Danbooru

Tag Alias: imouto -> little_sister

Posted under General

I don't understand what you mean by 'not an atomic concept'. The phrase 'little sister' may be two words, but it denotes a single underlying concept.

There's no reason to use a Japanese word when a perfectly straightforward English equivalent exists.

evazion: It's two words because it's morphologically decomposable into "little" and "sister" (or more properly "younger" and "sister") - so obviously so that it's not even a compound word, but a full-blown multiword phrase in English. 妹 in Japanese is literally a single word, and in particular a single morpheme. No part of it means "sister", and no part of it means "younger" or "little". It is a standalone concept. (This kind of stuff is determined by the oral form of the word, generally, but even looking at the written form, it consists of only one kanji, which itself contains radicals meaning "woman" and "future" which are clearly not forming a compounding relationship.) If we are tagging it in English, the question necessarily should be asked: why are we only tagging younger sisters? Why not just use sister? Whereas in Japanese, morphologically speaking "imouto" is not a subclass of some general class "sister", since there is not really a word for "sister". This question wouldn't make sense in Japanese because there is no word for "in general a sister whether she be younger or older than the referent". This difference illustrates why neither younger sister nor little sister can be uncontroversially represented as a direct substitute for imouto.

Does that help? ;)

EDIT: wakamezake (若布酒) is actually sort of a weaker example of this, as it can be morphologically broken into 若布 and 酒, but those individually mean "[a kind of] seaweed" and "sake", which is a reference to how pubic hair looks in it, I suppose. The obliquity of the reference could be used as an argument for the atomicity of "wakamezake", perhaps, but not nearly as strong as my argument for "imouto".

However these are all linguistic concerns. My point was just that 1) there is a precedent (probably more than one); 2) "imouto" follows that precedent in some sense linguistically.

All right, I'll be the devil's advocate.

I would argue that wakamezake is different because that is a concept that originated in Japan. The concept of a younger sister, however, is in no way limited to Japan, therefore the precedent does not apply here.

As for the linguistic part, it stands to reason whether a Japanese single-morpheme word is necessarily preferable to an English multi-word expression.

EDIT: By the way, I don't see what makes younger sister any less "atomic" than little sister. By your reasoning, both should be equally atomic (or un-atomic), no?

Soljashy: Just as "wakamezake" doesn't literally mean "seaweed sake", "little sister" doesn't mean "a small sister". However, "younger sister" literally means "younger" + "sister".

Sure, you can talk about the actual MEANINGS of tags, but isn't this whole discussion about their LEXICAL properties, it being a request for an alias of a tag in one language to a translation of that tag into another language (between which two entities exists not an physical but a lexical connection). :)

Soljashy said:
All right, I'll be the devil's advocate.

I would argue that wakamezake is different because that is a concept that originated in Japan. The concept of a younger sister, however, is in no way limited to Japan, therefore the precedent does not apply here.

This is why I supported wakamezake and am now supporting little_sister (or younger_sister, I don't particularly mind between those two). We thankfully don't have ringo anymore, either.

While you make good lexical arguments, 0xCCBA696, frankly, I don't think such a subtle difference is important here. In the end, the meaning is the same. To build on Slash's example, it's not unlike arguing that an apple from Japan should be called a ringo just because it's from Japan.

For the record, I'm not particular to younger_sister, little_sister is fine too if that's what you prefer. I don't know how you English folks commonly refer to your younger female siblings; I'm Afrikaans so I would just call her my sussie.

I thought tags were only for things that are visible in the image. It doesn't seem like younger sister would qualify. What would this tag be used on? All pictures of a female character that is known to have an older sibling? Just pictures of her with the older sibling? Pictures about the concept of "younger sister" (like post #261536 and post #35008)? Should it implicate to siblings?

And if we do a younger sister/little sister tag, should there also be an older sister/big sister tag?

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