Academics standing up publicly to Elsevier! This is very exciting. Thanks, Tim Gowers! Thanks, everyone else who has been working for open access for quite some time now!

On the topic of open access, I thought I might briefly address some of the most common non-financial/technical objections I hear raised about it. (I'm excluding the financial/technical ones because I'm not qualified to argue them in detail; let's just take it as given that the truth lies somewhere between "the current situation is the best of all possible worlds" and "we could switch to an everything-is-free-for-everyone model overnight if it wasn't for greedy capitalists", and deal solely with objections to open access as an ideal.)

Hardly anyone outside academia wants to read academic research anyway.

First of all, this can't just be asserted. Every year, JSTOR turns away 150 goddamn million search requests. Even if 99% of those search requests were from idly websurfing bozos who would have immediately clicked the "Back" button upon not seeing a picture of Katy Perry, that still leaves one and a half million serious requests.

Secondly, even if it were true, that's not an argument against allowing access to people who do want to read the stuff. And if the argument is supposed to be "Hardly anyone wants to etc., so it hardly seems worth addressing the problem" then clearly, the only option people like me have is to keep agitating until some worth is perceived in addressing the problem.

If we allowed everyone to read our papers, we'd have to dumb them down and include so much catch-up information that journals would become bloated and progress would be slowed.

No. This is a straight-up misconception and I don't know why it's so common. Maybe the people who believe this are confusing the call for "open access" (that is, letting non-academics read academic journals) for "greater accessibility" (that is, writing for the general public rather than fellow researchers). If so, let me reassure them: we want the former, not the latter. We don't want things rewritten For Dummies. We don't want editorial control. We don't want everything put on Reddit and voted up and down based on how cute the lead author's cat is. We want academic research to go on just as it always has, jargon and all, except with us allowed to read the results too. The fact that the material is written at a high level is exactly why we want to read it. If we just wanted to read summarized and sensationalized highlights, we'd be content with Slate.

If we allowed everyone to read our papers, the information would be twisted and misused by anti-vaccine activists, creationists, demagogues, bloggers, etc.

The world is already full of con artists, rabble rousers and dupes. There is no conceivable mechanism by which making better information more available worsens this situation. If anything, it should ameliorate the problem: the activists outside academia trying to refute the tidal waves of bullshit sloshing around the noosphere would certainly benefit from being dealt in to the non-bullshit game.

Arguments like these boil down to one single, patronizing principle: non-academics can't handle academic writing. This isn't true, and it's getting falser every day. We're allies, not enemies. One day things will be better, and I mean for everyone.

A haiku by Akutagawa Ryunosuke 芥川竜之介, 1919:

竹切れば寒き朝日や竹の中
take kireba/ samuki asahi ya/ take no naka
Cut the bamboo:/ a cold dawn sun/ inside the bamboo

From the Tale of the bamboo-cutter (Donald Keene's translation):

Many years ago there lived a man they called the Old Bamboo Cutter. Every day he would make his way into the fields and mountains to gather bamboo which he fashioned into all manner of wares. His name was Sanuki no Miyatsuko. One day he noticed among the bamboos a stalk that glowed at the base. He thought this was very strange, and going over to have a look, saw that a light was shining inside the hollow stem. He examined it, and there he found a most lovely little girl about three inches tall.

(Note that she's actually from the moon, not the sun.)

A couple of weeks ago, in the course of translating Kokin shū poem #189, L.N. Hammer noted that itsu wa to wa toki wa wakanedo ("Even though we can [feel this way] at any time", in his translation) is, as constructions go, hard to get your head around.

This is true. From the modern Japanese perspective, it can't be parsed from first principles at all: the particle wa isn't supposed to attach to interrogatives like itsu, presumably because, since they don't double as relative pronouns, they make no sense as topics. So you know it has to be some older, fossilized construction that must simply be remembered as it is, like bekarazu.

