I noticed that the Wikipedia article is under that spelling and thought that was very odd, since I’ve never seen it in English — Wiktionary has it under jujitsu and says:
Borrowed from Japanese 柔術 (jūjutsu). Popular spelling jitsu (instead of less popular jiutsu or jutsu) could reference to allophonic [d͡ʑɨ] or [d͡ʑi] (in Shitamachi dialect). First mentioned in The Japan Mail (1875, page 133), before the widespread use of the Hepburn system.
So that answered (more or less) my question about why we spell it with -jit-, but left me to wonder why Wikipedia used that bizarre spelling. Never fear, there was a long and contentious Talk page discussion about it back in 2010! It starts off with the following exchange:
Isn’t the spelling jujitsu more common in English as found on thefreedictionary?. Unless I get any opposing views soon, I intend to rename the article with this spelling.–Chrono1084 (talk) 16:20, 11 April 2010 (UTC)
No, “jujitsu” is a common misspelling, and is incorrect. Interestingly, this mistake is currently only really made by non-Japanese practitioners of jujutsu. The kanji for “jutsu” is the same one used by every Japanese martial art like iaijutsu, kenjutsu, ninjutsu, etc. Asymnation (talk) 16:20, 1 June 2010 (UTC)
The rest of the discussion consists of various people supporting one or the other of these opposed views; the first is obviously correct (jujutsu is not a standard English spelling, end of story), but there were so many aggrieved proponents of the “incorrect misspelling” view that the final resolution was:
Since there seems to be a majority of users who opposes the renaming, the actual title will be kept.–Chrono1084 (talk) 00:51, 11 July 2010 (UTC)
I’m just glad I don’t bother my head about Wikisquabbles any more — I could easily have gotten sucked in and lost my temper.
There’s a very popular anime out right now (or just finishing?? I lost track) called Jujutsu Kaisen, which might be influencing transcription opinions. The manga started in 2017 and the anime started in 2021
…wait, it’s a different kanji though!! The anime/manga has 呪術 “jujutsu”
So maybe unrelated.
Yup, different word. Also, the Wikipedia discussion was years before the manga.
Often Jiu-Jitsu in German…
yeah realized that after i clicked away, oops.
Anyways agree that the argument there is very frustrating! “Well, it looks like there’s multiple popular spelling of this as an English loanword, and it would be unfair to pick between those, so instead let’s use the Hepburn Romanization of the Japanese word.” — what?! Wikipedia frequently handles concepts that have a variety of popular names — e.g. I linked Road Verge in the corflute comments I think. This “jujutsu” supremacy is just weebs being weebs.
Incidentally, I think the mainspace article’s discussion of usage in contemporary United States is misleading — “Jiu-Jitsu” and variants are not deprecated at all. On a quick look I found one local gym that uses the spelling “Jujutsu” in its name but dozens that use “Jiu Jitsu”, “Jiu-Jistu”, “Jiujistu” (some of these distinguish between “Jiu[ -]Jitsu” and “Brazillian Jiu-Jitsu” as well, so it’s not a just “the Brazilian style has a distinct spelling” thing as some commenters on the talk page seem to imply. I haven’t found a “Jujistu” or “Ju-Jitsu” at all, though.
…though of course this is Original Research probably and doesn’t count for beans on Wikipedia.
Yeah, I long ago gave up on trying to improve Wikipedia in any significant way — I just add missing actors to movie cast lists and review links to jazz albums. The investment the weebs have in their weebery is exhausting and depressing to deal with.
I’ve changed my views on WP a bit since I saw the truly extreme hostility to it shown by Musk and the other technofascists (“Wikipedia must die” – in those very words.)
Imperfect and frustrating though it certainly is, it’s institutionally committed to the idea that there are actual real facts out there, and that the world of information is not determined by the arbitrary fiat of the lizard people and the Emperor of Mars.
The weebs are our allies against the MAGAbuggers.
(However, jujitsu is, of course, the correct form. Are we to stop saying “cul de sac” because it means “bum of bag” in French? Anathema!)
джиу-джитсу
ниндзюцу
where ц [t͡s] and тс [ts].
It’s perhaps also telling that the person who issued that “final resolution” was clearly a non-native speaker of English, and one whose command of English evidently leaves quite a lot to be desired.
