Making Kanji Lists

(Note: Please read the Introduction, and Part 1 first.)

This entry will teach you to how make (automated) kanji lists.

Why this method may appeal to you: You will not have to hunt down the meanings of individual kanji any further.

By making a list of kanji beforehand, the contents of which may number in the hundreds (even thousands, if need be), you save time and energy. Better still, the kanji list would contain characters in the order that they appear in the actual text, and, the list may, if you want it to, be comprised only of uniques (i.e. there won’t be any duplicates).

This method is immensely helpful especially when you are dealing with a text that contains many (as of yet) unknown kanji characters.

What You Will Have In Your Hands

Have a look:

The above is a snippet of the kanji list from the example parallel text I made for Part 1 of the series.

Tools, Places, And Instructions

1. You need Editpad Pro, because we will be playing with regular expressions (regex) after this. Also, you should have OpenOffice Calc. (I put these apps as requirements in the Introduction.)

2. Professor Jim Breen’s WWWJDIC. (Yes, that site will be your best friend from now on.)

3. Ten Nights of Dreams, by Natsume Souseki. (Hosted on Aozora.)

I would advocate that you trace the steps I’ve outlined below closely; the reason being that the regular expressions I made can be quite difficult to decipher if you don’t know what they are or how they function.

(A quick note to the regex wizards, if there be any reading this entry: please don’t laugh at my regex functions! I realize that mine are rather primitive in form. One could probably render them more efficiently. And yet, they suffice for the task at hand. That is why I have chosen to leave them as is. Still, should have you any suggestions in mind, I’d be most pleased to have a go at them.)

The Steps

You should be able to complete the following steps in less than 15 minutes. If you’re confused, click on the links; the screen captures are there to help you.

Here we go:

1. Select and copy (shortcut key: CTRL-V) the Japanese text. (At this point, make sure that Notepad2 is using the UTF-8 file encoding! Click File -> Encoding -> UTF-8.)

2. Fire up Editpad Pro. Paste into it what you had copied.

3. Open the Search bar. (Shortcut key: CTRL-F.) The ‘Regular expression’ box should be ticked.

4. In the Search field, insert this code:


[ぁ-ヿ０-９0-9]|[｡-ﾟ\n．、”　\-\s（）。※(「」＋―]


The ‘Replace’ field should be left empty.

And now, for the cool part: click ‘Highlight’. This has the effect of highlighting those sections the regex function covers.

5. Now press ‘Replace All’. All non-ideographic elements would be removed, leaving you then with just the Chinese characters. (Many of them will be duplicates.)

Now copy everything. (Shortcut key: CTRL-A, then CTRL-C.)

(An explanation as to why this step is necessary: If we feed the search process with the original text as is, we increase the possibility of a timeout error. So, by stripping the text of all but kanji, we are able to feed more kanji (thus, obtaining more output as well), yet at the same time we also minimize the possibility of a timeout error.)

6. Head on to WWWJDIC’s Kanji Database.

7. Paste what you had copied into the text field, and hit Search. The kanji characters, their search-codes and definitions will be enumerated, en masse.

Unfortunately, most of what had been generated is superfluous for our purposes. (After all, we only need the kanji characters and their respective definitions.) So we need to remove the extras.

For now, just select and copy all that’s on the page. (Shortcut key: click anywhere, then press CTRL-A.)

8. Go back to Editpad Pro, and paste what you had copied. Now, do the whole regex-replace thing again, but use this code instead:


(\s\d[\d\w].*([あ-ん]|[ア-ン])|\sSODA|\sSOD)|(^[(a-z)(A-Z)\n-].*)


9. And we have a kanji list! What’s great is that the kanji(s) and their definitions (inclusive of duplicates) appear in the exact order they do in the original text. If you’re satisfied with this text list, you’re already done. If not, continue.