And, indeed, if you look it up in a big-enough-ass dictionary, there is often a definition. The Nihon kokugo daijiten 日本国語大辞典 offers two, in fact: one likening it to itsu to itte (which sort of means "at (some/any) particular time" but usually combines with a negative form to mean something like "there is no particular time when...") and another to itsumo wa ("usually", "normally"). However, the latter is only attested from the Edo period, while the former goes back to the Man'yō shū; it also seems closer to what we are looking for in terms of understanding poem #189 (remember poem #189?).

What this suggests to me is that itsu wa is a case where an interrogative is functioning to represent a non-specified but specific member of the class of things it refers to (in this case, times). Here's an example of the sort of thing I'm thinking of, in modern Japanese:

料理を教えるのに、塩何グラム、砂糖何匁などと、正確に出すなら、ねぎを適宜に刻み、塩胡椒少々などというな。なになにを何グラムというような料理法を、科学的文化人の生活だと思っている人がある。科学的文化人とは、塩何グラムではなく、科学する生活態度を身につけた自由人のことである。

If you use precise expressions like 'salt, so-and-so many grams; sugar, so-and-so many monme' when teaching cooking, don't also say 'chop the onions nicely' and 'add a little salt and sugar.' Some people think that living scientific person of culture means cooking methods specifying so-and-so many grams of such-and-such. But being a scientific person of culture isn't about so-and-so many grams of salt; it's about being someone who has mastered the scientific approach to life but remains unfettered by it. (Mikaku baka 味覚馬鹿 ("Mad About Flavor"?), by Kitaoji Rosanjin 北大路魯山人. Undated but presumably from sometime in the first half of the 20th century.)

Here, nani ("what?") is reduplicated to give naninani, meaning "such-and-such": some unspecified (but specific!) member of the class of "things", and nan guramu ("how many grams?") and nan monme ("how many monme?") are placeholders for members of the class of "amounts in grams/monme of a given ingredient (that a recipe might specify)".

So maybe itsu wa to wa toki wa wakanedo is working similarly: "Time isn't divided up so that at such-and-such a time [there is a division]". I seem to recall Ōno Susumu 大野晋 mentioning something about this use of interrogatives, especially in combination with wa, but I can't remember where.

Here's another interesting itsu wa-related story. As noted above, itsu wa can be found in the Man'yō shū. There are four instances, and here, courtesy of the Man'yō shū Search System and the Oxford Corpus of Old Japanese (Frellesvig, Bjarke; Stephen Wright Horn; Kerri L Russell; and Peter Sells, 2012), they are:

#2373 (Kakimoto no Hitomaro):
何時不戀時雖不有...
いつはしも恋ひぬ時とはあらねども...
itu pa si mo/ kwopwinu toki to pa/ aranedomo...
"There is no time at which I do not love [her], but..."

#2877 (anonymous):
何時奈毛不戀有登者雖不有...
いつはなも恋ひずありとはあらねども...
itu pa namo/ kwopwizu ari to pa/ aranedomo...
"There is no time at which I am not in love, but..."

#3329 (anonymous):
... 何時橋物不戀時等者不有友...
... いつはしも恋ひぬ時とはあらねども...
... itu pa si mo/ kwopwinu toki to pa/ aranedomo...
"... there is no time at which I do not love [her], but..."

#3904 (Ōtomo no [Sukune] Fumimochi):
宇梅能花伊都波乎良自等伊登波祢登...
梅の花いつは折らじといとはねど...
ume no pana/ itu pa worazi to/ itopanedo...
"The plum blossom: there is no particular time at which I refrain from picking them, but..."

(I'm thinking of moving the whole blog to Frellesvig/Whitman romanization for OJ, and another equivalent system [probably Frellesvig's, again, for consistency] for MJ; what do you think?)

You will notice that itu pa is used in three ways:

1. itu pa (#3904)
2. itu pa si mo (#2373, #3329)
3. itu pa namo (#2877)

This namo of the third example is, in fact, typically cited as the only namo of its kind in the MYS. There are other namo in there — the sentence-final namo, the Eastern dialect auxiliary verb namo, cognate to ramu in the standard dialect — but they are mere homophones. This namo is a conjunctive particle, the one that grew up to be namu and overrun Heian literature completely.

