Friday, November 02, 2007

Professor Nicholas Teaches Japanese Class

These words were spoken to me by the great angel-nikolas, in the heavens, through his trumpet-cone: "Also, blog some thing. Ideally, it will relate both to Timmeraque and the many types of Japanese script."


Thus:

Nicholas paced back and forth quietly in the arboretum, staring blankly at the deserted classroom, where he had spuriously and quite unexpectedly been just appointed Assistant Professor at the University of Desmond the previous day. Eight o'clock. That was what it had said on his docket they had given him, was it not? The right time for his first class of the day: Japanese Culture 1002, which he had been coaxed quite cleverly and sharply into lecturing for on this, his first day. Ten minutes later but one intrepid student had quite mistakenly ventured into the halls where Nicholas operated his shuffling. "Ah, come, come, sit please! We were just to begin our lecture today," said he to her. Confused, she inquired as to whether the room was the physical chemistry lab, to which he quite firmly answered, "Yes." He had to do something today, after all. "Here, I will show you some hybrid 'orbitals' you can observe here," he declared, with an air of expert false dignity. After some hullabaloo she finally sat down and attended herself to his impending lecture upon the blackboard.

"Now, as I am sure you all know, the Japanese writing system uses three distinct writing systems, each having their own subtleties and wonderfully rich 'character'".

He laughed himself.

"Excuse me, Professor..."

"Nicholas."

"Professor Nicholas, in what way is the relevant to the study of hybrid orbitals?"

"Hold fast, we approach it briefly. Now as you know, it was in fact the great Timmerack that imparted upon the ancient Japanese their writing systems, having acquired great knowledge of the ways of calligraphy and orthography in China, and whereupon he traveled swiftly to disseminate this knowledge with great celerity.

"It was the way of the Timmerack, upon studying the Kanji of the Chinese people, and wishing to spread the great gifts of literacy upon the populace of Eastern Asia, and the Continent, did go forth and fly to Japan on his magical hover-stick, whereupon he did try to instruct the local peoples in the way of the litany, and the good church, and the good books of the people.

"Yet, there was a great problem, for the Timmerack, as he taught the populace in a great manner, though the Kanji contained thousands upon thousands of individual, distinct 'characters', which any man would take even years to learn to the point of great proficiency. Furthermore, the Japanese language contained several gramattical and syntactical constructs that were very impractical to implement in the system he had learned. Therefore, the Timmerack, finely attuned and attenuated to the suffering of the people, did devise ways to represent individual sounds of syllables, in the way of the Japanese pronunciation, and he did derive two sets of individual, syllabic, phonetic characters for the common usage.


"Firstly, the Hiragana, the flowing, curved style that was used to write ordinary documents, and the writings of the people, the great land flourished, then, the Katakana, straight and square, used for special occasions, and quite extraordinary circumstances, and is just fairly bizarre, was developed. These implementations strengthened the spirit of the people and the Timmerack saw it, and he was pleased, and it was good.

"Thusly, the great Timmerack was able to combine the merits and virtues of all the writing systems into a grand, united system, which was widely used and greatly appreciated by the populace, and that is how the Timmerack created hybridisation.

"Now you see it, don't you? Haha!" Nicholas concluded.

"Um..." the young girl interrupted, "Wait, what?"

"Can you not see it? The truth stands out right in your front. You must face the truth and hybridise with me, now!"