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An explanation of this site's background pattern, or... "How the Japanese Language Expresses the Word 'Vegan'." |
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Japanese and Chinese are very interesting to me in the way that they use a treasury of fixed-meaning characters in combinations (rather than relying on meaningless phonetics) to express different ideas. Together with the entymology of the thousands of unique characters, it makes for an extremely visual, often poetic, and always thought-provoking written language. English, by comparison, seems rather abstract to those without extensive knowledge of Latin and the other languages from which it is derived...but in these languages, it's all right in front of you. These characters (called "kanji," lit. "Chinese character," in Japanese) depict, or at least offer clues to their own meaning, and that meaning is reinforced every time they are seen in context as a component of a word or name. Each new word offers a slightly different way of seeing the world. |
| DESIGN NOTE: The characters shown above are rather ugly and homogenous, lacking in spontaneity and too uniform in size (but designed so for purposes of typesetting, because Japanese and Chinese fonts are monospaced). They come from a very standardized, very commonplace character set, roughly equivalent to our "Times Roman."
SPEAKING OF: The pronounciation of the whole phrase, phoetically, would be something like: To say "I'm a vegetarian," you could say "Watashi wa saishoku shugisha desu." TRIVIA: Chinese has a simpler (only two characters) way of expressing "vegetarian," which roughly translate to "simple food," but that is for another lesson. Just saying "Saishoku" in Japanese may sometimes be enough to get the idea across. There are several ways to say it in both languages depending on context/familiarity, but this is the most standard Japanese translation without referring to a specific Buddhist sect/practice. |
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Here's an enlarged version of part of my background pattern. I've modified the characters a bit to make them truer to their written forms and proportions, but there's only so much you can do with a few pixels, and it's still basically monospaced because of the multidirectional pattern.
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