Maybe it’s just my subjective impression—I haven’t attempted to look into this properly—but it seems that in the past decade or so, there has been a marked increase in the amount of activity on English Wikipedia by non-native speakers (an increasing proportion of whom appear to be undergraduate students, which is a separate Wikipedia development that has both its advantages and some very obvious disadvantages).
Ah well. At least we can hope that the recent improvements in the quality of machine translation might make some of these people’s future contributions somewhat more readable, at any rate.
Nat, no, the user wanted to rename it – if no one disagrees.
But folks disagreed and the user informed folks that he or she won’t rename anything.
FWIW at https://wadoku.de/search/%E5%8D%81%E5%88%86 we find e.g.
十分；10分
じゅうぶん
Zehntel n.
10分；十分
じゅっ･ぷん
zehn Minuten fpl.
10分；十分
じっ･ぷん
zehn Minuten fpl.
10分；十分
じゅう･ぶ
zehn Prozent n.
which establishes that, in the sense of ‘ten minutes’, the 十 of 十分 may be read alternatively with /u/ or /i/. In my personal experience these variants are used rather indiscriminately and I seem to remember that a certain vascillation between the two vowels also occurs with other Japanese words. Which leads me to suspect that instead of being just outright wrong, the -jitsu form in not only AmE but also German might be due to a previously preferred Japanese pronunciation, similar to the glide onset in Yen that has vanished in the language of origin but lives on in the Eurpean languages that borrowed 150 years ago.
It’s a bad sign when these debates occur solely on the Talk page; ideally the article itself will have a (balanced, well-sourced) synopsis of the real-world controversy that underlies the Wikipedia dispute. Some such Wikifights are a few highly motivated cranks batting away a continual series of objections from lifes-too-short commonsense observers. A conceptually separate* type of dispute is between Insiders and Outsiders; that seems to be what’s involved here: my cursory impression is that anglophones who actually practice something they call jVjVtsu use jujutsu, unless it’s Brazilian jiujitsu. Wikipedia policy favours common name over official name, but “common” is not measured by one-anglophone-one-vote; it gives more weight to insiders than outsiders, since insiders write more (in the real-world as opposed to Wikipedia) about the topic. Hence e.g. “Temple garment” rather than “Mormon underwear”.
I see there was another rename proposal on the same Talk page in 2018. I guess enough time has passed for a third try now, but it would need to address all previous Insiders in exhaustive detail to avoid simply being batted away again. One point worth mentioning is that most of the article’s own English-language sources use -jitsu spelling; I suspect some of the exceptions are by L2 writers. There is also a Ju-Jitsu International Federation
The wikidata item shows Wikipedia articles in 73 languages, some named -jutsu and some -jitsu; many discuss both spellings.
— de.wiki has “Jiu Jitsu” for the general article and “Ju-Jutsu” for a German-specific variant
— cs.wiki has a “Džúdžucu” page marked for merger into its “Ju-jitsu” page.
— Nynorsk and Bokmål take opposite stances (guess which has which).
* a problem being that cranks tend to self-identify as Insiders.
Nat, no, the user wanted to rename it – if no one disagrees.
But folks disagreed and the user informed folks that he or she won’t rename anything
Oops, I missed that!
But still, I can’t help thinking that if you’re the sort of person who hasn’t grasped that the English word “actual” doesn’t mean what its cognate in various other European langauges means, then what on earth makes you think you are qualified to be editing English Wikipedia at all…
Imperfect and frustrating though it certainly is, it’s institutionally committed to the idea that there are actual real facts out there, and that the world of information is not determined by the arbitrary fiat of the lizard people and the Emperor of Mars.
Yes, yes, comrade, your philosophical views are impeccable. With that out of the way, have you actually tried to edit a Wikipedia article that is being watched over by a nutter committed to his nuttiness? (I use the masculine pronoun because I have a strong suspicion, amounting to a conviction, that the overwhelming majority of such nutters are in fact of the male persuasion.)
The very few contributions I have made to WP are on topics so obscure as not to attract even nutters (except, possibly, myself …)
There you go. I’m afraid, as with so many human creations, the gleaming ideal is tarnished by the facts on the ground.
One learns not to reject the imperfect.
