What is a bank(teibou)?

[DragonmasterX]

Can someone describe in their own words what a bank is? Even after looking at the pictures at google, I still don't have a solid picture of this "bank" in my head. This is something I wondered everytime 堤防 came up in Air.

http://images.google.com/images?svnum=10&hl=ja&lr=&q=%E5%A0%A4%E9%98%B2&btnG=Google+%E6%A4%9C%E7%B4%A2

Image search for the English "bank" brings up the financial institutions.

[inuyasha9854]

I'm guessing something like an embankment, or a river bank.

[Haeleth]

Roughly equivalent to a "levee" (those things that Katrina breached in New Orleans) or a "dyke" (the sort they use in the Netherlands to keep the sea out, not the yuri sort).

In the specific case of AIR, it refers to the sea wall that separates the beach from the shop with the juice vending machine.

[GreatSaintLouis]

Nitpicky question: Is the structure a 'dyke' or a 'dike'? I grew up on a freshwater marsh cris-crossed with the things, and I could've sworn it was 'dike'. Unless this is another one of thos 'color'/'colour'-type issues...

[Haeleth]

Nitpicky question: Is the structure a 'dyke' or a 'dike'?
Yes. :P

In British English, at least, the two are completely interchangeable; Oxford style prefers 'dike', but recognises 'dyke' as "a frequent spelling", while other authorities prefer 'dyke'. It may of course be one of those cases where Americans accept only one of two spellings that are permissible in British English - not so much 'colo(u)r' as 'medi(a)eval' or 'Americani(s|z)e'.

[Shii]

It may of course be one of those cases where Americans accept only one of two spellings that are permissible in British English - not so much 'colo(u)r' as 'medi(a)eval' or 'Americani(s|z)e'.In the northeastern U.S. at least, a dike is a wall and a dyke is a Sailor Scout.

[GreatSaintLouis]

It may of course be one of those cases where Americans accept only one of two spellings that are permissible in British English - not so much 'colo(u)r' as 'medi(a)eval' or 'Americani(s|z)e'.

That could possibly be it, or it could just be due to the ignorance of my contemporaries that I've never heard of any alternate spellings. Every time I use the word in a sentence, I'm usually rewarded with funny looks and entreaties not to say it so loud before have to I explain that it refers to a physical structure.

...yet another one of those fascinating words that's had its traditional meaning usurped by common colloquialisms.

[Claudio]

For what I can tell you, "dyke" sounds very wrong, mainly because of it's pronunciation.
"Dique, dike" is correct for a dam-like structure that separates bodies of water (or water from something else), but "dyke", pronounced "daik" is, uh, definitely anglic in origin. I'm not familiar with any "daik" root in the grecorroman original tongues, though I'm not a linguist by any means.

[Guest]

Well, for those interested in the etymologies of dike and dyke.

dyke
1931, Amer.Eng., probably shortening of morphadike, dialectal garbling of hermaphrodite, but bulldyker "engage in lesbian activities" is attested from 1921, and a source from 1896 lists dyke as slang for "the vulva."

dike
O.E. dic "trench, ditch," from P.Gmc. *dik- (cf. O.N. diki, Du. dijk, Ger. Deich), from PIE base *dheigw- "to pierce, fasten" (cf. Skt. dehi- "wall," O.Pers. dida "wall, stronghold, fortress," Pers. diz). At first "an excavation," later (1487) applied to the resulting earth mound; a sense development paralleled by cognate forms in many other languages. This is the northern variant of the word, which in the south of England yielded ditch.

http://www.etymonline.com/

The American dyke has nothing to do with the British dyke (it's just a plain old variant of dike in British English).

[Haeleth]

Of course, etymonline (like most lexicographical sources) omits the American dyke/dike meaning "diagonal cutting pliers", which was the subject of several fascinating Language Log posts recently...

It's amazing how easy a thread is to derail, isn't it? :D

[Carl]

For what I can tell you, "dyke" sounds very wrong, mainly because of it's pronunciation.
"Dique, dike" is correct for a dam-like structure that separates bodies of water (or water from something else), but "dyke", pronounced "daik" is, uh, definitely anglic in origin. I'm not familiar with any "daik" root in the grecorroman original tongues, though I'm not a linguist by any means.
In New Zealand it's always pronounced "daik".

English is quite a flexible little language.

[GreatSaintLouis]

Of course, etymonline (like most lexicographical sources) omits the American dyke/dike meaning "diagonal cutting pliers", which was the subject of several fascinating Language Log posts recently...
Wow, I had no idea about that one. "Diagonal cutting pliers" - sounds like some sort of metal shears or tin snips or something.

It's amazing how easy a thread is to derail, isn't it? :D
Bear witness to half the fun (and all of the danger!) of the Internet!

