Merry Christmas!
Forgotten Friday #105 - 蕃茄音尋 / Tomatone Hiro
I seriously underestimated how much families would throw a wrench in my plans. Which sounds a little weird! What I mean is that my plan was to write out all the articles in the spreadsheet, and then post them in the order in the spreadsheet. But, I have a rule to not spam families. Especially if someone is bingeing the archive (of my blog, not the Japanese wiki). It would be like "oh. Shirushine. Oh. Shirushine. Another Shirushine." And they would just walk away, because that's boring.
Trying to avoid people just walking away without clicking "read more"!
Who is Hiro Tomatone?
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| official icon from bank |
Wonky formatting means wonky translation!
And, well, I think that his character item is a person. But, you know. In Hiro's character art, he has a little kid named Joe on his shoulder. And when I say little, I mean like under twelve inches. Is he a robot? What is his height? It's not given. I believe that Joe is a faerie, but he has no wings. Well, Google Translate gave me faerie. Plugging it into a dictionary said it could also be "elf". I accept that definition.
Let me start by saying that black, white, and an accent is one of my favorite color schemes to ever exist. Especially when the accent is red. I mean, I'm partial to purple, but that's not as evocative as red.
One of the support staff in my school district was a very read woman. If she said something, I believed her. She never forcibly asserted herself as being correct, and had a sense of self-doubt that made her feel trustworthy. She was excited about her pregnancy and said that babies cannot perceive colors correctly at birth, with the only colors they can understand at birth are black, white, and red. I did Google it, and she was entirely correct! She was creating her nursery to take advantage of that fact so that it would be more visually appealing to the little baby.
This lines up really amazingly with a study by Brent Berlin and Paul Kay. As languages develop words for colors, invariably the first three words represent white, black, and red.
Mind you, using that study's logic, Japanese didn't have a word for pink until they took pink from English. The study was looking at abstract color words - not descriptive color words. Momoiro, or the color of peaches, is descriptive. Heck, there's even an argument that English doesn't have a word for orange because oranges are orange. (No one knows if the fruit was named after the color or if the color was named after the fruit, and that's why it's a topic of debate.) So, those Amazonian tribes don't see in black and white. They probably just use descriptive terms and not abstract terms.
Hiro loves music, dancing, and musical instruments. He also likes tomatoes and those dumb French sandwich cookies.
He hates noise and wasabi, and he's a freaking jerk that has no idea how technology works. "機械音痴" is the term used, and I had no idea what "machine deafness" was supposed to mean. Jumped over from Google translate to a dictionary, and it means "being hopeless with machines".
I know exactly why Google Translate has been hopeless with these articles. Whereas English is fun and easy and has rules that make it correct or incorrect, Japanese is hahahahaha. Even when there are grammatical rules, they are abandoned with glee. If you write like a Japanese textbook, Google translate is perfect. But, I've gone through two dictionaries and I don't get "受け攻両方男子". It actually breaks jisho. It gets confused and doesn't properly break it up into words. Now, I think I know how it is meant to be understood. 男子 is being used to reference Hiro. Everything before it is modifying "boy". "攻" isn't a word. We can assume, however, that it's meant to mean attack. 受け is to receive, and 両方 means both sides. So he is a boy who receives attacks from both sides, which I think means everyone. But guess what?! I have no idea! That's nothing like Google translate, because Google translate suggests you add a "me", and then it's that both men attack.
I really, really love English.
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