It is wise to be wary of gleaming ideals. But it does not follow from the fact that we cannot attain them in practice that they are pointless and should simply be abandoned.
http://www.english-on-the-web.de/download/mothstar.pdf
I am, of course, in full agreement on both counts.
By now, there’s enough discussion in this thread that future updates of the Wikipedia article could cite it. Just saying (I don’t have time currently to wade into this myself).
Pronounced the same, of course; you don’t release the [t] before you get to the [s].
Who flies afar from the sphere of our sorrow is here today and here tomorrow.
Hey, I find he was riffing on Shelley with that one ! Thurber is more fun anyway.
I would suspect that the people who were intent on that spelling for Wikipedia might also belong to the particular type of Japanese martial-arts aficionado–probably more prevalent in the US than anywhere else–who wants their martial art to have as much authentic, and preferably archaic, Japanese-ness as possible. The spelling jujutsu would group the art clearly with the other arts of war from the Old Days: kenjutsu, sōjutsu, kyūjutsu, etc. These contrast with the budō, the more recently-codified martial arts with ostensibly pacific purposes (athletics, meditation, self-improvement, etc.): kendō, judō, aikidō, karate-dō etc. Wikipedia s.v. judo, under the heading “judo versus jujutsu” says: “Kano [the founder] believed that ‘jūjutsu’ was insufficient to describe his art: although jutsu (術) means ‘art’ or ‘means’, it implies a method consisting of a collection of physical techniques. Accordingly, he changed the second character to dō (道).” A similar story is told about the founder of Aikido. I cannot find the correct term for the ancient samurai art of edit-warring.
Heh. I suspect you’re right. (And now I want to see John Belushi as samurai editor.)
@languagehat: That’s one of those references that I really wonder how many people will get.
Iykyk. (Reference.)
Seems like a large segment of the commenters are plenty old enough.
Conan Doyle has immotalized “baritsu”, a misspelling of bartitsu, the British art of moustachioed self-defense, named by and for E. W. Barton-Wright. So far there has not been any argument at WP for spelling it “bartutsu”. There is some speculating there about whether Conan Doyle misspelled it due to an unconscious recognition that a Japanese word couldn’t have an -rt- cluster.
Seems like a large segment of the commenters are plenty old enough.
Old, shmold. If you are not too young for Sumerian literature, you are not too young for Belushi.
Conan Doyle has immotalized “baritsu”, a misspelling of bartitsu, the British art of moustachioed self-defense, named by and for E. W. Barton-Wright.
As seen here in 2010.
Hah, and the comment section of the No-sword post linked there is almost entirely about jūjutsu/jiujitsu!
As seen here in 2010.
And he and you too, then, could not ignore the whiskers.
They do not lend themselves to ignoring.
I think the most remarkable thing about this story is that a man who could name his new martial art “Bartitsu” was not only in dead earnest but evidently taken entirely seriously by his contemporaries. Truly, the past is a foreign country …
I’m disappointed that the Germans don’t spell it Dschudschuzu.
There are increasing numbers of things in today’s world that are so ridiculous I can’t believe people are taking them seriously. Someone promoting a new martial art called “Bartitsu” would hardly rate.
I think it arrived a decade or two too late for that.
a new martial art called “Bartitsu”
I believe there’s a newer version that was introduced on The Simpsons
FWIW, Jim Breen’s useful WWWJDIC lists simply “柔術 【じゅうじゅつ】 (n) jujitsu (martial art); jiujitsu; jujutsu” without further commentary on the variants.
It’s not *the* standard spelling, but it is *a* standard spelling: almost all American dictionaries include “jujutsu” as an alternate spelling (the only exception is dictionary.com, which used to have it, but mysteriously dropped it a while ago). British current dictionaries, on the other hand, don’t include it, except for Collins.
I haven’t noticed it before myself either, but that doesn’t mean it doesn’t exist, and in figurative contexts as well; googling “political jujutsu” got several dozen hits with that spelling, including in edited media (compared to ~200 for “political jujitsu” and ~300 for “political jiu(-)jitsu”, space+hyphen+solid combined).
In support of mollymooly’s impression that “jujutsu” is relatively more common among practitioners, a worldcat query for books in English, 1990-2010, subject:”physical education or recreation”, with “jujutsu” or “jujitsu” (excluding “brazilian”) in the title, gets about equal numbers of each.
