TheTrueBlue Wrote:

Evil_Dragon Wrote:They actually had the balls to simplify that character?

Hey man, it used to look like this, ok?

http://img43.imageshack.us/img43/8112/11...471845.gif

http://img29.imageshack.us/img29/4041/evillaugh.gif


I mean we all sit here and advocate the logic of the kanji... Someone please explain the logic of this said Character, I'd love to hear someone try to rationalize that passed the fact that I probably could've been used as a great marketing ploy for the aforementioned noodles! haha.

Some rural country noodle shop owner probably just wrote it one day for the hell of it to see if it could attract customers, He was probably illiterate and only had knowledge of some basic Kanji so he just jumbled them all together in some way that looked to have some order. He then drew in on a big sign in big strokes, and the wealthy customers started to role in to interrogate about it thinking perhaps he was some wize Hanzi master and he said buy a bowl of noodles and I'll tell you the story of that Hanzi HANZI HANZI! and it just caught on from there, I guess..

Or,
The head of the Imperial kitchen just made some huge Hanzi because the Emperor asked him for a meal he had never tried, so the guy was worried that the emperor had
already eaten everything Imaginable, so he just made some noodles and wrote this crazy character to trick him into thinking he was eating something new and exotic!

Those are the most likely ways that some Hanzi that irrational could come about and stick around!

yukamina Wrote:

magamo Wrote:You mean something like this?

こ・
れ・
の
こ
と
か
な
？

If the OP is confusing dots with commas, then probably he meant this. But who knows?

Sometimes these ones look like commas, don't they?

The comma-ish symbol you're talking about is called ゴマ. As far as I know, the symbol is not the same as the Japanese comma "、". When ゴマ is used for emphasis, it is called 圏点. I don't know how to type it on this forum. It seems ゴマ is more popular than dots in vertical writing.

Anyway, I found an example here. Also, here is an article about 圏点 (also known as 傍点 and 脇点) on Japanese Wikipedia.

Ok so seems like its dots for horizontal writing and the goma for vertical writing but I don't quite understand the usage, is there any English equivalent?

Heres an example I found from Murakami's Kafka on the Shore (reproduced horizontally but vertical in the original)

「そのときはそこときで考える」と僕は言う。
「そ、の、と、き、は、そ、の、と、き、で、考、え、る、」と少年は手のひらにのせて重みをはかるみたいに、僕の言葉をそのまま繰りかえす。

Except of course the marks on the repeated sentence aren't commas as I see now they are a good bit thicker.

I checked my translation and the repeated sentence is written in italics "when the time comes" so maybe goma= italics.

Edit:checked the link above and they appear to be for general emphasis. Thanks.

@greatfool

"手のひらにのせて重みをはかるみたいに"

^ This is exactly what 圏点 is implying in the sentence. If there were no gomas, it would read "...と少年は僕の言葉をそのまま繰りかえす。"