Hello again!

As I was walking around Eugene, I found a number of small businesses and restaurants with East Asian writing. This Asian market, for one, is located on 503 East 11th Ave. The pinyin for the traditional Chinese characters are ” Yà zhōu lóng” which stands for “Asian dragon.” If you separate the words, in order, they are: “Asian,” “continent,” and “dragon.” The first two words make a compound word and stand as “Asian continent.” Its translation is pretty straightforward, but it is interesting to see a small market like this one use the word for dragon in its name. It makes me think they are using it as a metaphor to say their market is great and auspicious.

This restaurant “Izakaya Jinsei” is located on 1249 Alder St in Eugene. In this photo, you can see the Japanese words “いざかや 人生” (which uses both hiragana and kanji characters in its name) on the storefront of the restaurant. Separated, the words “いざかや” mean “tavern or small bar”, and the words “人生” mean “life”. In class, we discussed how the Japanese language uses three writing systems: kanji, hiragana, and katakana. While hiragana is often used to write verb endings and grammatical particles, in this example it rather phonetically sounds out the kanji rendition of “izakaya”, or 居酒屋, and provides an informal tone.

So far, I’ve been able to follow along with the history and social nuances of the three East Asian languages. However, I’ve been more challenged since we started our lessons discussing basic structures of East Asian languages. Thankfully, I’ve been able to keep up by reviewing past lessons through lectures and iClicker quizzes. I wonder how different languages came to use different structures (SOV vs. SVO). I know that it’s largely due to their parent language, but I’m curious about the specifics of it!

Until next time,

Claudia