So I’d be OK with Wikipedia spelling the article title that way if (as mollymooly suggested) they had some source, like a survey. The stupid part is calling “jujutsu” the only “correct” one. At least they haven’t managed to police all of Wikipedia; there are still articles with titles such as “Jujitsu at the 2021 SEA Games” and “Ju-Jitsu World Championships”, and lead sentences such as “Mehdi Hadiha is an Iranian-Swedish judo and jiujitsu athlete”.
@DM, but syllabification?
Wiktionary отсос [ɐt͡sˈsos]. (not sure t͡s.s is not a clutch)
———–
And softening, of coruse.
отсю́да en.wiktionary [ɐt͡sʲˈsʲudə] ru.wiktionary [ɐtʲ͡sʲˈsʲudə] – t͡sʲ and tʲ͡sʲ are weird.
WP has t͡s and (t͡sʲ) and refers to Цюрих (Zürich), and шпицята (Spitz).
When I read “Цюрих” I stumble, I think “fuck!”, I say цу, I say цю, I say “fuck”, I think “/цю/ is WEIRD but I think I heard /цю/рих from people.
(When I read Serbian ч /t͡ʃ/ and ћ /t͡ɕ/ I say Serbian ч and ћ, wihtout stumbling* and thinking “fuck”)
* I do stumble because Russian /t͡ɕ/ is ч and Serbian /t͡ɕ/ is ћ.
You can’t hear syllable boundaries in or around voiceless consonants.
Does отсос have [t͡sː] with a long [sː]? (That would surprise me, but I don’t know.)
I’m disappointed that the Germans don’t spell it Dschudschuzu.
Perhaps Hungarian dzsiudzsicu will do?
The Latvian form is džiudžitss. Why the final gemination? Is the gemination the cause for the loss of the final u?
And, why <iu> in jiujitsu? Is it a simulacrum of [ɯ]?
Ed.: I desperately hope that there is Yiddish דזשיודזשיטסו somewhere.
The second s is the masculine nominative singular ending (masculine was chosen because there is no neuter). Lithuanian -is, -as, -us all seem to correspond to Latvian -s.
I think the main purpose is to create a simulacrum of a properly front [d͡ʑ].
Why the final gemination?
That’s stem džiudžits- plus nominative singular marker -s. I have no idea why the word wasn’t put in the class of nouns with nominative singular -us.
In any case, googling and checking various online dictionaries lead me to believe that there is also an indeclinable variant džiudžitsu.
Lithuanian uses the suffixless džiudžitsu. Exceptionless Esperanto uses ĵuĵicuo.
I tried to find out what it’s called in Interslavic, but there’s no entry in the Interslavic-English Dictionary under any of the three spellings. I could use the word generator, but I lack the energy to look up what it’s called in all 12 Slavic source languages.
…TIL that jiu-jitsu has the -jutsu element. I think I’ve previously known that джиу-джитсу was actually дзю-дзюцу but hadn’t connected it to the Naruto (vel sim.) term jutsu (by itself or as in ninjutsu, taijutsu etc).
(Come to think of it, I’m not sure if I’ve consciously realized that “jiu-jitsu” shares its initial element with “judo” either.)
The very few contributions I have made to WP are on topics so obscure as not to attract even nutters (except, possibly, myself …)
Maybe you should write a Kusaal WP article about the country of Turkey; it is strangely missing in that edition (one of only eight such languages*), and the addition would let some sensible entry (rather than an unaccountably popular crank) take the top spot in the list of Wikipedia articles in the most languages.
(I’m not sure if you’re the most appropriate person to do that, but I imagine you probably know more about that country than most other people who can write in Kusaal.)
Pronounced the same, of course; you don’t release the [t] before you get to the [s].
Yes, except I think the [ts] is slightly longer; similarly, the verbal endings in -т(ь)ся tend to get represented as -цца [or occasionally -тца] rather than just -ца in the Russian version of Funetik Aksent.
(A neat minimal pair, I believe not original to me, is курица “hen; (of meat) chicken” vs. курится “is fuming; can be smoked”; and checking them up on [English] Wiktionary I see that they’re given the same pronunciation.
Plausibly the distinction gets neutralized when too far from stress; I see that водиться “to be found (in); to associate (with)” does in fact get a [t͡sː] on Wikt, contrasting with водица “(diminutive) water”, which doesn’t.)
