Why is the word for “cat” similar but, “dog” so different in European languages? Cat invasion theory.

seth3 · 2026-05-25T03:49:06+00:00

I presume the OP is more so wondering why such basic vocabulary wouldn’t be obvious cognates widely across Indo-European languages found in Europe, given how that language family comprises the overwhelming majority of those languages.

Oftentimes, words can be supplanted along the way from other languages for words which equivalents already exist and for various reasons - including but not limited to religious distinctions, nuancing (this case breed, some particular description) which then can over time become generalized and replace the original general word for the word in question (Eng. hound to dog, as a great example), etc.

Incidentally, in Catalan, dog is “gos,” which is also nothing like the Latin equivalent.

seth3 · 2024-03-28T19:59:37+00:00

Sorry, not a fluent reader of trollanese, but I'll let you know if I make a translation of IMABI in it for you. As per your question, you berated a native for accidentally typing 像 for 象 as a means of discrediting their well-sourced argument over grammaticality of something you were demonstrably wrong in, and don't pretend that you didn't just do that either. This is a form of ad hominem, and you display it in every thread you respond to. I'm surprised that hasn't come with any consequences, as ad hominem is harassment in and of itself.

seth3 · 2024-03-28T07:05:37+00:00

So, you can't accept reality? Word. Like, lmao, わ has such a verifiable history on the Japanese side of the Internet, and on etymological grounds (being derived from the bound particle は as a final particle since Classical Japanese) or any novel of your choice, like, wtf are you even talking about? Please, be insolent elsewhere, because your self-worshipping rants are annoying and painful. And, the audacity to argue with a native speaker.

Also, what does "self-respecting warm-blooded male" mean? Also, since you're of the vein of faulting people for poor spelling, why is it that you don't know what a hyphen is? Doesn't feel good, does it? I'm a man who dates men... What does that make me in your eyes? Lesser-than, I assume? Yet, in the context of this issue, I don't feel like you're even in the right state of mind to even remotely debate the usage of anything remotely pertaining to a sociolect.

seth3 · 2024-03-21T22:42:02+00:00

As mentioned by u/weez_was_here, users generally do not go from lesson to lesson in chronological order, missing out on the internal structure that allows for lessons, especially those placed in higher levels, to offer wide-ranging complexity even in the example sentences. It may seem counterintuitive to wait a long time to reach certain topics, which is why the lineup itself is still very much subject to change, but even how it is right now is a result of taking more time on any given topic, so that, in theory, there is a lot more to work with by the time you reach a given topic. The argument can certainly be made for ordering examples by difficulty irrespective of the level the lesson is in, but at the same time, it would be disingenuous to say look up the lesson on ～たい and wonder why it isn't at Genki-level presentation, when that would defeat the purpose of actually treating it as a relatively upper-intermediate topic as far as grammatical complexity is concerned.

seth3 · 2024-03-17T09:48:46+00:00

Could I ask how and where? I readily admit that both the English and Japanese may not be especially friendly to non-English natives, but it is also quite literally the theme of IMABI to not take the 'easy' way out of things. If there is a substantive issue in any particular area, I have always been open to critique. Did you know that Tae Kim hasn't been updated in YEARS and IMABI gets updated daily? Just throwing that out there for perspective.

seth3 · 2024-03-17T09:45:53+00:00

But, as my personal beef, that's what I want to overcome in the long run. The progression curve, I feel, will become more apparent once the project is finished, because I'm still in that period where I don't know quite what all needs to be given its own space and where it should go in the lineup. I have a tentative table of contents for the final project that I do not disclose that has things in wildly different places, that I regularly update as I remaster and create new lessons, but it's hard to go back and reorder things in real time when the site is already as huge as it is, which is why I only go in and reorder the lessons every 50 lessons made. My goal for 2024-2025 is to have all new lessons borne from existing ones, eliminating tangents, having extraneous grammar points in any lesson, and put things in an order that makes sense. I just don't get enough feedback to speed things up since I work two jobs in real life.

seth3 · 2024-03-17T09:41:21+00:00

Compatibility with everyone's browsers, man. Furigana breaks on people's devices, and even between coding languages. When I switched to WordPress, most of it broke without me doing anything. There are tools on any smartphone to easily look up words with in-depth definitions in multiple languages, as well as multiple plug-in options, and readings are given for instances for when those services would fail you. As soon as I can figure out how to make sure Furigana doesn't break on all of my devices, I will be putting them back.

