PaCrappa wrote:GateofThunderforceIII wrote:Pa, if you were serious about not using the term shmup, then I agree with you.
When I have ever used the term "shmup"? In fact I purposefully spell it "shump" every single time I mention this website on this forum. I'm kind enough to call it by name on other forums, but I think "shmup" is silly so I make fun.
Obviously 1944, GW2 etc are vertical scrollers with horizontally oriented monitors. I've just described them perfectly in English so why adopt foreign language terminology that would only confuse half of my friends, the greatest portion of whom do not live to read the internet and aren't worried about what they call stuff in Japan? "What's up with your TV dude?" "You dope, it's TA-TEH, don't you got the internet?!" Yeah right.
The options screen in a Japanese game is not going to dictate the terms I use to describe the way my TV stands at my house in the USA, nor the orientation of the game being played on said TV set. I see those words on screen and I can tell what they mean, but that doesn't change my vocabulary regarding the subject. Why should it? Does it have to? Am I wrong?
Anyways, I wasn't trying to argue. Just pointing out that some people don't have to get caught up in interweb Japanophile terminology. Say portrait and landscape, tate and yoko all you want to. I'm sure I'll be able to figure it out.
Pa
Well, of course you're free to say and think what you like. However, your position that because we can "perfectly describe" the 'foreign' term
tate in an English phrase we should preferably do so has some glaring flaws. Namely, it would necessitate you throwing out all other etymologically foreign words which can be said in a descriptive phrase in English. For example, 'sushi'. We can say 'vinegared rice with raw fish' in English, so by your logic, saying sushi to represent this concept would be stupid and should be avoided. I doubt anyone would agree with you on this. Likewise, we would have to get rid of the borrowed French word 'dentist', as we could just as easily say 'tooth doctor' instead. Oh, but that's not good, as 'doctor' is also a borrowing from French. We'd have to say something like 'tooth mending fellow' (I'd like to use 'person' here, but sorry, that is also a borrowing from French!). And on and on. Do you see where this road leads us?
Your argument also fails on the level of linguistic enconomy. For example, the verbal use of
tate, as in "I tated my TV", is much simpler than saying "I rotated my tv so it would be vertically oriented". Simpler constructions for commonly discussed notions normally win out over more complex constructions, if the language variety in question has a choice between the two.
Finally, I think you're overlooking the fact that every area of interest, be it a hobby, profession, or field of study, has some specialized terminology not used outside its sphere of reference. For example, when talking to non-linguists about languages I try to avoid the terms they are probably unfamiliar with (like 'morpheme', 'phoneme', 'diachronic', and 'essive'), and use descriptive phrasal equivalents instead (like 'meaningful unit' for morpheme, for example). The same would be true for a web-designer, computer programmer, lawyer, mechanic, golfer, mahjong-player, or just about any other worker or hobbyist and their specialized terminology. How is this any different from the use of
tate in the shmups hobby? If your friends come over and aren't familiar with the terminology, then you can either try and teach them the term, or just use a descriptive phrasal equivalent (you obviously seem to prefer the latter), but if you are with other shmup-players who understand the term and use it productively, what is the logical reason to avoid its use? That would be like a golfer avoiding the use of 'par' when speaking to other golfers. When I go to shmup-meets here in Hawaii with Gaijinpunch, Wanderer, and Matt, they all exclusively use
tate in their speech to refer to a vertically-oriented monitor (or the action of rotating a monitor to be vertically oriented), and I bet the same is true at other shmup-meets.
In closing, the fact remains that the terms
tate and 'shmup' are rapidly gaining acceptance and are being used more and more frequently among those who play these games. However, this acceptance and productivity is based on no one speaker's decision, but rather an implicit social negotiation between a community of speakers over time. It's a natural process. You can thunder against it, but odds are your thundering will eventually fade into the distance, drowned out by those who have embraced the terms, happily shmupping away on their tate screens.