[A very different, much more complicated, Russian minimal pair between [ts] and [t͡s] previously on LH. As I recall, at the time I wasn’t sure if they were actually distinct either. I’m not sure how I missed the obvious verbal-ending option.]
the British art of moustachioed self-defense
…I originally imagined this as a (presumably humorous) martial art where the moustaches are the hitting implements, which sounded like something that wouldn’t have been much out of place in Ranma 1/2.
But nope, apparently it’s serious and the moustaches are only there because it’s British. Oops.
I’m disappointed that the Germans don’t spell it Dschudschuzu.
The somewhat less nativized spelling Dschiudschitsu does get a bunch of Google hits – mostly quotes from early 20th century sources.
Perhaps Hungarian dzsiudzsicu will do?
…the aforementioned hits include this lovely Hungarian article on the history of spellings for the word, with the even more lovely title “Dzsúdzsucu és dzsúdó“.
Why the final gemination?
I often wonder how the Latvians manage to pronounce those multi-s(h)ibilant endings.
*) the other seven are Fante, Greenlandic, Mon, Nahuatl, Nupe, Obolo, and Paiwan; there are, of course, many thousands of other languages that lack a Wikipedia edition entirely
FWIW, the older (Danish) dictionary has JiuJitsu as the headword. (Internal caps! but it’s from the supplement which was edited from 1992 to 2005; the first quotation is from 1907, though, [den århundredgamle japanske Sport Jiu-Jitsu], citing it as a loan from English. The newer dictionary has jiu-jitsu, pronunciation thouroughly nativized, and citing Japanese jujutsu as the source.
> I’ve changed my views on WP a bit since I saw the truly extreme hostility to it shown by Musk and the other technofascists (“Wikipedia must die” – in those very words.)
“Bad guy hates good thing” isn’t a reason to withhold criticism of the good thing. You can support a thing while being aware of its flaws. I love Wikipedia, i use it every day, and I’ve donated to it recently, but i very much share languagehat’s frustrations with attempting to edit it.
For recent-ish (and funny, because the person in question was able to get outside help quickly) illustration of a flaw in Wikipedia’s process: Wikipedia editors refused to update Emily St. John Mandel’s page to include her divorce until she got a proper journalist to interview her about it.
For another recent personal frustration, I learned from from the trivia game Redactle that all mentions of 𐤮𐤱𐤠𐤭𐤣𐤠 “Śfarda” being an endonym for the ancient state of Lydia have been redacted from English Wikipeda (and several but not all other language versions). Apparently we can only assume that Sfar- refers to the capital city of Sardis, not Lydia as a whole, but even then you could still mention that it’s the Lydian name in the article about Lydia!! I dunno I just think it’s worth noting when the name we use in the modern day comes from an outside culture (“Lydia” comes from the Greeks) and I like seeing more ancient scripts (there currently still is a bit of Lydian script on the page but it’s all the way at the bottom section discussing deity names)
(I’m pretty sure I’ve found academic sources using 𐤮𐤱𐤠𐤭𐤣𐤠 / Śfarda an an endonym for the whole kingdom, but I don’t know if they’re up to date/domain experts, it could be like geneticists using Greenberg’s language families. So I’m not gonna attempt to contest anything on the talk page.)
(And I’ve found similar redactions in other articles about ancient Anatolian polities so I hesitate to definitively say this is the cause, but I noticed that the [en.wiki] Sepharad article is much shorter and consistently reverted than the Ashkenaz one… so I kindof wonder if some editors have a problem with the idea that סְפָרַד could ever have referred to anything other than Spain? Sorry if this is actually political/religious hot water, I’m not trying to start shit, I just like to read about etymology and topology and ethnic self-conception over time, so I think it’s worth discussing. If it’s really misinformation to connect סְפָרַד to 𐤮𐤱𐤠𐤭𐤣𐤠 can we get some sources disproving it, instead of uncited reverts?)
Sardis-Sepharad putative connection previous discussed on Languagehat here, though not in detail.
[and wow the rest of that thread looks right up my alley — I really love this blog <3]
Sorry if this is actually political/religious hot water, I’m not trying to start shit
No, no, I’m glad you brought all that up — it gets my bile going! And this blog is fond of you too.