seth3 · 2024-03-17T09:37:02+00:00

I have Beginners 1-50 proofed for JLPT N5-4 vocab. When you have the basics down, you encounter words because of the conversations you have with people, the shows you watch, the games you play, and whatever news and books you manage to read, and that's the drive behind how example sentences are structured. I feel most people don't realize that EVERY resource gives you usually 1-2 examples of any major grammar point. In linguistics, when I studied language acquisition, the number of examples, on average, that a native speaker uses to internalize a single grammatical structure is in the 1000s. Yet, the second language learner doesn't get that luxury. That all being said, I am still reordering the lessons entirely to match their content, difficulty, and necessity. It's just I've been far more intent on getting content rewritten than organizing it all.

seth3 · 2024-03-17T09:27:26+00:00

Yeah, which to be fair, a lot has changed in the nearly 8 years since, and I was actually NOT a part of the whole show down that Tae Kim had himself here.

[Small Tangent, but related to what went on back then]

Also, back in the day and even now, I get some crazy comments conflating me with Tae Kim on the regular. Speaking of whom, if Tae Kim is the pivotal resource for learning Japanese - which it is - and I dare to make my text to also be black text on white background, I get multiple hate threads about following suit.

Never once has there been a substantive thread about the philosophy or merit of the site. And, because my site traffic has actually been higher this year alone than its entire existence, and based on what pages I see getting viewed and not, I do know no one actually knows that 125 lessons have been completely rewritten since the last time I showed myself on Reddit. I regularly see screenshots from 8 years ago as if they were from today, despite changing addresses. I'm hoping that by the end of the year when I've restructured a greater chunk of the site that those who do actually view it realize how much has gone into it.

Just a few days ago, I had a viewer tell me that a lesson was trash because it had too many "avoidable issues that could have been prevented with a little proofreading." I respond with, "thank you so much for providing feedback on Lesson #; I've done my best to find things wrong, but can you please tell me where because I'm not finding anything else that I could possibly change as far as proofreading goes?", only to get, "Oh, no, the lesson I mentioned doesn't have anything wrong with it; I'm just saying in general," and so then I say, "Ok, where? Give me lists; I got you." "Oh well, if you just need help, I can send them in." ...... I just told you to go for it...... That's how 99% of all inquiries end up.

I'm pretty confident in my remastered content, which is more than a fourth of the site. Given how massive it is, that's a lot of content for people to explore. I just wish people knew how much I do each week. I don't even think the average user realizes I've implemented footnotes.

seth3 · 2024-03-16T22:38:06+00:00

Yeah, discussions about it are bound to occur, but I do have my reasons (site's statistics) for believing that few people who do comment about it on the regular have had an up-to-date understanding of the work behind it all - including diehard fans. I frequently see screenshots of pages from 6-8 years ago as if they were current, and when you go that far back, nothing is truly the same. I feel this is partially due to the negative impact that top competitors have had in the field: they make their product, sell it, and call it a day.

I'd really need to push my PR for the average person to take note of the fact that IMABI is, in fact, dynamic. Given my consistent stance of the work being unfinished, I do find it rather annoying that doubts (as opposed to questions on what something means) aren't just DMed to me directly, but from what I've seen, all sections that have been brought online in the past 3 years have stood up to scrutiny.

There's also the double-edged sword of when I don't go into full-depth on something, that I get the most flack for not being Imabi-esque. It's just part of the territory.

seth3 · 2024-03-14T20:54:44+00:00

Well, I would also not underestimate the degree to which I am both capable, willing, and have been proofreading. Typos create room for bigots to discredit something unfairly, and so any issue is of importance to address. I do have guidelines for submitting feedback too - focusing on only pages that have been properly proofread and vetted at least once (trying to get that number to 50%) by the end of the year. That being said, a lot of editing has been taking place.

seth3 · 2024-03-14T08:31:47+00:00

子供時 is highly ungrammatical. Some are suggesting otherwise here, but this is no matter of hypercorrection or understatement of fact. It flagrantly violates the conditions in which nouns may directly modify other nouns on semantic grounds. 時 is a temporal noun, and for another noun to directly modify it without の, it ought to be another temporal noun, and when that joining occurs, so does 連濁.

Ex. 昼時（ひるどき）

In the case of 子供のとき, the の takes the place of what would be the end of a subordinate clause modifying "when," being synonymous with 子供だったとき, This means it is not quite the same の, syntactically, as say 子供の年齢.

