apologize and end this line of inquiry if you're annoyed. And I also apologize if you're not, for assuming you are. I'm bad at reading emotions.)
It sort of looks like a uh, picture of the sun right next to a picture of the moon? Two sources of light = bright? Okay, kinda stretching it, but it's not one of those compound logograms formed by rebus either, since the pronunciation is highly distinct from any of the pictographic components. Plus it makes more sense than the radiation trefoil ideogram.
Eh, the trefoil is a pictogram (for a no-smoking sign, the cigarette is a pictogram, the barred circle is the ideogram).
Now, I can kinda see the sun in 日, but getting the moon from 月, with no prior knowledge or exposure to a system that uses that, or similar one, and thus has through cultural learning or otherwise implicit or explicit knowledge of where it came from? It sure doesn't look like a moon at first glance (the older, more pictorial forms do, however).
Cross-cultural linguistics makes everything fuzzy; but depending on your definitions, characters are not ideographic - they represent a word, and that word represents the idea, viz. 明 does -not- mean the idea of 'bright', it means the word 'míng'/'mei' (and various readings in other languages), and those words are what is connected to the concept of 'bright'. It certainly sounds like splitting hairs, but like that, the characters have gone far past representing the concept itself in the mind of a reader. The word is indelibly linked to the character, and cannot be split apart.
This is the critical point where they cease to be ideographic and become logographic.
While most of what I did in this field was undergrad stuff, and more focused on the anthropological side, the lecturers themselves were quite heavily linguistics focused (the convener was who I did Japanese Linguistics with, and the guy who did the Hanzi section's entire academic career was in Chinese linguistics). As part of Japanese linguistics though, we did trace the entire development of written Japanese from steles and swords up until the modern day.
Eh, the trefoil is a pictogram (for a no-smoking sign, the cigarette is a pictogram, the barred circle is the ideogram).
Now that you mention it, it does sorta look like an atom with rays being emitted out of it, which would make it a pictogram. 'though I guess it's kinda ideographic (the concept of "hazardous radiation") as well when used for sources of ionizing radiation that don't involve emission from atoms.
Paracite said:
Now, I can kinda see the sun in 日, but getting the moon from 月, with no prior knowledge or exposure to a system that uses that, or similar one, and thus has through cultural learning or otherwise implicit or explicit knowledge of where it came from? It sure doesn't look like a moon at first glance (the older, more pictorial forms do, however).
Cross-cultural linguistics makes everything fuzzy; but depending on your definitions, characters are not ideographic - they represent a word, and that word represents the idea, viz. 明 does -not- mean the idea of 'bright', it means the word 'míng'/'mei' (and various readings in other languages), and those words are what is connected to the concept of 'bright'. It certainly sounds like splitting hairs, but like that, the characters have gone far past representing the concept itself in the mind of a reader. The word is indelibly linked to the character, and cannot be split apart.
This is the critical point where they cease to be ideographic and become logographic.
Oh, I get it now. If those words were ideographs (or pictographs), we should be free to make minor changes to it because multiple similar pictographs or ideographs should be able to depict the same object/creature or concept. The fact that the form of the graph has been baked in suggests strongly that that it has been directly linked to a word or morpheme instead of the underlying object or idea, right? Also we can form new words/phrases out of linear combinations of multiple logographs (representing multiple morphemes, like 水色), while combined pictographs and ideographs (like a cross through a cigarette) tend to be squished together to form a new *graph instead.
(I mean, words do change, yes, but not as freely as pictures)
Paracite said:
While most of what I did in this field was undergrad stuff, and more focused on the anthropological side, the lecturers themselves were quite heavily linguistics focused (the convener was who I did Japanese Linguistics with, and the guy who did the Hanzi section's entire academic career was in Chinese linguistics). As part of Japanese linguistics though, we did trace the entire development of written Japanese from steles and swords up until the modern day.
Sounds quite fun.
Paracite said:
Cross-cultural linguistics makes everything fuzzy; but depending on your definitions, characters are not ideographic - they represent a word, and that word represents the idea, viz. 明 does -not- mean the idea of 'bright', it means the word 'míng'/'mei' (and various readings in other languages), and those words are what is connected to the concept of 'bright'. It certainly sounds like splitting hairs, but like that, the characters have gone far past representing the concept itself in the mind of a reader. The word is indelibly linked to the character, and cannot be split apart.