10. Still in Editpad: We need to make sure the data is formatted nicely, to help OpenOffice Calc import it more easily. So, let’s do another search-replace again, but use the following regex functions:


Search: (?<=\p{lo})((\s|-\s)(?!=([a-z]|)))
Replace: \t


What the above function does: it will select only the whitespaces in between kanji and their definitions, and will convert them into tabs once you hit ‘Replace All’; do just that.

Now, select and copy everything.

(Careful readers may notice that I used a negative lookbehind function as a subexpression of the larger positive lookbehind function. This feels redundant, I know, but, in my humble opinion, it keeps everything safe and dandy, by imposing a double check on both characters to the left and right of the whitespace.)

11. Fire up OpenOffice Calc, and do a Paste. A ‘Text Import’ window appears. Make sure the ‘Tabs’ box is ticked. (And the ‘Space’ box, unticked.)

12. You’re done! (Take note that the list includes duplicates, so if you want to have them removed, read the following section. Otherwise, skip to the last section, the Side-Notes.)

Kanji List - Uniques Only (No Duplicates)

(optional — continued from the previous section)

1. Completely highlight the two columns with data. Then, from the menu, select: Data -> Filter -> Standard Filter.

2. Change the field in the Value drop-down box to ‘not empty’.

3. Click ‘More’, then tick the ‘No duplication’ box. Also, tick the ‘Copy results to…’ box, and insert this value into the field below it:


(-undefined-) -> C1:D1


5. A new list, without duplicates, has been created in the 3rd column and 4th column. Scroll up and down the spreadsheet to check.

Now, just delete data from the 1st and 2nd columns, then move the contents from 3rd and 4th column there.

6. And you’re completely done! All you’ve left to do is to apply the tips from Part 1 to make your spreadsheet look good.

Side-Notes

I understand that some people may question the necessity of being able to create kanji lists my way, when there are already gloss generators (such as this one) out there.

Why I decided to make my own kanji lists: Firstly, the generators out there are great, but I really dislike having duplicates in my printed kanji lists. I want each kanji to appear only once. Secondly, I’d rather that the kanji list be presented in a way that appeals to me, which is something that can’t be done with list generators. Thirdly, I like having control over each step of the output process.

If I’ve helped you out in any way, do let me know.

The Lines-Replace Method

This entry will teach you how to make parallel texts quickly and efficiently.

A quick explanation: The main purpose and use of this method is to generate, in raw text format, a list of sentences separated by newlines. (The ‘\n’ character.)

Spreadsheet apps are able to import them with greater ease as such.

What You Will Have In Your Hands

Here’s the end result of this tutorial:

You’ll be making that yourself, with a bit of guidance from yours truly.

Content and Copyright Issues

The above is a parallel text snippet of 夢十夜 (Yume Jyuu Ya) - Ten Nights of Dreams, as penned by Natsume Souseki, the distinguished Japanese author.

I would recommend anyone who’s interested in Japanese to start off with Ten Nights of Dreams: the horror-fantasy theme the story plays with makes it a fantastic and fascinating introduction to the world of Japanese literature. (It does not use complex grammar either, so beginners should be able to cope well.)

For this tutorial, I have chosen to use Natsume Souseki, as the copyright for his works have expired. (So I’ll be safe from any legal repercussions.) However, the translations I’m using were obtained in their entirety from No-Sword; I therefore reserve and attribute full credit to him for that. (I hope the author won’t mind, as I’m not making any profit out of this exercise.)

So, visit these sites to get what you need for this tutorial: the original Japanese version of Ten Nights of Dreams. (The site, Aozora, is something like a Japanese version of Project Gutenberg.) Get the translations from No-Sword too.

You may also download the example parallel text if you like. (It’s in OpenDocument format though.)

Now, read on.

The (Twelve) Steps

My example will use the story from the First Night in its entirety. I’ve taken a lot of screen captures; so click on the links for a visual guide if you’re confused as to what you should do.

The steps outlined below may seem complicated, but really, they would take only take 5 minutes of your time to complete.

1. Select and copy (shortcut key: CTRL-V) the Japanese text. (At this point, make sure that Notepad2 is using the UTF-8 file encoding! Click File -> Encoding -> UTF-8.)

