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Given this property of Japanese text, is there wordplay associated with a string of characters with double/reverse meanings depending on how the characters are

Given this property of Japanese text, is there wordplay associated with a string of characters with double/reverse meanings depending on how the characters are combined?

needle0 7y ago
Yes. One that comes to mind is "[name]さんじゅうななさい" which can be either interpreted as "[name]-san, 17 years old" or "[name], 37 years old", depending on whether you interpret the さん(san) as an honorific or part of a number. (The sentence would usually be written in a combination of hiragana and kanji, but is intentionally written in all hiragana here to ensure ambiguity.)
- needle0 7y ago
  Another one: "この先生きのこるには", which should be broken up at "この先/生きのこるには" to mean "To keep surviving going forward", but since 先生 (teacher) is such a common word, it jumps at your eyes and turns the sentence into "この先生/きのこるには" which means the nonsense "For this teacher to mushroom(verb)". Usually this doesn't happen because the "survive" part is written with more kanji as 生き残る, but here it is written in hiragana to make the きのこ(mushroom) part visible and further mess with lexing. In both cases, some liberties have been taken with notation to intentionally encourage silly mis-readings; It happens much less often in ordinary text.
polm23 7y ago
Not exactly double / reverse meanings, but there are several setences that are traditionally used to test Japanese tokenizers. Most of them are tongue twisters, like this one: すももももももももの内 "Japanese plums (sumomo) and peaches are both kinds of peaches" In speech intonation would make the word boundaries here clear, but in writing it looks odd. This isn't a tongue twister, but tokenizers often fail on it: 外国人参政権は難しい問題だ "Voting rights for foreigners is a complex problem." 外国人 (foreigner) / 参政権 (gov participation rights) is the right tokenization, but a common error is to parse it as 外国 (foreign) / 人参 (carrot) / 政権 (political power).

Given this property of Japanese text, is there wordplay associated with a string of characters with double/reverse meanings depending on how the characters are combined?

needle0 7y ago

Yes. One that comes to mind is "[name]さんじゅうななさい" which can be either interpreted as "[name]-san, 17 years old" or "[name], 37 years old", depending on whether you interpret the さん(san) as an honorific or part of a number. (The sentence would usually be written in a combination of hiragana and kanji, but is intentionally written in all hiragana here to ensure ambiguity.)

needle0 7y ago
Another one: "この先生きのこるには", which should be broken up at "この先/生きのこるには" to mean "To keep surviving going forward", but since 先生 (teacher) is such a common word, it jumps at your eyes and turns the sentence into "この先生/きのこるには" which means the nonsense "For this teacher to mushroom(verb)". Usually this doesn't happen because the "survive" part is written with more kanji as 生き残る, but here it is written in hiragana to make the きのこ(mushroom) part visible and further mess with lexing. In both cases, some liberties have been taken with notation to intentionally encourage silly mis-readings; It happens much less often in ordinary text.

polm23 7y ago

Not exactly double / reverse meanings, but there are several setences that are traditionally used to test Japanese tokenizers. Most of them are tongue twisters, like this one: すももももももももの内 "Japanese plums (sumomo) and peaches are both kinds of peaches" In speech intonation would make the word boundaries here clear, but in writing it looks odd. This isn't a tongue twister, but tokenizers often fail on it: 外国人参政権は難しい問題だ "Voting rights for foreigners is a complex problem." 外国人 (foreigner) / 参政権 (gov participation rights) is the right tokenization, but a common error is to parse it as 外国 (foreign) / 人参 (carrot) / 政権 (political power).