Yeah, different cultural backgrounds does make things quite fuzzy. The ✓ checkmark ideogram means "correct" in most European countries (and in China and among most overseas Chinese), but it means "wrong" among most Japanese, Koreans, and some Europeans (the Swedish, I think?).
Oh, I get it now. If those words were ideographs (or pictographs), we should be free to make minor changes to it because multiple similar pictographs or ideographs should be able to depict the same object/creature or concept. The fact that the form of the graph has been baked in suggests strongly that that it has been directly linked to a word or morpheme instead of the underlying object or idea, right?
(I mean, words do change, yes, but not as freely as pictures)
Pretty much; it become roundabout - to use Chomsky stuff, the person reads the character, links it to the word, which links to the concept, which is what the comprehend. (The reverse occurs when they write it). I mean, of course there's more to it than that, but that's the gist. It's the same in English, but less noticeable with alphabets. The letters C-A-T spells 'cat', which is the word 'cat', which links to the concept of a feline.
Or to put it another way, there's no real reason you couldn't use two 日 (日日) to mean 'bright' (Two suns! Super bright!), it's just linked to 明 now, and won't be changing any time soon.
Yeah, different cultural backgrounds does make things quite fuzzy. The ✓ checkmark ideogram means "correct" in most European countries (and in China and among most overseas Chinese), but it means "wrong" among most Japanese, Koreans, and some Europeans (the Swedish, I think?).
It's more / than ✓, since ✓ isn't used in Japan to mean 'wrong', it's just not really used in marking (That would be 〇 ✖ - with ✖ losing a stroke to become /, rather than ✓ losing the initial downward stroke); you might see it used in the western context in signage, people are aware that it can mean 'correct' or 'good'.
Pretty much; it become roundabout - to use Chomsky stuff, the person reads the character, links it to the word, which links to the concept, which is what the comprehend. (The reverse occurs when they write it). I mean, of course there's more to it than that, but that's the gist. It's the same in English, but less noticeable with alphabets. The letters C-A-T spells 'cat', which is the word 'cat', which links to the concept of a feline.
Things do get a little funny when somebody 'reading' or writing a foreign language manages to get all the graphemes correct without being able to nail any of the phonemes. There are some words in Japanese that I forget how to pronounce (requiring me to get a dictionary, or search for the word using good ol' IME pad), but I can nonetheless understand because the kanji + okurigana has been baked into my mind. They are also some words in my native Chinese that I've forgotten the pronunciations for (usually these are words you see in writing but almost never say in real life), 骧 was ironically one of them just now (despite me knowing both Japanese on'yomi, 'though I was able to guess most of the Chinese pronunciation except for the initial, because the part without the radical [襄 in this case] is usually phonemic).
I do suppose this does occur for some English speakers as well (e.g. big technical words rarely used in common speech, or foreign words like Schadenfreude), but I believe readers of alphabetical languages would usually automatically sound out the words in their head, even if they never seen the word before.
That said, how do weird furigana for Japanese kanji (like using non-Japanese words [of similar meaning as the furigana, or using a completely different word, Japanese or otherwise) factor into this? Two words with one used as clarification for the other (like this)? Replacing the phonemes of one word with that of another?
Paracite said:
Or to put it another way, there's no real reason you couldn't use two 日 (日日) to mean 'bright' (Two suns! Super bright!), it's just linked to 明 now, and won't be changing any time soon.
Yeah, funny that 晶 is less bright than 明.
Paracite said:
It's more / than ✓, since ✓ isn't used in Japan to mean 'wrong', it's just not really used in marking (That would be 〇 ✖ - with ✖ losing a stroke to become /, rather than ✓ losing the initial downward stroke); you might see it used in the western context in signage, people are aware that it can mean 'correct' or 'good'.
I thought it was more ✓ for (please check this). Guess it's just a truncated ✖ then.
On a related note, I've also seen △ being used for poor (but not completely wrong) answers, and double circles ◎ (or just a straight-up flower) being used for exceptionally good answers. Some Japanese games would have have ◎○-△✖ representing elemental resistances or affinities.
Speaking about △, using it to mean someone is cool (-さんかっけ~) is a form of rebus, right? Would △ qualify as a logogram here (and only here, or other forms of rebus)?
I'm sure it had 'horse' on the right...Like this, right?RyuuCan ya' write my name in kanji fer me?You're saying you can't write that?My name!I'm glad you got it right!Horse
Forgot the right partJou
Young lady.Huh...?Whoa!Now Abukuma...Tricky.You can write it in kanji, right!?Jou
Male wayAlmost there, still got the lower right part wrongAbukuma