And, despite being quite common in the Senmyō (a collection of 62 "Imperial edicts", i.e. senmyō 宣命, embedded in the late 8th-C history Shoku Nihongi 続日本紀 and written in Old Japanese prose), this namo only appears once in the MYS... or does it?

Non!, cry Satake Akihiro, Yamada Hideo, Kudō Rikio, Ōtani Masao, and Yamazaki Yoshiyuki, editors of Iwanami Shoten's Shin Nihon koten bungaku taikei 新日本古典文学大系 ("New Compendium of Japanese Classical Literature") edition of the MYS. Invoking an "old interpretation" 古義, specifics not given, they amend the 奈毛 /namo/ of the text to 志毛 /si mo/, citing #2373 and #3329 as examples of the itu pa si mo form, and thereby (a) tidying up the use of itu pa in the MYS, and (b) removing namo entirely from the MYS (making it, perhaps, a form used exclusively in prose).

It's an interesting idea, but it's hard to build a case stronger than the circumstantial one above. In particular, while si mo does appear as 志毛 four times in the MYS (and 志母 another half-dozen or so times), 奈毛 appears in the Senmyō, like, a million times, as does 奈母. (I don't have a good scholarly edition, but something claiming to be the full text of the Shoku Nihongi can be found at j-texts.com.) So it's certainly possible that si mo was intended, but it would be by no means unusual in terms of spelling to have written 奈毛 and meant namo: it's not an obvious corruption in the text.

Personally, I'm not confident enough in my understanding of namo/namu to declare its appearance in MYS #2877 a more egregious instance of entities being multiplied unnecessarily than the proposition that we should amend a text that looks perfectly fine.

Pronoun abuse is a common failing of Indo-Europophones in the early stages of learning Japanese. Japanese is a pro-drop language; you gotta drop your (pragmatically inferable) pros. On the other hand, because Japanese pronouns are also tied into the honorific speech system, they have uses beyond simply pinch-hitting for antecedents, and this is where it gets interesting.

For example, instead of just saying korosu zo ("I'll kill you!"), you might add the so-familiar-it's-contemptuous second-person singular pronoun temee to get korosu zo temee ("I'll kill you, asshole!"). That is, the pronoun is used not for its meaning but for its implication: it conveys how you feel about your interlocutor, socially speaking.

In this week's episode of Sasurai Afro Tanaka さすらいアフロ田中 ("Wandering Afro Tanaka"), a manga serial by Noritsuke Masaharu, I found this example of use of the familiar (but not necessarily offensive) second-person singular pronoun omae. Here it is with rough English equivalent (not really a "translation" as such).

(Quick context: Tanaka works with a small team of other men in the construction industry. Today was the first day on the job for new team member Kazama, so everyone is out for celebratory drinks. Tanaka and his co-workers suggest going to a hostess club afterwards, but Kazama is not interested. Why pay women to talk to you, he asks, when women are all over the place anyway? You could just strike up a conversation with one anytime if you wanted to. Tanaka and his co-workers are stunned, not least by the fact that Kazama seems to find it inconceivable that one could be as bad at meeting new women as they are. This is what Tanaka thinks to himself.)

O-... omae... / Sonna... / Dare demo shitteru koto wo / samo tokuige ni... / Omae... // Sonna koto wa / omae ni iwareru made mo naku/ omae ... // Omae omae omae...

O... omae... / That's... / Of course we all know that, / you don't have to be so smug.../ Omae... // We didn't need / you to tell us that / omae...// Omae omae omae...

Only one instance of omae in the original is really translatable as a pronoun:
omae
ni iwareru made mo naku, "we didn't need you to tell us". The rest are all what you might call "vocative-familiar". Like the temee above, this omae doesn't clear up any ambiguity. Its function, like (say) "mate" in Australian English, is to convey two things: (1) "This sentence is directed at you! Pay attention to it!" (2) "We are equals (or you are my subordinate) and I feel no need to be especially polite."

Note that this last part doesn't necessarily mean actively rude. (Even allowing for the fact that our interior dialogue is often a lot franker than what we say out loud.) But it does contrast with other options Tanaka has for performing this function.

