You’re right. I was thinking “alphabetic” would resonate more with a general audience, albeit not 100% accurate. Thanks for pointing it out!

As a bonus note, the term “mora” is used to describe a syllabic character.

(edit: typo)

In case you’re wondering, the “Japanese” section of the shirt has a mixture of actual Katakana (usually used for “style” or foreign words) and Hiragana (used for native words and [grammar] case markers). Plus, random shapes that look somewhat like Katakana. Some appear to be backwards Katakana, while some are simply made up (like the “R” character).

Also, the shirt says you need to turn you head to read it… But traditional Japanese, which was written top-down and right-to-left, was readable without turning your head. T L K
H I I
I K N
S E D
_ _ A

(edit: Vertical text is weird in Markdown)

I realize it’s meant as a joke. But if you know Japanese, even if only how to read the non-Kanji, alphabetic characters (Katakana and Hiragana), it borders on lame. Especially since they faked a bunch of the characters.

This is actually false in a literal translation sense. That’s the interpretation/implication of the title. Similar to how you would interpret the title of a biography called, “Abraham Lincoln”, as “The story (of the life) of Abraham Lincoln”, despite the latter not being the actual title.

In this case, the title is literally “Odysseyus” where “-us” is the nomative (subject) case case marker required in Latin. The English literal translation is, therefore, simply “Odyssey”, his name.

Because it’s an epic story, however, it matches English and general writing conventions to translate it as “The story/journey/epic/tale/what-have-you of Odyssey.”

Over time, especially in English, “O/odyssey” has taken on a more generic term, as well. So, adding the extra stuff in an interpreted translation (vs. literal translation) also helps differentiate the title of the book from a generic odyssey that might be a grand adventure by/with a different main character.

Even the Sun’s light can take thousands of years to actually exit the sun.

The wording is not how light from our sun works… Unless you’re simplifying greatly. It’s not in a maze or some container that takes thousands of years to escape. The light is based on photons that are emitted via nuclear fusion then some mass being converted to energy/photons.

I’ve read that photons can bounce around (i.e. be absorbed and re-emitted) an estimated 40,000 years… but we all should understand that is a) an estimate and b) an estimate for the inner-most photons. Photons created via near-surface level areas of the sun may be emitted outward from the sun near-instantaneously.

All this to say that the light/photon(s) don’t/doesn’t start out as light. However, once a photon exists, it may be trapped for thousands of years due to the shear amount of mass trapping it and needing to be absorbed/re-emitted until space-bound!

$150 per hour? I’m in salaried software engineering and barely making a third of that after a promotion.

If what you propose happens, all the prices of everything would skyrocket… It seems good on paper, but it ignores all the greed of capitalism…

For better or worse, (the latter for rich folks…) there “needs” to be tiers of incomes (in Capitalism). Bumping the minimum just bumps the prices. We’ve already experience it with minimum wage bumps in the US. We don’t have an actual solution that works at the moment in the US because minimum wage increases automatically lead to greedier CEOs.