2. Fire up Notepad2. Paste what you’ve copied.

3. (EXPLANATION: Sentences in Japanese are often demarcated by the ‘ 。’ symbol. Therefore, we will use that marker as a line-ending to denote where sentences begin and end.) Open up Replace Text (shortcut key: CTRL-H), and insert the following into the empty fields:


Search String: 。
Replace With: 。\n


Make sure you don’t forget to tick the “Transform backslashes” box. Then click Replace All.

4. Now you’ve got a list of sentences, aligned nicely. However, it’s a bit messy: some sentences have blank lines in between. Not a problem. Select all text (Shortcut key: CTRL-A), then click Edit -> Block -> Remove Lines. (Shortcut key: ALT-R.)

5. Once you’ve done that, the sentences should look much cleaner. Now, select everything (shortcut key: CTRL-A) that’s present in the text file, and copy them.

6. Fire up OpenOffice Calc. Paste what you have (shortcut key: CTRL-V) in the first column/row. A new window should open, asking you to configure the character set and separator options. Unicode, the default character set should work fine; as for the separator, leave it on “Tab”. Press OK.

7. You’ve now a spreadsheet with perfectly aligned sentences, but with an ugly and jagged appearance. What we need is some formatting magic. But first, enable the use of specific fonts for Asian languages. (Click Options -> Language Settings; at the ‘Enhanced language support area’, ]tick the ‘Enabled for Asian languages’ box. Then hit OK.)

8. Now press F11. In the Styles and Formatting window, right-click ‘Default’, then click ‘Modify’. Click the tab called Fonts. Change the font under ‘Asian text font’ to something you like. (I have a bit of a preference for Meiryo myself, and would highly recommend it.) Next, click on the ‘Alignment’ tab. Select ‘Top’ from the Vertical drop-down list, and under ‘Properties’, tick the ‘wrap text automatically’ box.

9. Voila! You now have something that resembles a parallel text. But we’re only half-done.

10. Repeat steps 1-9, but use the English translation this time around. (Here are the translations from No-Sword, if you missed the link above.) Also, take note that you should use the normal period fullstop character, ‘.’, instead of ‘。’, this time around.

So:


Search String: .
Replace With: .\n


When you paste the data into the spreadsheet, take care to do so in the 2nd column.

11. At this point, you should have something that looks like this: a dual-parallel text. We’re nearly done. Now use the shortcut keys ALT-Left Arrow/ALT-Right arrow to gauge the width of the columns for both the English and Japanese language cells. (Alternatively, you could also drag the column headers.)

12. Select all cells (shortcut key: CTRL-A). Then, click ‘Format’ -> Default Formatting.

Done! All that’s left is for you to beautify the spreadsheet, just the way you like it.

Side Notes

The parallel sentences may not be nicely aligned against each other sometimes. Manual inspection and correction may be necessary.

The line-replacement method I’ve been using, as outlined above, may seem fairly obvious to some. But it would surprise you how many do not employ it, thus wasting valuable time and energy making parallel-texts manually.

Lastly, if I’ve helped you out, do let me know. And, if you’ve any tips or suggestions, please do share. Look forward to the next tutorial, which will be concerned with making kanji lists.

Just the other day a friend brought up the topic of marriage.

See, the topic would have been just fine… if she hadn’t been so ultra-idealistic about it.

Nooooooooooooo. She just had to dump the whole fluffy bunnies, rainbows and butterflies, sugar and spice, sweets and chocolates, azure blue oceans and clear skies, life-is-so-perfect, “What A Wonderful World” batshit on my ass, managing it all in less than 5 minutes flat.

(Please pick a phrase: ’supernatural’, or ‘typical female’. You may use either one to describe her mutant powers, depending on how sexist you would like to come off sounding. )

(Note: No offense meant to Louis Armstrong.)

Then, she asked me for my opinion.

… Heh.

