Japanese - Ask questions thread

Basically if you have a question about the language, ask it and fellow 4channers might see it and answer it for you.

To start it off. When an animate object (iru) dies, is it considered inanimate(aru)?

I found this story on how these sages created radicals

As they reduced the kanji to simpler and simpler forms, these simpler forms turned into RADICALS. Put another way, when the sages were simplifying the kanji for topic ( 題 ), they were not thinking IS IT WEIRD THAT SUN AND HEAD AND FOOT MEAN TOPIC? WILL THIS BE CONFUSING TO FOREIGNERS 1,000 YEARS FROM NOW? BECAUSE THAT WOULD BE TERRIBLE! The meaning of it was not on their minds at all. They were thinking, “WHICH COMBINATION OF RADICALS MOST CLOSELY RESEMBLES THE ORIGINAL PICTOGRAPH? BECAUSE WE ARE JUST SIMPLIFYING IT BUT WE DON’T WANT TO FUCK AROUND AND INVENT A WHOLE NEW LANGUAGE FOR CRYING OUT LOUD.” And the one sage would be looking at the original pictograph, like, “If you draw the top part like this, it kind of looks like the sun radical.” And the other sage was like, “Yeah, and if you squint your eyes and drink some sake, the bottom part kind of looks like feet.” And the third sage was like, “The right side looks like nothing on God’s green earth, plus we have 200 more kanji to simplify before lunch, so let’s just make it the face one, fuck it.” and they hi-fived and moved on. Anyway, this is the system we are stuck with