“This blog is fond of you” sounds threatening.
fond of isn’t threatening, but fill in the blank in “the world is trying to […..] you” with something happy…
(I’m kidding)
“Bad guy hates good thing” isn’t a reason to withhold criticism of the good thing
Surely. It is a good reason to think about whether you may have missed (or underestimated) something valuable about the aforesaid good thing, though.
@David E.: I beg to differ. It will depend on the circumstances, but I think it’s generally a mistake to let villains set your agenda for you. Simple example in a slightly different direction: I have since I was a young child never cared for cauliflower, despite my mother’s best efforts to get me to eat it. If you were to tell me that some arbitrarily villainous character (Leon Trotsky, Charles Manson, Mark Zuckerberg, whoever) famously dislikes cauliflower and maybe for that very reason I ought to give it another chance (or “think about whether I may have missed something valuable about it”) I would not find this persuasive even though the internet is no doubt at present full of easily-manipulated marks who could be persuaded by the propagandists of Big Cauliflower to double or treble their cauliflower consumption just to symbolically defy J.D. Vance or Keir Starmer or whoever else they may have an unhealthy parasocial relationship with.
I agree with JWB. Whether or not baddies like or dislike something should not have any impact on our assessment of it.
Fas est et ab hoste doceri …*
Thinking about whether you may have missed something valuable, in the light of a bad guy’s ranting, does not preclude the possibility that you may decide, No, you haven’t. Should we avoid the thinking part?
* Unfortunately the Starmerites seem to have taken this idea to heart. And not in a good way …
— Just because the flies like something, doesn’t mean it’s crap.
— Still, if it’s covered with flies, it’s unappealing.
Should we avoid the thinking part?
Never avoid thinking — that way madness lies! But like JWB, I think it’s a mistake to let villains set your agenda for you. I mean, if a villain sets you thinking, that’s great; anything can set one thinking. But one must avoid the easy train of thought “if that guy likes it, I’d better rethink my affection for it.” Of course, I say that as someone who likes Ezra Pound, the Soviet national anthem, “Giovinezza,” and the war reporting of Trotsky, so I am a man of suspect taste.
@DE, well, maybe that’s why, when you repeated to me several times that very bad English-speaking people like a word “Semites” and that it sounds bad in English, and I repeated (to LH) several times that I have no opinion of a different phrase “Semitic peoples” and that to have an opinion I need to know what Semitic-speaking referents think of this English (and also international) phrase you said “you are trolling us”.
You thought you told, and then told and then told something that surely would make me have some opinion of this different phrase.
I hate the anthem.
LH was able to foresee somehow that a man would be born who would hate it…
Oh, lots of people hate it, and I can understand that! I just happen to like it.
“This blog is fond of you” sounds threatening.
To quote Benjamin Prester: “That’s like saying “Brazil has decided you’re cute.””
Perhaps the old Soviet anthem is more majestic or grandiose, but of course the context in which many/most Americans encountered these foreign anthems from wicked regimes was Cold-War-era instantiations of the Olympics, and there’s a certain nostalgic association of the former East German anthem with winning gold medals via blatant cheating and pumping 14-year-old girls full of testosterone that the Soviets can’t quite beat.
Well, “Giovinezza” is a better singalong than the Horst-Wessel-Lied. Italian Fascists were just more cultured.
Maybe you should write a Kusaal WP article about the country of Turkey
Domine, non sum dignus …
Actually, it would be pretty easy in one sense. Dagbani WP has lots of very brief articles on countries which don’t actually say much beyond “X is a country in the continent of Y.” I can see why they might do that, but I don’t share the impulse.
My favourite Kusaal WP page so far is actually
https://kus.wikipedia.org/wiki/F%E2%86%84n%CE%B5tiks
– presumably the work of someone from GILLBT.
denn es muss uns doch gelingen, dass die Sonne schön wie nie
||: über Deutschland scheint :||
“because it must be possible for us to succeed in making the sun shine over Germany beautiful(ly) like never [before] after all”
(The lyrics were abolished wholesale when reunification was removed from the agenda in the 70s.)
Least-expected Kusaal WP page so far:
https://kus.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fest_Noz
Sadly, just a very literal translation of the English page, but even so …
The story of just why this particular page got picked for translation would probably be more interesting than the actual page itself.
Today’s featured article at en.wikipedia happens to be Ezra Pound.
About time.