Category: Writing

I am not the writer in our house; my partner is. Nevertheless, from time to time I find myself writing a bit of flash fiction or even poetry and vignettes in a series I call The Sparrow Story.

I truly have no pretensions around the craft of the written word at either a sentence or paragraph level, let alone at something as grandiose as stitching all of that together into a written story. Can you imagine all those words to write? Crazy!

Nevertheless, given my obvious insanity and lack of sense of my limits, I do have aspirations of someday producing a written story or two that may not be a complete waste of another human being’s time to read.

Words

Words come tumbling, rumbling like rapids from the mouth
So many, so different and still all remain so more the same

We define and describe and decapitate this truth, that truth, any truth
With words and sentences that congeal as horizontal lines of blood in human desperation

We fill the voids and crevices and dark places we fear so much
Till the canyons of our ignorance echo with the ring of our rhetoric

Dead just a moment ago and where has my now gone?
Fleeted into yester`s moment and nevermore

Shall scholar redact man`s mortal foe?
Shall poet transcend this our malignant woe?

The fool dances upon the god`s brow in mighty delight, ignorant
Our prison is now complete as our language grows

Welded from the same tools we attempt to fly with
To soar above this Earth and world and be apart As our Maker

We are bound to this one life, this one blood, this one love
Not in shackled isolation or desolation, though

See not the yester`s shadow creeping so long and black along our path
Blanket over the mountain yet formed and filling the canyon yet dug

For I am not the word
Even as I say it, “I am”

Have a word for a word?

It is now possible to add comments to words and characters on Kotoba. This feature allows you to write your own comments about a specific word or character that can be viewed by other users. Ultimately, I hope this facilitates you to share your linguistic nuances or insights that you feel might be appreciated by other language learners and lovers. You can see the latest comments here, or add your own to your favorite word or character.

Vocabulary Lists are now Study Lists

In an attempt to generalize ourselves, we have moved vocabulary lists to study lists. This is in recognition that our vocabulary lists can now include characters, not just words. To boot, in the future we would like to add grammar and example sentences to our study lists thereby making them as complete as possible for learning a language.

Houston, we have 漢字文字 Characters!

Kotoba achieved another important milestone this evening. Characters! As alluded to in previous posts, my work has been focused on developing a language-agnostic model of language characters. The work is heavily inspired on Kanjidict which is also the source of the 10,000+ chinese characters that are now a part of Kotoba.

Sexy Models

Well, maybe sexy is too strong a word for most people. But if you are like me, then data modeling is sexy. And if that is the case then Kotoba can be particularly sexy.

One of the main objectives at this point in Kotoba’s development is ensuring the entity-relationships are modeled correctly. While no easy task, it is something that has been growing organically through trial and error and a fair bit of research into other projects.

Remember, while Kotoba is currently geared toward Japanese one of the goals is to ensure, as best as possible, something that can be more universal. That said, ironically, the most challenging task thus far is to sufficiently normalize characters rather than for words due to the numerous normalized, language-based character attributes that one might wish to track.

Overview of Kotoba's entity-relationships circa March 2009. Click to enlarge.