Where am I?
Hello, I'm Mayhem, and this is my webbed site. I'm a linguist, and also study Classical Japanese. If you need something more specific than that, you are on a user's page hosted on a website called neocities. A website is a collection of files you retrieve over the internet. These files are displayed by a web browser, which is likely what you're using to view this. The internet <joke> is a series of tubes </joke>. More seriously, the internet is a series of interconnected networks. Over these networks, communication between computers can take place. A computer is an object or person that performs computation. Though, the usage for object is more common now, and people-computers are not able to connect to the internet themselves. That I know of. It would be wild if they could.
Other Questions
What is this website for?
I'm working on a translation project of an Edo-period Classical Japanese text. It's under construction at this link to Haru-no-Umi.
What is Classical Japanese?
Classical Japanese was a written language used in Japan for a significant portion of its history. Japan, for a long time, had something called diglossia. Diglossia is a state wherein two languages, or forms of languages, coëxist in popular use in the same spatiotemporal location. Classical Japanese, the written language, stayed fairly close to the form of the spoken language it was based on – Early Middle Japanese – while the spoken language diverged significantly more. This means that if you know Classical Japanese, you can read texts from the Heian period (794-1185), all the way into early Syôwa period (1926-1989)!
"hey why does the way you romanise japanese look different than im used to?"
There are actually several different competing standards for romanising Japanese! The most common is Hepburn, which is what you're probably used to seeing. However, Hepburn romanisation has a few significant flaws that prevent it from being effective for my most common use cases. The romanisation used on this site is called Nihon-siki (This is a link to the Wikipedia page for it). Nihon-siki is a much tighter representation of the writing system, and retains a lot of distinctions that the others merge, like ず zu and づ du (which are both zu in Kunrei-siki and Hepburn). Romanisations are tools, and it's good to pick the right one for the job!