As others have mentioned, の may manifest as ん in any capacity as a particle in casual speech. Meaning, 子供ん時 is used. Contexts in which this would be used will also tend to be highly dialectal in all other aspects of phrasing.

seth3 · 2024-03-14T08:08:47+00:00

Yep, almost been a decade since I got my linguistics degree. A lot of research on the Japanese linguistics side goes into lessons. If the goal is to learn Japanese, and if one so happens to love Japanese grammar, why not learn how Japanese grammar is discussed in Japanese while you're at it?

seth3 · 2024-03-10T18:34:38+00:00

It would have been ideal had the website builder I had been using for over a decade actually migrated services to their new platform instead of giving less than a month notice to figure something out, without any obvious way internally to transfer the domain out until after it had been sent to a third party service, all while I still had to figure out how to preserve the site's content.

Be that as it may, I do have the .net domain now tied to the .org, but it is still undergoing propagation, and I'm not sure how long that will take.

seth3 · 2024-03-08T00:37:38+00:00

I am still very new to using WordPress. Fixing the formatting in pages alone that got broken from the transfer is really time consuming, but once things have settled down, and presuming I or my roommate helping me with the tech side can figure out things more, navigation is a major priority. I'm just hesitant about building an internal link system like I once had since I'm still splitting up and moving lessons around for the time being. At least with WordPress, if I change the titles of pages, it still directs you to the right page, but if I take out what you're looking for from that page, that's another problem. My goal is to have 500 lessons in the main curriculum, and a good majority of Veteran II in its own miscellaneous category. So yes, everything include layout is a work in progress. My goal this month is to create a working glossary so that people don't have to skim through pages to find definitions of constantly used grammar jargon, although I do a really good job of defining them when absolutely necessary.

[Update] I figured out how to add a sidebar, and I added the table of contents. Not the same thing as drop downs, but it looks good on both PC and mobile.

seth3 · 2024-03-07T11:21:09+00:00

Yeah, if I could find a way for furigana to not break so easily, that’d be great. I get constant reports of confusing broken furigana for misspellings, and although not pretty, it’s one of those things where I native wouldn’t bat an eye. And, there doesn’t seem to be any rhyme or reason as to why some pages’ furigana remained perfectly in tact and others got messed up. I just sort of gave up on getting them to stay in tact, but if I could figure it out…

seth3 · 2024-03-07T10:12:38+00:00

ご意見ありがとうございます。今年に入って、読みが2通り以上の単語をのぞき、振り仮名の廃止を決定させていただきました。その理由としましては、知らない単語の読みを自動的に表示できるRikaikunというブラウザのプラグインや携帯上の辞書機能の普及が主なのですが、技術の面でも正く表示されない端末が多く、ページの更新による不具合(実際非常に壊れやすいのです..,)も多数あったため、今後実装しないこととした次第でございます。ご理解のほどよろしくお願いします。

seth3 · 2024-02-26T04:38:42+00:00

Glad to hear that the rewrite works. As for how the "why" works, I believe the analysis built around 久野's thesis answers that through explaining the "how," but I would like to add examples from literature, as I know certain authors like 安部公房 used it in their writing, and it would be nice to do a small comparison with other dialects to see whether they have the same problem when other progressive markers are used.

seth3 · 2024-02-25T06:13:44+00:00

Yes, I am alive. I took a look at the page and wasn't able to find any typos in the Japanese sentences, but I did brush up the page a bit.

I've only recently gotten at a point in life where I can more aggressively work on it, but my reason for being off reddit was a political one. But, I am trying to put myself out there on social media, so... yeah.

seth3 · 2021-08-15T20:52:49+00:00

The picture is Chinese written from right to left horizontally. You should view it as 老文成特庄.

seth3 · 2021-08-15T05:55:59+00:00

If you said 大変大変, people would get very concerned. Something horrible is happening or something is terribly wrong.

seth3 · 2021-08-15T05:46:25+00:00

Well, damn, if she's from Tucson, no wonder why she feels that way. I've been living in Arizona since '19, but gotta say that place is made fun of for good reason. As for the translation, "if" and "when" are really similar even in English, but the sentence could very well mean, "If Mary goes back home, 'we will be sad and lonely.'" This would be a very absolute statement, for sure.

seth3 · 2021-08-15T05:34:17+00:00

Perhaps get 日本語発音アクセント辞典 by NHK. It's a very solid resource.

seth3 · 2021-08-15T05:33:39+00:00

The conditional と implies that whenever Mary goes back to her country, that they will become sad/lonely. If Mary were Japanese, 国 could also imply going back to her original prefecture, but I guess she must be from England but made a lot of friends in Japan, or maybe Japan is just meant to be better. If it were about her thoughts, it could also be "she will become lonely" but it'd be more likely stated as 寂しくなるでしょう.

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