I watched the rest. VE-RY GOOD
I’m hoping my experience as an actual professor will help me bring home that “professorial” vibe
Just to clarify, I didn’t mean to guess at your actual position / experience, just this tone of teaching is “T.A.-like” to me and I think that’s best for this context.
“[Archaeology] does see itself as a scientific community”
I detect a familiar defensive posture often taken by linguistics, lol
“This space itself sort of yells gathering hall to me. Would this be a place where outsiders would be gathered to be judged, accepted or rejected by the insiders?”
I didn’t even get into thinking about that term, “asylum”, such an interesting choice.
I’ll bet anything asylum was translated from “prison” and the localizers were like “grab that thesaurus, Jerry!”
So, my new year’s resolution for 2021 was actually not to talk about Dark Souls. Now as if tempting me, you had to frame it in this way, you devil.
北の不死院
“北の” is simply, “northern”.
“不死” is “undead”. Literally, it’s written as “without death”, and while in RPGs it is often used for “undead-type monsters” I’d add in other contexts it could also be “immortal” as in “不死身”. And that it’s an old-timey, Japanese-sounding way to say that, rather than, for example, referencing the Chinese Daoist tradition like “仙人”.
“院”, then. Well, it’s neither “asylum” nor “prison”.
If you look it up in a Japanese dictionary, it’s a word with wide range, appearing in various compound words for types of buildings, and on metonymy to public figures, like how we talk about “today the White House said”. Probably the closest English equivalent is a word like “institute”. Notably a Buddhist temple— as opposed to a Shinto “宮”— is a “寺院”, but also a hospital, “病院” (“illness institute”); grad school, “大学院” (“greater study institute”); or perhaps the Japanese House of Representatives, “衆議院”, literally the . . . “mass meeting institute”