English is quite a flexible little language.
Or deeply flawed, depending on how your glass is filled. It really makes me appreciate learning Japanese - words only have ONE possible pronunciation! And half the time, the words are made up of little pictures that give you the meaning! Beautiful!!

All we get in English are there, they're, and their.

[Shii]

It really makes me appreciate learning Japanese - words only have ONE possible pronunciation!But "letters" have usually a dozen pronunciations...

[GreatSaintLouis]

True. What I was attempting to get at and failed (due to my own incompetence, not the shortcomings of English) is that each syllable/character is pronounced only one way (i.e. く, 'ku') and therefore words only have one possible pronunciation - 行く, (いく) is always 'iku', for example.

The catch, as you mentioned, is in the myriad of possible meanings kanji can carry, in which case yes, the pronunciation of the word does change. But it still adheres to the static pronunciation of the syllables that make up the word.

I shouldn't try to discuss even my shaky grasp of linguistic concepts at 3am. I'm not sure if anything I just wrote made a damn lick of sense.

[Haeleth]

each syllable/character is pronounced only one way (i.e. く, 'ku') and therefore words only have one possible pronunciation - 行く, (いく) is always 'iku', for example.
Except when it's 'yuku'. :P

There are some genuine inconsistencies. ん can be any of [n], [N], [m], [j~], [a~], , [u~], [e~], [o~], and probably a few others. I admit that's not quite analogous to English inconsistencies in that it's possible to deduce the pronunciation of most syllables if you know the basic rules of Japanese phonetics, which is [i]not the case for English "-ough". But can you tell me how the following sentence is pronounced, given your knowledge that "each syllable/character is pronounced only one way"?

はははははははがいたいと言う

</evil>

[Nanatuha]

はははははははがいたいと言う

Sir Haeleth, does the sentence include laugh? (all ha is laughing except last one)　:p

[l|ammamama]

I'm guessing the sentance includes a mother, a tooth, and possibly a sword (the whole "itai" thing..) but i'm at a loss as to how you could connect all that grammatically with "wa"s - this is why kanji is a good idea -_-


My favorite thing about the language isn't the pseudo-static pronunciation of the kana, but how in many cases you can use radicals/elements that signal the kanji's on-yomi to help learn the vocabulary. Words like "野球” (yakyuu - baseball) can be used to help remember the pronunciation of seemingly unrelated words such as "請求書" (seikyuusho - a bill) because the 求 shape indicates the "kyuu" sound. Even though the two kanji mean completely different things (求 is approximately "request", and 球is "ball" more or less), so long as you pay attention you can save a lot of brute vocabulary memorization. There's a lot of exceptions, but the whole shape-sound phenominon is widespread enough to be very helpfull.

That, and the way that the kanji-sound-based entemology of most japanese words (at least those that are not kun-yomi) tends to be relatively transparent, when compared to english. In my experence at least.

[Haeleth]

Kanji and punctuation. ^_^

Nanatuha has revealed the underlying ambiguity of the non-phonetic spellings still used for some Japanese words. The mother/tooth interpretation (which was what I had in mind) would be 母は「母は歯が痛い」と言う (where, of course, いう is pronounced ゆう). You can keep up the recursion a lot longer. ;)

[Talbain]

One might also argue that a dike is something that blocks water, while a dyke is someone who cock-blocks.

Couldn't help myself.

[GreatSaintLouis]

But can you tell me how the following sentence is pronounced, given your knowledge that "each syllable/character is pronounced only one way"?

はははははははがいたいと言う

I'll admit that you've got me there, but that's still along the lines of the kanji, in which the pronunciation changes with meaning.

What I was trying to get at, and have obviously failed miserably, is that Japanese pronunciation is largely inflexible. Take for example, the word 'bagel'. It's pronounced by all of my friends as 'bay-gul', and yet I instinctively (possibly due to the influence of my mother's Wisconsin accent as I was growing up) pronounce it 'bah-gul'. A minor difference, to be sure, but one that has spawned countless arguments.
Regardless of which pronunciation is correct, my argument is that this is possible in English due to the flexibility of our vowel sounds, whereas in Japanese, the speakers are limited by the syllabic characters of the language itself - か is pronounced 'kah' and not 'kaah'.

Maybe that should have been my thesis statement from the beginning - "Japanese vowel pronunciation does not enjoy the same floppy standards as in English, thereby limiting drastically the possible pronunciation for a word when the meaning is known. Obviously, there are exceptions when a syllable can have two pronunciations - は as 'ha' or 'wa', へ as 'he' or 'e', etc. - but on a whole the spoken language is much more rigid than the relative tolerance of English pronunciation."

... and even that's a sucky thesis. How am I supposed to do this English major thing if I can't properly express an idea? -_-