The Conversation

I chimed in, “Well, I’m not against the idea of marriage.”

“Great,” she replied.

“… But if I ever find myself about to be shackled by one, I’m going to at least have my body tattooed and painted beforehand, with legal documents, ordinance mantras, cursed statutes, holy judgments and magic seals so powerful they could even seal up Nine-Tails’ chakra. And, if it would be absolutely necessary for me to pull off awesome ninjitsu summoning powers and shit, I’d summon Johnnie Cochran instead of huge-ass giant frogs or snakes or slugs. He’d definitely be of use to me, comparatively speaking.”

She looked at me, amused. With one eyebrow raised.

“… Right, Zafran.”

I continued. “As always. And, I’m also going to make sure that I would have an assload of other contracts at arm’s length, covering all of the ancillary matters. You know — prenuptial agreements, asset declarations, all that jazz. All so microscopic in detail it’d make Malaysian politicians cringe if they were to be held that accountable.”

She looked at me, mortified. “But Zafran, that’s like… quantifying love!”

“… Plus, at least 20 witnesses for the registration process. The whole thing will be televised, and encoded in MP3 format, then down-sampled so that I can easily upload it to Creative Commons for the whole world to see, and testify as witnesses to, for that time when the Gates of Hell lets loose a woman’s fury. And oh, what the hell. Since I’m at it, I might even fill out child custody forms in advance too. Just in case.”

“And, pray tell, who would ever marry you should you continue being this anal?”

“Myself, of course. I’d be honoured to. Anyway, if my future chick doesn’t want to marry me because of ‘love transcends all’ issues, I’ll just go find some other chick-lah. Senang kan? (Simple right?)”

“No way.”

“Yes way. If you enjoy being sucked clean and dry — I mean that financially, by the way — and have everything you own split into two just because the other party had some RM6,000 contribution in a RM400,000 higher-purchase agreement, then feel free to be my guest and jump into marriage and be made love to by human leeches.”

“And you’re suggesting that…-”

“Oh, sorry dear. I forget that you’re a woman sometimes.”

“Right. And how would your future wife ever talk to you?”

“Through my accountant, of course. Psychic mediums are fine by me too.”

“Uh-huh. Just how are you going to convince her parents to take you up then?”

“I dunno. How the hell would I know? Thank God for my Family Law studies. It’ll be me versus centuries-worth-of-Malaysian tradition. Like a skinny guy against a sumo wrestler. Fun stuff. And you haven’t heard the other stuff too, have you.”

“… What other stuff?”

His Lordship Returns

Sorry, can’t talk about the ‘other stuff’. Suffice to say that it’s offensive, so I won’t be writing about it.

Anyway, the only reason this post came about is because His Lordship, The Malay Male, made His Return a while ago, and posted something related to this just recently. And I just couldn’t resist from sharing my insignificant and biased thoughts as well.

So, yes, go and read ‘Semusim di Syurga: Proses Memelayukan Diri‘.

(Warning: The blog post is in Malay, and depending on your sensitivity level, can come across as being very, very offensive, or ten times that. But it’s sharp, realistic, and totally balls-to-the-walls, which is why it should warrant at least one reading from you.)

——–

I intend to make a series of entries, chronicling the way I go about learning languages; in particular, the Japanese language. I will share any and all methods that I’ve come to devise myself over the past few months.

Some of these methods have been of immense help to me. I hope the same will hold for you as well.

(The methods may still be applicable even if you’re learning other languages. If you find that they are, do let me know.)

What I Offer

I’ll teach you how to make this, in 20 minutes or less:

Tempted yet?

What You Will Have In Your Hands

1. A parallel text of a full short-story or novel.

(Nearly-perfectly) aligned in form, sorted English-Japanese, or Japanese-English, as you please. Requiring only minimal editing or fomatting to have it entirely your way.

The good thing is that my method is fairly automated. (In comparison, the effort you would have to spend doing the same thing manually could deprive you of some few nights of sleep. Yes, I know. I speak from experience.)