For example, earlier in the story he says Yatto kōhai-rashii tokoro ga, kimi..., "Finally, something kōhai-like about you [has become visible], kimi", where kimi has the same vocative function as the omae above but an entirely different set of social implications: "You are my subordinate and I am favorably disposed towards you."

The move from kimi to omae symbolizes what the shock of Kazama's words does to Tanaka's state of mind. What was an indulgent, almost patronizing stance is shattered, leaving only extreme and unstructured informality and heightened urgency in the vocative function. It is really the final Omae omae omae that does it for me. Without any actual content to attach to, these represent pure flailing, an imagined grabbing by the lapels and vigorous shake. Kazama's casual failure to even conceive of Tanaka's position as a possibile one has driven Tanaka beyond the limits of language.

Another question from the Scrap Sack:

The passing of the years is referred to as "letting the stars and frost go by" (星霜を送る). As frost comes down once a year you could call it a sign [of a year's passage]. But the stars come out in the sky no matter what season it is. It is difficult to tell [from the stars] when one year ends and another begins. What say you?

And the (meat of the) answer:

The stars do come out in the sky all through the year, but they also move around the sky. This expression refers to the counting of these cycles [and therefore the years].

Can't argue with that. I looked up 星霜 in the Nihon kokugo daijiten and found that it is pronounced seisō (originally seizō) and does indeed mean "years." That's "years" in the general sense of "reeling in the", not the specific sense of "four more", although apparently it has been used in the latter sense in the modern era; the example they give is 二星霜 for "two years" in a 1907 sentence by Tsunashima Ryōsen 綱島梁川).

The earliest attestation they have for the word is in a poem by Liǔ Zōngyuán 柳宗元, so it was no doubt borrowed whole from Chinese.

Anyway, after explaining that the stars move, the answer goes off on a bit of a tangent (partly involving the year star) that I won't translate here. But I did learn that while most of the stars move one way, the ascending lunar node, a.k.a. "Rahu star" (羅睺星), moves the other. (Basically — see comments.) (Ketu's node gets a pass, probably because Ketu isn't evil.)

The Chiribukuro 塵袋, literally "Bag of rubbish," is a harshly named but entertaining proto-encyclopedia from the 13th century. It is in a question-and-answer format, and here is a question I read today:

Dragons and snakes seem to be separate things, but does referring to snakes rising to become dragons imply that dragons begin as snakes? There have also been instances of dragons appearing to be snakes. Nor does the way that the two Dragon Kings Nanda 難陀 and Upananda 跋難陀 appear in images such as the Big Dipper Mandala 北斗曼荼羅 wrapped thrice around Sumeru differ from the doings of a snake. It is unclear whether they are one and the same or not. What say you?

The answer starts with a literature review:

Snakes becoming dragons is perhaps a reference to reincarnation. Since they say that if the fish who live in the ruins of Yu fight their way upstream to the dragon gate they can become dragons, it would seem that fish can become dragons too. It is also said that snakes can become eels, and that yams can too. Is there no end to such transformations?

(According to the notes in my edition of the book [Tōyō bunko 2004, ed. Ōnishi Harutaka 大西晴陸 and Kimura Noriko 木村紀子], "yams become eels" was a common contemporary expression for a preposterous event, particularly a fortunate one, that nevertheless happened.)

The above seems almost sarcastic, and perhaps the mention of the yams-become-eels saying was intended as criticism of those who believe everything they read. However, the author does not seem skeptical about the idea of dragons in general, or that one might become one. The second half of the answer discusses the five types of dragon defined in the "Great Accumulation Sutra" 大集経: fish-dragons 魚龍, snake-dragons 蛇龍, horse-dragons 馬龍, elephant-dragons 象龍, and toad-dragons 蝦蟇龍. If fish and snakes become dragons, no doubt they become fish-dragons and snake-dragons in particular, the author reasons. (It is also noted in passing that horse-dragons may be the source of the notion that dragons' voices sound like the neighing of horses.)