Twelfth Post!

[hoisinsauce]

POST NAMER TBC-- work harder, meme!

Welcome back, anyway! Chat fandom, media, creative things, weirdness from around the net, funny stuff, anything! Meme awaits!

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Comments

Re: Languages

[(Anonymous)]

'That's not a crow, that's a raven!'

Saw this line in a 'fic for a Japanese canon, and it's been marinating in my head all morning. It's a perfectly cromulent sentence in English, but it's odd in Japanese because Japanese uses karasu for both crows and ravens.

There must be some way to distinguish the two, though. The main difference between a raven and a crow is their size. In Chinese, there's also no distinction between a mouse and a rat - they're both laoshu - but when pressed, a Chinese speaker might resort to small laoshu and big laoshu. So I started wondering if a raven is just a big karasu and...

> https://ja.wikipedia.org/wiki/大鴉

Yeah. Yeah, it is. In other words, that character is actually saying 'That's not a karasu, it's a BIIIIG karasu!' This line is now infinitely funnier to me, at the low, low price of thirty minutes of my sanity.

Re: Languages

[(Anonymous)]

(As far as I can tell, the Japanese don't have a separate word for ravens because ravens aren't native to the islands. Common ravens are migratory and do very occasionally show up in Hokkaido, so their official species name is watarigarasu - or literally, 'migratory karasu.')