In American English on the weather, it often gets said as “Tomorrow’s temperatures will be below freezing, watch out for ice on the roads and sidewalks.” Below freezing, below the freezing point. As a military guy, you’ve probably heard it like that before, haven’t you? The places I’ve lived don’t usually get cold enough to worry about engine coolant, so idk what people would say in those places.
I don’t think we’d be bothering to use fahrenheit in Japanese other than to say that it exists and is used in the US. A lot of Japanese folks (at least in my area), aren’t aware that shaved ice doesn’t only exist in Japan.
I just don’t understand this defensiveness over a term that uses celsius. If you’re learning Japanese, you’re gonna have to get used to celsius anyways. Sure, you can constantly check conversions from F to °C, but celsius is very easy to learn and makes the experience more smooth.
Defensiveness? I’m just as comfortable in C as F, makes no difference to me. Really we’re all just trying to guess why Koichi and the gang might have left that off. It’s not up to us whether they do leave it off or even if they should. It’s just conversation man, relax.
I was being defensive about a term that doesn’t use celsius, for what it’s worth
I don’t think 零点 would mean “the freezing point of water” outside of a Celsius context so I don’t think it means the same thing as “freezing point.”
I’d be completely happy with it if 零点 was the general term for the freezing point of water (with the etymology being because of Celsius), but as far as I can tell, it isn’t, that’s 氷点. 零点 instead seems to mean zero because it has 零 in it.
My impression is using 零点 in a Fahrenheit context (or even Kelvin) would either still mean 0 or just be confusing (it doesn’t seem all that common a phrase anyway). So it just seems not ideal to bake a Celsius context into the definition itself when it’s not inherent to the word and other contexts clearly exist somewhere in the world that you might want to describe in Japanese.
Like, if I asked roughly:
“what’s the 氷点 in Fahrenheit?”
I think that’s a question that makes sense. With the answer being 32 degrees.
If I asked:
“what’s the 零点 in Fahrenheit?”
I don’t think that would make sense. The 零点 is when it’s 0… so it’s… 0
But like, the celsius context is the only one present in common japanese no? Ignoring the use of kelvin in scientific areas, but the terms seems more for day to day life.
This actually does make sense to me, at least in english. You’re just asking whats the equivalent of 0° in fahrenheit in a more roundabout way. I’m not sure in japanese though, just wanted to add this because i forgot like an idiot
Totally, and I 100% believe a Japanese person saying 零点 in Japan probably means 0 degrees Celsius, implying that they’re talking about the freezing point of water.
It’s just that the best definition then is what Jisho has:
“zero degrees (Celsius); freezing point”
but SRS has a hard time conveying parentheses and semicolons… and if somehow someone keyed in on 零点 and only remembered “freezing point” they might get the wrong idea about what 零 means, or they might ask “what’s the 零点 in Fahrenheit?” hoping for the answer 32.
Because I know I personally don’t think about 0 degrees Celsius when I think about the phrase “freezing point.”
And at the end of the day the word’s there to reinforce 零 as “zero.”
Again… that’s a wildly minor concern (and fully debatable), and it’s a great user synonym.
That’s just my increasingly long-winded take on a potential concern with adding “freezing point” to 零点 officially.
At this point I mostly just hope anything I’ve said has made any sense to anyone else
That’s fair… but it still doesn’t mean “what’s the freezing point of water in fahrenheit” though! Which is what the speaker would have intended if they thought it meant “freezing point.”
Like… “what’s the equivalent of 0 degrees Fahrenheit” means a different thing than “what’s the freezing point of water in Fahrenheit” which is the main thing I mean.
Honest question: would 0° Celsius be a wrong take for the term? Saying the freezing point (in celsius) is just a fancier way to say something or somewhere was at 0°C.
I know nuance is important, which is why I"m asking if it’d be incorrect.
We could also have freezing point in celsius. Pretty long, probably won’t be used as much, but it explains the nuance pretty well, and people are free to abbreviate it as freezing point after they understood what it meant
I’m a bit of a very straightfoward person, so I’m sorry if this sounds dumb but: don’t they mean the same thing? Maybe I’m biased because I’ve learned celsius, but to me, Freezing point of water = 0°C, so I don’t understand the difference that much.
I’d be 100% fine with “0° Celsius” or “freezing point (celsius)” at least with my (admittedly limited and potentially incorrect) understanding of the term. (they might be cumbersome to type for SRS though…)
Honestly – I’d even prefer “0 degrees” over “freezing point.” I don’t mind assuming Celsius, I just don’t like baking it in to the definition when the word itself doesn’t seem to inherently imply it.
But “zero point” seems closest to me - I think the 点 here (and I could be wrong) is like, the 点 where the thermometer reads 0, not actually the same as 度.
It’s already accepted because of typos, but adding “zero point” as an official synonym would probably be a good outcome in my book (and would encompass some of the math definitions too maybe).
No problem! Not dumb at all! (it’s Fahrenheit’s fault for sure)
To me,
“what’s the equivalent of 0 degrees Fahrenheit?”
means “what degrees Celsius = 0 degrees Fahrenheit?” with the correct answer apparently being -17.7778 degrees.
