Is there a word in Japanese for verbs that are both transitive and intransitive, like 待つ? In English there’s “transitive”, “intransitive”, and “ambitransitive”. But in Japanese, I only know of 他動詞 and 自動詞.
Read an article about it the other day and they were just 自動詞としても他動詞としても機能する動詞, so maybe there isn’t a specific term.
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That’s quite a mouthful… Least they could do is call them 他自動詞 or something…
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Occurred to me watching football yesterday: in American sports, the word “chippy” describes a game in which two teams who really don’t like each other – maybe they’re bitter rivals, maybe there was an incident that got everybody worked up – are visibly taking a lot of cheap shots, throwing elbows a little harder than necessary, lot of play past the whistle. Short of guys brawling, but it feels like you might be headed there. (Don’t know if it’s said in other English-speaking parts of the world sports?)
Anything specific corresponding in Japanese? Like “tense” or “rough” of course describe that as well, but is there a word or turn of phrase specifically well-known in a sports context?
I know they have things like ラフプレー to describe individual actions. I wouldn’t necessarily expect there would be one word for “everyone is fouling harder than normal”. But I’ll ask around.
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If it turns out they don’t have one, I guess you can try to coin チッピー.
This kanji looks completely different in different fonts. Even jisho has the two variations on the same page. How come? How am I supposed not to mix them up?
Printed typeface vs handwritten.
Just like a, g or b in Latin script have also their different looking in a serif printed typeface and in handwriting, so do the kanji.
If you are not familiar at recognizing kanji in various font/styles variations, it would be a good idea to use the “font randomizer” user script.
Search for that on the forum to find the dedicated thread, it has also several screenshots.
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Also, I think nowadays (unicode-wise at least),
令 is the standard Chinese display form of the character,
令 is the standard Japanese display form.
There’s a handful of characters like that, for example 直 vs. 直
I’m using markup to specify between them:
<span lang="zh">令</span>
<span lang="jp-jp">令</span>
Googling it sounds like in this case the official Chinese version of the character was updated to match the older handwritten form, whereas in Japanese both forms still exist, it’s just one of those things where characters can be written slightly differently in different contexts. (like printed vs. handwritten)
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Can you run me over how to get firefox to display japanese instead of chinese characters again? I can’t find your last explanation (and am running a new configuration)
I’m pretty sure in Chinese too both variants exist. It’s just that the so called “simplified Chinese” is actually a standardization of printing based on cursive handwriting (like if textbooks, newspapers and poker books printed in English had started to consistently use Lucida instead of Times Roman or Helvetica).
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Sure, if you set one of your browser language preferences to Japanese (along with English and whatever else you want), those characters should default to Japanese when not specified.
Looks like in Firefox it’s this area of preferences:
It looks like “Choose…” → adding Japanese to the list and moving it down to the bottom of the list works for me.
(the menu is a little confusing… I would have thought Set Alternatives would be the way to go but Choose seemed the one to pick) (normally I use Chrome)
If English is still the primary one (top of the list in Choose), it shouldn’t cause any major trouble, but it does seem like sometimes websites default to Japanese if it’s specified for some reason, so if that ends up being annoying feel free to turn it off - it’s only a few characters anyway, and getting used to both forms of them isn’t the worst thing in the world.
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In general, yes, but it seems like the “traditional” non-simplified characters in this case match the simplified Chinese usage moreso than the Japanese (if wiktionary is to be believed at least):
I’m definitely not one to ask about usage in Chinese though! So I certainly wouldn’t be shocked if it’s used in some capacity, I just thought the computer formatting by language setting was interesting. (or I might be misunderstanding what you mean)
Can I mark myself right for returning “middle” instead of “center” for 中央?
Yeah, I would
スマート means slim. In Japanese.
I mean, it can mean well-dressed in English too, but they kinda warped it.
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It’s a nice addition to the katakana topic going on right now 
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Yup, let’s move it there. We’ve already talked about dogs, mayo and 唐揚げ.