Heterogenia Linguistico was described to me as follows:
It’s manga, but there aren’t any giant robots or high school girls or exploitative crap. It’s a story about a linguist in training (actually more like a Japanese university equivalent to a graduate student worker) who’s tasked with exploring the part of the world where nonhuman sentient creatures like werewolves and giant octopus live in order to document their languages.
I’m not a manga person myself, but if one likes both manga and languages/linguistics, this looks like it would be worth investigating. It’s created by Soruto Seno, and it has the following alternate names:
Heterogenia Linguistics ; Heterogeneous Linguistics ; Heterogenia Linguistico ~Ishuzoku Gengogaku Nyuumon~ ; ヘテロゲニア リンギスティコ ～異種族言語学入門～
I don’t know what the “～” signifies; I presume the last one is Chinese, and if anyone can parse it for me I’ll be grateful.
GT says the Chinese means “Introduction to heterogeneous linguistics.” It’s unable to cope with the immediately preceding Japanese, though, and just (sorta) transliterates it as “Hetero genia Ringigistico”.
It’s Japanese (in Chinese we say 語言学 not 言語学) and is transliterated before as Ishuzoku Gengogaku Nyuumon.
The Japanese wave dash can be used to mark subtitles, which looks like what it’s doing here.
Is it to be understood as “hetero-generic linguistics”, i.e. the scientific study of the languages of non-human species?
I just read all the way to the current cliffhanger, and I’m getting a vague idea of the size of the Japanese ideophone inventory.
Heterogenia is a calque of ishuzoku 異種族, which means “other kinds/races/species”. I don’t know whether this meaning comes across as more intuitively obvious in Esperanto than in English.
Jon W is right about the wave dash. I would add that in vertical Japanese, the equivalent is a vertical line (like an em dash rotated 90 degrees). In horizontal Japanese, an em dash looks too similar to the kanji for “one” (—、一), so the wavy line often gets used instead.
At last: a definitive test for Chomsky’s theories!
Do giant octopuses have Merge?
I’ve seen ~ for dashes in horizontal Chinese, too, including scientific papers.
David E.: Do giant octopuses have Merge?
Do they have? Their syntactic trees are octenary, for Noam’s sake. They have Merge beyond the wildest maximalist fantasy.
True: giant octopuses have Engulf.
Jon W is right about the wave dash. I would add that in vertical Japanese, the equivalent is a vertical line (like an em dash rotated 90 degrees). In horizontal Japanese, an em dash looks too similar to the kanji for “one” (—、一), so the wavy line often gets used instead.
It should be said, however, that in this sort of sub-title bracketing function, the wave-dash feels a little informal, and (even in horizontal orientation) the flat dash is usually employed in formal contexts like academic papers despite the resemblance to the kanji for “one.” (Where the possibility for confusion is somewhat alleviated by the fact that in the Minchō 明朝 font likely to be used in such formal contexts, there is a serif-like protrusion on the character for “one” that makes distinguishing it (a little) easier. This difference is not available in the “Gothic” font this blog renders Japanese text with.)
@DMT could “Xenolinguistics” be a closer translation then?
This difference is not available in the “Gothic” font this blog renders Japanese text with.
Weirdly enough, I see the difference in your (italicized) quotation but not in the original (non-italicized) text.
(Google Chrome under Windows 8.1, for what it’s worth. Might well come out differently in another browser.)
I see the difference in both versions (Firefox under Windows 10).