I find language absolutely fascinating. I love how just the inflection of a phrase can drastically change it from being something that could be hopeful to bitter sarcasm. Or how the meaning of words will morph into the complete opposite through misuse or societal acceptance, poor inflammable and literally really don't mean what you think they do. It's also interesting to see how words come into and fall out of favor over the years. I generally get my language fix by listening to two separate podcasts that really delve into the oddities of the English language (The Allusionist and Lexicon Valley if this is your type of thing). And while there are certainly plenty of things in English that will keep you interested and confused, I am also rather intrigued by foreign languages as well. During high school I took two years of Spanish but ended up deciding that I wasn't up to sitting through a third year. Then in college since I didn't have the minimum language requirement from high school, I took a full year of French and quickly forgot all of it. Over the past couple of years I've been slowly making my way through the Duolingo app, successfully finishing the French course and recently starting to attempt Spanish. And while I really don't have an end goal for studying these, seeing what similarities exist across the various languages and how they influence each other is certainly an interesting aspect to the learning process.
Now I have no real experience with Eastern cultures, so I can't really tell what language tonight's sticker is in or is emulating. My siblings are all enthralled with anime and manga, so I've had a little exposure to Japanese although more spoken Japanese than the written language. I also took a course in Japanese folklore during college, to satisfy Pitt's general requirements and for fun. But in the end neither are enough for me to really tell the difference between the different culture's characters. I know that Japanese was based and heavily influenced by Classic Chinese but they have evolved over the centuries to be their own unique styles. And Chinese is so large that even different regional dialects can almost be considered different languages at times. But I'm sure for people who are familiar with both languages they can easily tell which one this sticker is written in, or if it's really another Eastern language. Although there is the possibility that this doesn't actually say anything. There's quite a few stories around the internet about people getting Chinese characters tattooed on themselves without really looking into their meanings and getting some ridiculous things in the end. But who knows how true these stories really are. I will admit that deciding to post tonight's sticker is a bit of a gamble, since I don't know what it says or have the time to really try to figure out what it could be. But if any of you happen to know a bit of Japanese or Chinese, I would love to know what it says.
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Maggie Ondrey
An amateur photographer and writer capturing a small portion of the city. Archives
August 2017
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