I generally say that I speak English, Norwegian, Russian, and Japanese, but I could get into a lot more detail about how and why I speak those languages, because there’s a lot of discrete skills that go into a language, and if you grow up bilingual you aren’t necessarily equally proficient in both languages. I’ve also dabbled in a number of other languages like Toki Pona and Esperanto, I’ve picked up a bit of other languages through exposure, I’ve invented a number of my own conlangs, too, and I’ve learned a number of writing systems without actually speaking those languages.
So for the title of this song, I pretty easily managed to find the original title of the song by searching in English, and I had already learned the Korean letters without actually trying to learn Korean itself. So I could sound out the title, and I saw the 마 and the 녀 and I already knew from exposure to Korean, from the stilted English translation, and from knowing the sound correspondences of Sino-Xenic vocabulary, that these two syllables corresponded to the on’yomi of 馬 and 女 in Japanese. And so I reasoned that the original Korean title was probably a compound of two two-character loanwords from Middle Chinese, and using Wiktionary I quickly managed to identify these:
駿馬 | Korean junma = Japanese shunba or shunme.
處女 | Korean cheonyeo = Japanese shojo (not to be confused with 少女 shôjo whence EN shojo)
Oh, an incidental fact I was going to mention was that the “ma” in junma might be a distant relative of the English word mare. There’s a lot of unrelated languages that happen to have words for horses starting with a sound like “ma” or “mo”, and this has led a lot of people to speculate that as basically the domestication of horses spread, the word for horses used by the original domesticators spread with it.
I was also going to say that I’ve been in a sense developing my main conlang for about 9 years already depending on how you count it. I’d hoped to finish the first draft of its dictionary this year, and I guess I still have a few months left, but I feel like I’ve been so busy with other things that I’ll probably end up spending another year (or two) on that project… And obviously, after I finish that dictionary, however many drafts it takes, I will then write a second edition, because there is truly no escape.
If you have any ideas for highly-specific things to coin words for, I’m always open to suggestions; if you have any funny sentences or paragraphs to translate, then I’m open to that, too.
![A lady with excellent horse-like features? Or an excellent horse with affection for a lady? Was something lost in translation of this song title? 🤔 [🇰🇵 Pochonbo Electronic Ensemble 🎵]](https://hexbear.net/pictrs/image/6cb61b7b-00d5-45b8-b16c-987b1a32a542.webp){kind=link}
That’s a lot of HexReplyBot
Anyways the song’s title is 준마처녀 where 준마 means “swift horse” and 처녀 means like “unmarried woman” or “maiden”.
So yeah it’s the lady that has excellent horse-like features
So instead of sexy like a fox, she’s sexy like a speedy horse?
Thanks!
Do you know many languages?
I generally say that I speak English, Norwegian, Russian, and Japanese, but I could get into a lot more detail about how and why I speak those languages, because there’s a lot of discrete skills that go into a language, and if you grow up bilingual you aren’t necessarily equally proficient in both languages. I’ve also dabbled in a number of other languages like Toki Pona and Esperanto, I’ve picked up a bit of other languages through exposure, I’ve invented a number of my own conlangs, too, and I’ve learned a number of writing systems without actually speaking those languages.
So for the title of this song, I pretty easily managed to find the original title of the song by searching in English, and I had already learned the Korean letters without actually trying to learn Korean itself. So I could sound out the title, and I saw the 마 and the 녀 and I already knew from exposure to Korean, from the stilted English translation, and from knowing the sound correspondences of Sino-Xenic vocabulary, that these two syllables corresponded to the on’yomi of 馬 and 女 in Japanese. And so I reasoned that the original Korean title was probably a compound of two two-character loanwords from Middle Chinese, and using Wiktionary I quickly managed to identify these:
駿馬 | Korean junma = Japanese shunba or shunme.
處女 | Korean cheonyeo = Japanese shojo (not to be confused with 少女 shôjo whence EN shojo)
Wow, based. A whole conlang? That’s another level of nerd. Nice.
I was including dabbling, yes.
Oh, an incidental fact I was going to mention was that the “ma” in junma might be a distant relative of the English word mare. There’s a lot of unrelated languages that happen to have words for horses starting with a sound like “ma” or “mo”, and this has led a lot of people to speculate that as basically the domestication of horses spread, the word for horses used by the original domesticators spread with it.
Etymology kicks ass.
I was also going to say that I’ve been in a sense developing my main conlang for about 9 years already depending on how you count it. I’d hoped to finish the first draft of its dictionary this year, and I guess I still have a few months left, but I feel like I’ve been so busy with other things that I’ll probably end up spending another year (or two) on that project… And obviously, after I finish that dictionary, however many drafts it takes, I will then write a second edition, because there is truly no escape.
If you have any ideas for highly-specific things to coin words for, I’m always open to suggestions; if you have any funny sentences or paragraphs to translate, then I’m open to that, too.