[78-L] X-word puzzles and 78s

[Malcolm Rockwell]

Tying my the previous post on crossword puzzles and language even 
tighter to 78rpm discography (how obscure), when I was researching 
Hawaiian recordings made and pressed in Japan translation was ever 
problematic. Titles from the 1950s were easy to do. But the further I 
went back - to the 78rpm Nipponophone era c. 1918 or thereabouts - the 
harder translation became. The Japanese language and it's written forms 
had changed so much that I needed to find someone alive who was around 
in the 1920s to read not only kanji, but katakana. Couple that with 
trying to locate someone not only familiar with the idiomatic Japanese 
of the day but with the idiomatic English of today made my task 
virtually impossible. To translate some of the earlier language directly 
I not only would have to have learned modern Japanese, but Japanese as 
it was spoken and written in 1900.
And I thought English was bad enough!
Malcolm