Harry Potter and the Methods of Rationality discussion thread, February 2015, chapter 108

b_sen

New long chapter! Since I expect its discussion to generate more than 160 comments (which would push the previous thread over the 500 comment limit) before the next chapter is posted, here is a new thread.

This is a new thread to discuss Eliezer Yudkowsky’s Harry Potter and the Methods of Rationality and anything related to it. This thread is intended for discussing chapter 108 ~~(and chapter 109, once it comes out on Monday)~~.

EDIT: There have now been two separate calls for having one thread per chapter, along with a poll in this thread. If the poll in this thread indicates a majority preference for one thread per chapter by Monday, I will edit this post to make it for chapter 108 only. In that case a new thread for chapter 109 should be posted by whoever gets a chance and wants to after the chapter is released.

EDIT 2: The poll indicates a large majority (currently 78%) in favor of one thread per chapter. This post has been edited accordingly.

There is a site dedicated to the story at hpmor.com, which is now the place to go to find the authors notes and all sorts of other goodies. AdeleneDawner has kept an archive of Author’s Notes. (This goes up to the notes for chapter 76, and is now not updating. The authors notes from chapter 77 onwards are on hpmor.com.)

Spoiler Warning: this thread is full of spoilers. With few exceptions, spoilers for MOR and canon are fair game to post, without warning or rot13. More specifically:

You do not need to rot13 anything about HP:MoR or the original Harry Potter series unless you are posting insider information from Eliezer Yudkowsky which is not supposed to be publicly available (which includes public statements by Eliezer that have been retracted).

If there is evidence for X in MOR and/or canon then it’s fine to post about X without rot13, even if you also have heard privately from Eliezer that X is true. But you should not post that “Eliezer said X is true” unless you use rot13.

EDIT 2: The poll indicates a large majority (currently 78%) in favor of one thread per chapter. This post has been edited accordingly.

Spoiler Warning: this thread is full of spoilers. With few exceptions, spoilers for MOR and canon are fair game to post, without warning or rot13. More specifically:

You do not need to rot13 anything about HP:MoR or the original Harry Potter series unless you are posting insider information from Eliezer Yudkowsky which is not supposed to be publicly available (which includes public statements by Eliezer that have been retracted).

If there is evidence for X in MOR and/or canon then it’s fine to post about X without rot13, even if you also have heard privately from Eliezer that X is true. But you should not post that “Eliezer said X is true” unless you use rot13.

koibito 恋人 vs. aijin 愛人 -- so it's only half identical. 人 has kun'yomi hito (from Old Japanese *pi₁to₂), with voicing of the initial consonant in the compound word koibito, and kan'on reading jin. If Wiktionary can be trusted, koibito is the generic term for 'lover/boyfriend/girlfriend', whereas aijin was borrowed (regularly) from Chinese to translate the English terms 'lover' and 'sweetheart', underwent semantic shift in Japanese, and ended up meaning 'mistress'.

Interestingly, Chinese 愛人 àirén is just an old-fashioned word for 'lover', and the word for 'partner in an extramarital relationship' is 情人 qíngrén... except Valentine's Day is qíngrénjié. Wiktionary also thinks there's a difference in usage of 愛人 àirén between the PRC and the ROC, but it doesn't describe it.

(Why was rén borrowed as jin? I'm guessing there are borrowing patterns, like how English has borrowed enough from Latin that new Latin borrowings will mangle the vowels in entirely predictable ways, but I don't know what they are. My first guess was that kan'on readings are based on a dialect of Chinese that had the same ȵ > ȵʑ > ɻ shift as Mandarin. I figured that was too simplistic, but given that 日 has the kan'on reading jitsu and the go'on reading nichi (go'on was earlier than kan'on), it might be right. Aijin is almost certainly regular, since 刃 is rèn in Mandarin and has kan'on jin. *ɻiC > ɻəC? Could be, since the apical vowel can't occur with a coda consonant.)

(edit: I should probably point out that I don't actually know most of this stuff -- I just know how to look it up. So my sources could be wrong or I could be misinterpreting.)