less with more

Amazon is selling a "newer" edition of the Shiffert translations of Yosa Buson haiku in which the Japanese original has been dropped ... but errors have been introduced into the Latin character roumaji transcriptions which were "retainied" !!

If there is a case for an ebook, this is it.

The W.S. Merwin follows the available editions of Buson haikushuu fairly closely ... but with no Japanese other than more faithful transcriptions of the kanji and kana into roumaji.

---

red kanji vine

A red vine on our street ... one of my "kanji" photos (taken this morning in a gusting wind.)

蔓草   

つるくさ

Precise Puppy tagainijisho folies

Precise Puppy linux running in RAM on a netbook is a delight — but surely no ordinary user could have configured the tagainijisho app to run after install !

The problem was not just the absence of Qt libraries; the challenge was to configure and update the package manager so as to find them !

The chief reason to use a variant of Ubuntu linux ceteris paribus is precisely the pkg manager.

The Precise Puppy 5.4.3 ISO may have been built before the optional packages were in the respective repositories.

Had the last step in ISO preparation been an update of the pkg mgr, could this stumbling block have been avoided ?

Not entirely ... not without a menu item and with Tagaini installing elsewhere than /opt ... the user still required a script.

---

kanji for Heidegger

昭 light in the clearing

永 for Parmenides and Heraklit

---

Quintilian aule

In his advice on remembering through loci and images, is not the 'forecourt' of Quintilian's memory architecture also our Aule ?

ad herennium

De institutione oratia

Japanese kanji

If you are learning to read Japanese, I have two web pages in plain HTML (no Japanese font, no JavaScript.)

One web page is for the joyo kanji and one is a page of the Henshall kanji.

Both can be used with the Curl applications for Joyo kanji recall and Henshall kanji recognition (but for these, the MIT Curl browser plugin* from Curl.com is required.)

Images of these pages and app's can be seen at http://kanji.aule-browser.com where you can pick some pages by clicking on images of that page.

Versions of my Curl kanji pages with interactive mnemonic features are coming soon!  Android mobile app's are in the works at logiquewerks.com.

The pages and app's above all use the dictionary definitions found on-line in kanjidic2.

* that plugin is called the Surge® RTE (RunTime Engine)

Japanese kanji by grade: gold on indigo

The Curl applets for Grade-based Japanese Kanji were updated today.

Here is an example with both a popup menu and the FIND panel:

The gold-leaf on paper dyed with indigo motif is one that I first saw in the Minneapolis Institute of Arts collection. In fact, 'indigo', as the boundary between blue and violet, cannot be displayed on computer screens.  My choice is created using HSV parameters sent to the Curl classes for Color and Background.  The 'gold' is also not the www standard.  Results will vary depending on your software and hardware.

---

Firefox urlencode lapse, or ?

I was validating an HTML page at kanji.aule-browser.com today when I hit a few URL errors in anchor links.

The URL's were added ad hoc for kanji from pages found in Firefox and the URL copied out of the address field.

Oops!  These URL's are for kanji stroke order diagrams and the URL includes a Japanese character.  The URL comes back from Firefox address bar "COPY" with the kanji character urlencoded. But: the URL includes a param following an ampersand and THAT was not encoded.

According to w3c the URL is not valid unless the ampersand is escaped (but the links were tested and worked fine ...)

Once the ampersand was escaped,  the HTML validator stopped objecting - but the "?" for the start  of parameters was still not escaped!

Here is what Firefox returns:

http://www.sp.cis.iwate-u.ac.jp/icampus/u/akanji.jsp?k=%E9%9A%A3&o=e99aa3

Here is what the HTML validator insists upon:

http://www.sp.cis.iwate-u.ac.jp/icampus/u/akanji.jsp?k=%E9%9A%A3&o=e99aa3

Notice that %26 is not what is required for this URL to work correctly.

http://www.sp.cis.iwate-u.ac.jp/icampus/u/akanji.jsp?k=%E9%9A%A3%26o=e99aa3

Firefox reports the URL on my web page as

http://www.sp.cis.iwate-u.ac.jp/icampus/u/akanji.jsp?k=%E9%9A%A3&o=e99aa3

The HTML anchor attribute on the page is now set to

href="http://www.sp.cis.iwate-u.ac.jp/icampus/u/akanji.jsp?k=%E9%9A%A3&o=e99aa3"

The kanji is 隣

---

Kanji Recall

The "Henshall" kanji Curl applet at my kanji study pages now will remember where you were last in the set  -  at least as long as the Curl Surge RTE plugin is running ( a session cookie is being used.)  You can even change browsers from, say, Firefox, to Chrome, and Curl remembers which Kanji you were on.

If you have a request for different behavior or a different kanji set, then forward your request to infoATaule-browser.com where the "AT" is our @ mail symbol.

Note: the applet requires the MIT Curl browser plugin from curl.com or curlap.com

Curl has a forum at communities.curl.com

Firefox Perapera for Kanji

I am finding that my two pages testing edict and edict2 as UTF-8 encoded text are also a great test of the Perapera Japanese-English dictionary plug-in for the Firefox browser.

Of course, the plugin required the compilation of the dict ... but it clearly hints at more uses for the content of EDICT2 than as some single text file out on a server.

I have posted two versions of each of EDICT and EDICT2 as HTML pre text:

edict white-on-black
edict black on white
edict2 w/b
edict2 b/w

Kanji dict plugins to read an English gloss are available for your web browser.

Note: each page may take a moment to load as there are some 162,000+ entries.

---

Ezra Pound's periplum for periplus?

Is Pound's 'periplum' merely for Greek periplus ?

An article misses prunus (also cherry) and the orchid of Mauberley - a different view when comparing Zh "plum" and Zh "sea"

as in  梅  and  海  not to mention venom   毒液   -  or even  poison  毒藥   - and then there is perineum.

Note that 'sea' may also serve as 'beach', depending upon point of view in a poem.

Pound has his fun with us when we fail to look for the symbol, or 符號 .

Note the frequency of the "peri-" prefix in Russian ... and our occasional reliance on prunes.

Casual gardeners insist on distinctions of cherry and plum ( compare prunus and the  malus  of the Romans) ; see rank and "apricot".

I await  a scholar to correct me, leaving me road apples as the itinerant master rides off to another skirmish or recent hanging.

Defeated, having given his ear, 
his wound unbound,  he went unshod,
avoiding the road and the inns.

---

Gesture Control

What Westerners, Europeans and others may not appreciate is how often native Japanese-speakers use gestures to disambiguate kanji when speaking due to the great number of homonyms in their morae-based language.

Will gesture-control of devices lead to such combined speech+gesture identification?

---

Katakana Stroke Order & Direction

Animated stroke order and direction at http://www.umich.edu/~umichjlp/Katakanapro/index.html

---