Via chavenet’s MetaFilter post, Daiz’s indignant Crunchyroll is destroying its subtitles for no good reason:
Since the beginning of the Fall 2025 anime season, a major change has started taking place on the anime streaming service Crunchyroll: the presentation quality for translations of on-screen text has taken a total nosedive compared to what has been on offer for many years, all the way up until the previous Summer 2025 season. […]
In these new subtitles, translations for dialogue and on-screen text aren’t even separated to different sides of the screen – everything is just bunched up together at either the top or the bottom with only capitalization to distinguish what’s what, leading to poor readability. In addition, lots of on-screen text is just left straight up untranslated.
If you care about these things, you’ll want to click through for the details and the very enlightening screenshots; I agree with the MeFi commenter who said “The Kill la Kill fan subs shown in the article are both amazing from a technical point of view, and beautiful to look at.” (We discussed fansubbing in 2021 and earlier this year.)
And happy Thanksgiving to those who celebrate it! I’ll be away feasting at my sister-in-law’s for much of the day, so try not to wreck the furniture while I’m gone.
… so try not to wreck the furniture while I’m gone.
Food fight!
https://ibb.co/9kG0LHYf
You kids stop that right this minute!
Today we’ve invited international students from the local college over for dinner. Having to thread a mishmash of cultural and religious food restrictions as well as allergies, we’re doing our first vegetarian Thanksgiving.
And to keep this comment language-oriented, I note the etymology of mishmash per Wiktionary, “Attested since the late 15th century, Middle English mysse masche, probably a reduplication of mash, although a Yiddish origin or influence has also been suggested. Cognates include Saterland Frisian Miskmask and German Mischmasch.”
Also mishmash reminds me of succotash (“borrowed from Narragansett msíckquatash, boiled corn kernels”), which we aren’t serving.
In Yiddish it’s normally mishmosh.
try not to wreck the furniture while I’m gone
Baas kae ka nwaamis di’e pɔɔg!
Talking of Thanksgiving, is WP correct in implying that the colonists actually brought their own turkeys with them from England?
(Being UnAmerican, I am not well versed in the mythology, but had acquired the notion somewhere that the turkeys were supposed to be a new-world novelty supplied by the locals.)
They ate kolokolo birds.
Of course. It all fits.
Turkeys were introduced to Europe very early, and their origin was promptly forgotten; they were believed to have come from Turkey and/or d’Inde. You’ve mentioned possible confusion with guineafowl, which would fit this.
The guineafowl are from everywhere: poule de Numidie, poule de Guinée, poule d’Afrique, poule de Barbarie, poule d’Égypte, poule d’Inde, poule de Mauritanie, poule de Pharaon / du Pharaon, poule de Tunis.
Cool resource BTW.
> WP correct in implying that the colonists actually brought their own turkeys with them from England?
Not sure which wikipedia page you’re looking at, but the page on Thanksgiving (United States) has a quote from William Bradford saying the Pilgrims had wild-caught turkey at the First Thanksgiving (or more broadly across that summer and fall of 1621).
But looking at British Colonization US Bird History blog says turkeys were part of the supplies shipped to the Jamestown colony within three years of its founding and to Plymouth colony within a decade of its founding, so round trip turkeys were a thing from pretty early on. The blog has citations on the Jamestown resupply that you might be able follow up on, i haven’t tried. (Also, the British weren’t unique here. The Dutch, Spanish ,etc also sent turkeys to their colonies, apparently Europeans in general were big fans I guess :P)
Not sure which wikipedia page you’re looking at
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Turkey_(bird)#History
Western Oti-Volta preserves the proto-Oti-Volta word for “guineafowl”, but not the POV word for “chicken.” Looking at the reflexes of the latter etymon, I was reminded that Gulimancema has reduplicated the initial: kòkólō beside e.g. Moba kólĝ, Nawdm kɔ̀rgá etc etc.
It looks very like kòlókòló “turkey” might be an intra-Gulimancema remodelling of the Hausa-derived tòlótòló by analogy with kòkólō “chicken”; in which case, the Mooré form would be borrowed from Gulimancema, and the Dyula form from Mooré. That would go with the notion that the bird was initially introduced by Europeans at the coast, which seems much the most plausible scenario anyway.
I’m not used to thinking of Dyula borrowing from Mooré rather than vice versa (I tend to assume that Western Oti-Volta languages are receivers rather than donors of widespread loanwords, especially when it comes to words shared with very widely used interlanguages like Dyula), but the “trousers” word we were discussing the other day was another likely case of that.
I suppose that, given the longstanding power of the Mossi kingdom thereabouts (the Mossi once sacked Timbuktu) and the fact that Mooré is by miles the largest Gur language, I should get used to thinking of it as a source of loanwords too (and not just loans into Bisa and Kusaal.)
[The paper that Lameen and I published was about possible Gur (essentially, Oti-Volta) morphological influences on Songhay, and in the course of it we discovered a couple of fairly basic nouns that look very like loans from Oti-Volta into proto-Songhay; they looked like an earlier stage of Gulimancema, so far as there was anything distinctive about them from the Oti-Volta side.]
Also on the topic of Thanksgiving and Plymouth Colony, Mii Dash Geget has a series of posts on Tisquantum (aka Squanto). I havent finished reading them all but what i have read is excellent!
Edit: and thank you for specifying the correct wikipedia link! Probably should have thought to check the bird’s page ^^;;
If Craig cannot for various practical reasons serve “regular” turkey to his international guests, they could nonetheless be educated about American culture by being poured glasses of https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wild_Turkey_(bourbon). That distillery (in Anderson County, Kentucky) is now owned by the foreigners at Davide Campari-Milano N.V., who bought it from those other foreigners at Pernod Ricard S.A., but such is globalization, and both sets of foreign owners took pains to not interfere with the Americanness of the product.
Back to the OP, I am suddenly and perhaps perversely amused by the complaint that “anime streaming service Crunchyroll” allegedly did not provide the consistently high-quality service that its paying customers might have hoped for. Because nothing says “long-term commitment to quality and reliability through thick and thin” like naming your business “Crunchyroll.”
Some more about this issue:
https://animebythenumbers.substack.com/p/worse-crunchyroll-subtitles
https://www.animenewsnetwork.com/answerman/2025-10-27/.230367
This level of attention to detail makes for a better viewing experience, but it’s a lot more work to localize anime this way, and a real differentiator, since it’s simply impossible for competitors to do.
And I guess that’s why they’re quitting. Bah!