(way to go Fahrenheit, always making sense…)
whereas
“what’s the freezing point of water in Fahrenheit?”
means “at what temperature in Fahrenheit does water freeze (at standard elevation, etc. etc.)?” and the correct answer would be 32 degrees.
To be fair, I think the implication might be more cultural. On a vaccuum, it could mean any sort of degrees, but since Japan only uses °C, that’s the meaning it came to have, if that makes sense?
I could be completely wrong though. It’s a good topic to think about for sure
It’s a really really minor quibble, and including the synonym would ultimately be completely fine.
I think I’ve only stuck with it since it felt like I wasn’t communicating what I meant well enough…
I definitely agree Japan assumes Celsius, I just personally got the vibe from 零点 and the dictionaries/wikipedia articles I looked at the denotation of “zero” was still much stronger than “freezing.”
Like I can totally imagine a case where 零点 strongly means freezing and is frequently used for that, it just felt to me more like people saying 0° in a Celsius country would of course therefore mean the freezing point. More so than 零点 coming to directly mean freezing itself.
But I’ll definitely admit a stronger impression formed about that than is really warranted! So I could be completely wrong too, and definitely agree it’s interesting to think about…
I decided to check a monolingual dictionary. (零点（れいてん）の意味 - goo国語辞書)
It says this: １ 得点が全くないこと。「試験で―をとる」「恋人としては―だ」
“Having no score at all” ２ 寒暖計の零度。氷点。
“0 degrees on the thermometer. Freezing point”
From this, it seems clear that to them, 0 degrees and freezing point are strictly equivalent.
I saw that too, but I took the primacy of 寒暖計の零度 as informing my impression the word first means “when it’s 0 on the thermometer.” (and when stuff is 0 in two other senses), with the freezing point synonym following from that.
Like 氷点 is worded much differently, focusing on the physical reaction:
水が氷結するとき、または氷が融解するときの温度。
And that different nuance I thought was at least minorly important.
I recognize the distinction between those definitions matters a lot less in countries where you don’t have two kinds of thermometers though!
(and I’m going to try to not keep responding. Sorry for posting so much about this… I think I was fixating on this as a way to procrastinate on a major problem I have to deal with)
I was thinking about the cultural perspective topic and thought of a few interesting examples:
外国人
Wanikani gives “foreign person / foreigner,”
jisho “foreigner; foreign citizen; foreign national; alien; non-Japanese”
Weblio more like Wanikani, focuses on “foreign person” without specifically mentioning Japan
邦人
Wanikani gives “Fellow Countryman / Japanese National / Compatriot”
Jisho “Japanese national (esp. abroad)” and “fellow countryman”
Weblio gives 自国の人 and 日本人 as separate definitions
邦訳
Wanikani and jisho give “Translation Into Japanese” and Weblio agrees it’s just specifically into Japanese.
I would say surely 95% of times or more when I’ve seen or heard 外国人 it’s in a Japanese context with “non-Japanese” in mind, so it’s interesting Wanikani and Weblio both only give the not-specific-to-Japan case, while Jisho adds it at the end. And both approaches seem valid to one extent or another.
I feel like the Celsius/Fahrenheit thing is sort of between 外国人 and 邦人 in a way.
The 寒暖計の零度 implies a potential different meaning in American contexts, but clearly the assumption that that’s the same as 氷点 is very strong too. But if it were listed as a fully separate second meaning like with the Japan-specific meaning in 邦人 it would be clearer to me that both were equally valid without one taking precedence in edge cases. And plus 邦 feels like… “your own country, but especially Japan” in a way where 零 just feels like neutral zero.
It’s an interesting problem to try to capture words like this for SRS. Of course, the less sensitive subject matter and the contextual split being between Japan and basically just America instead of Japan and the entire rest of the world make it much less important, but hey.
I didn’t realize how strongly 0 degrees is associated with freezing for people who don’t have to deal with Fahrenheit ever, and I feel like the feeling may be mutual for the reverse. They just seem like different concepts to me, which inflates the distinction maybe more than it’s worth…
I think it’s just a case of an assumption made in a given culture. For example, in Dutch we have a word that’s nearly identical to 零点 “nulpunt” (from nul meaning zero, and punt meaning point). If you were to look up the official definition, it simply refers to the point where something is zero. The word itself doesn’t necessarily imply a scale. However in practice when using the word, it’s a synonym to the freezing point (unless you’re in math class, in which case it refers to the root of a function, but that seems to hold for 零点 as well). It’s not that the word itself directly implies this, it’s just that if not otherwise specified, the assumption is that you’re referring to zero Celsius, since that’s the only scale anyone uses here. From what I can tell 零点 functions identically, unless otherwise specified the assumed scale is Celsius, making it effectively a synonym for the freezing point.
I don’t think 零点 is special in any way here. When referring to temperatures, Japan like most of the world assumes Celsius. Similarly to how if I say “It’s 30 degrees outside” nobody will think I’m referring to 30 Kelvin, the assumption would either be 30 Fahrenheit for Americans or 30 Celsius for everyone else. For most countries using the Celsius scale, the notion of 0 is freezing is quite common due to the implied scale.
