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I should probably double-check this with a Japanese first, but I think the words 「強盗」 and 「略奪」 don't mean "looting" in the sense of people snatching whatever th
by angus77 16y ago
I should probably double-check this with a Japanese first, but I think the words 「強盗」 and 「略奪」 don't mean "looting" in the sense of people snatching whatever they can from stores after a disaster. My (possibly incorrect) understanding is that 「強盗」 is forcible robbery, and 「略奪」 is the kind of looting an army or band of pirates would pull off during a raid.
Of course, words take on different (and sometimes surprising) meanings in different contexts, and I'm not a native speaker.
- jrockway 16y agoYeah, and EDICT is pretty weak Japanese dictionary, IMHO. One-word translations lead to misunderstandings. Having gone to school in Japan, I found EDICT useless whereas a random paper dictionary or denshi-jisho would actually help me find the right word. So anyway, I would not use EDICT as my sole source for "there is no word" or "the correct word is..." If I cared, I would probably read through the Japanese newspaper coverage until I found a word that seemed relevant in both dictionary definition and actual context. If there is no word for the phenomenon or it never happened, then you wouldn't be able to prove anything... but if there is a word and it did occur, then you would have something a little more solid than "I googled for Japanese dictionary and found some words in them."
- OasisG 16y agoDo you feel the same way about Jisho (http://jisho.org/ http://jisho.org/)? I generally find it handy.
- angus77 16y agoThis looks good, too. I especially like the fact that it tells which words are "Common word"s.
- jbm 16y agoI take issue with calling it "weak". EDICT is useful resource that needs sentence examples. It certainly is far better than any e-dictionary I could find for French back when I was forced (by law) to attend French class. It definitely helped a lot when I was in college (and, admittedly, situations where I used the wrong word)
- Paulomus 16y agoReally, I always found it pretty useful. I guess this might be because when doing J->E translation I already had context from the source text. Still the WWWJDIC results at least link to ALC (which does give lots of context) or to Japanese Wikipedia entries (which can compare to the English version of the same article) For arguments sake: http://eow.alc.co.jp/%CE%AC%C3%A5/EUC-JP/ http://eow.alc.co.jp/%CE%AC%C3%A5/EUC-JP/ has lots of usage examples of 略奪 in context suggesting it does in fact mean looting.
- angus77 16y agoThanks for the link! Somehow I'd never come across that site before (I guess because I've got a good densi jisyo. The only times I check out words online is when I want more context; in which case I go to the Japanese Wikipedia). The question left open, though, is whether that's the word reporters normally would use. It's not clear in the examples whether or not the word is being used hyperbolically. I mean, just because you can say "Muhammad Ali annihilated his opponent" doesn't mean that "annihilate" is a synonym for "defeat".
- Paulomus 16y agoThis Chunichi Shimbun Article: http://www.chunichi.co.jp/article/national/news/CK2011031702000193.html http://www.chunichi.co.jp/article/national/news/CK2011031702... about the increase of looting in Japan following the earthquake uses 略奪 to refer both to armed robberies and taking things from unattended stores.