Today's lesson: the difference between English and Japanese.
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Consider the phoneme expressed in the IPA as "aj".
In English, the word expressed by that single phoneme is "I", a word quickly and loosely defined as "me" or "myself".
In Japanese, there is also a word expressed by that single phoneme: "ai," the word which translates into English as "love".
So the sound "aj" means "me" in English, and, in a funny way, "us" in Japanese. In English, the thing you never find in "team," in Japanese, the most beautiful kind of partnership. In English, selfishness; in Japanese, giving.
1 comment:
hmmm what about other languages? I'm greedy that way. being American and selfish and all... ^_^
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