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[personal profile] edenfalling
One of my WIPs, Lemonade, contains three main characters. One (Sasuke) speaks only Japanese. One (Faith) speaks only English. The third (Duo) is a native English speaker, but also passable-to-fluent in Spanish, Japanese, and two or three other unspecified languages. (Plus he reads Latin, because that amuses me.)

In chapter two, Sasuke curses very briefly in Japanese. Specifically, he says "shimatta."

I just got the following review, from an anonymous person calling hirself "Language Geek":

Be careful, be very careful, Shimatta might just mean shit in Japanese, however it seems a bit close to Schmatta which is a rather derogatory term in Yiddish.

To which my response is, basically, WHAT? Yes, obviously words in different languages will occasionally sound similar (or identical) to unrelated words in other languages, but what does that have to do with anything? Nobody in this story speaks Yiddish. It's written in English with very occasional garnishes of Japanese and Spanish, for color. If you read any of the words as Yiddish terms, you are actively looking for things to misinterpret. (Well, okay, I think I used a very Anglicized Yiddishism once -- something along the lines of 'plans, schmans,' but that's standard American usage at this point, and the first word of that kind of phrase is always in English anyway.)

Besides which, seriously, Japanese. Not Yiddish.

Twit.


(I am being petty enough already, so I will not go on to rewrite the review in properly grammatical English. But oh, I want to. Because I am, at heart, extremely petty about certain things. *sigh*)
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edenfalling: stylized black-and-white line art of a sunset over water (Default)
Elizabeth Culmer

January 2026

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