2. A list of kanji.

Appearing in the exact order you encounter them in the Japanese text. Without duplicates.

Accompanying definitions included.

The Benefits

As I’ve discovered, the benefits of having something like the above are plenty.

1. The aligned texts are great for printing. Better yet, since you can select individual or batch parts (with the accompanying translations), you can easily extract a page or two for practice for whenever the computer’s not around.

2. The data can be easily sorted. We are using spreadsheets, after all.

3. The data can be exported. For use with Anki, or any other SRS apps of your choice. (So long as they support *.csv or *.tsv files.)

4. You can select your own font-type and size. This I find to be a huge incentive, especially if you’re a Meiryo junkie like me.

5. Easily cross-refer to kanji and their meanings. No need to waste time hunting down definitions by poring through Remembering The Kanji (if you’re an RTK user) or kanji dictionaries, especially if you don’t have a ready Internet access nearby.

6. And so on and so forth.

I love regular expressions, and I use them a lot, so be prepared to play with them a bit. (And don’t worry — if you follow the tutorial properly, you won’t even need to know what they are to make parallel texts like the above. I’ll try to make the tutorial as clear as possible.)

The Tools You’ll Need

All that I mention below are either free, open-source software, or (usable) shareware.

Other tools better or more efficient than the ones I suggest probably exist. (And if they do, and you use them, please recommend them to me by way of a comment.) For the moment though, I’ll make the best use of what I already have.

1. Notepad2. The original Notepad bundled with Windows XP is lacking in features, and that’s why we need Notepad2.

2. Editpad Pro. The only reason why I’ve included this here is because I like the regex engine, which I think beats the one in Notepad++. Also, Editpad Pro has the ability to highlight regex searches, which I love and think is absolutely fantastic. (Pardon my enthusiasm.)

3. Open Office Calc. (Alternatively, Microsoft Excel). I will only illustrate my examples using Calc though.

In The Meantime

I’m currently a bit busy with exams, so I’ll get about completing the tutorials as soon as possible.

I’m dead serious.

Amongst other things, it listed down the personality traits that made Hitler… well, Hitler. It seems that the man was anal-retentive, immensely demanding, and fiercely opinionated. He also believed himself to be some sort of saviour.

All of this got me thinking, “Great, I’m already set on the right path to triggering another World War myself.”

Then I read this article today: Wired - How Apple Got Everything Right By Doing Everything Wrong.

Having pondered through Steve Jobs’ character, I felt enlightened. And somewhat delighted too, seeing that I share the personality traits of a tech-industry leader, especially one whose oral spits are weighed in gold and whose corporate moves are shadowed down to the nanometer.

Plus, as a CEO, I’ve always admired him. (I’d put him right next to Larry Ellison. Sorry, Bill.)

The Fruity (And Allegedly Evil) Soothsayer

What’s great about him: Jobs’ would not stop at being a mere perfectionist, who “would scrutinize everything, down to the pixel level.”

No.

He simply transcends that level:

… his autocracy is balanced by his famous charisma — he can make the task of designing a power supply feel like a mission from God.

Imagine that.

Getting other people to feel all pious and righteous for doing something important that most people would never pay attention to. (I offer a more palatable analogy of the above for comparative purposes: “… he can make the task of feeding the cats feel as important as the dissemination of a prophetic message.”)

And the capacity to inspire other people to do their job with a “messianic zeal”? Whoa.

And I absolutely love this part, considering that I’ve been plastered with the label numerous times over the course of my life:

“Steve proves that it’s OK to be an asshole,” says Guy Kawasaki, Apple’s former chief evangelist. “I can’t relate to the way he does things, but it’s not his problem. It’s mine. He just has a different OS.”

Apparently, Steve Jobs is just like yours truly.

Conclusion

If things go the way they should, then in 10 year’s time, not only would I be an ultra-charismatic self-acclaimed messianic leader of a multi-racial army (whose soldiers each have injected into their ears a 1-terabyte zPod of my own make and direction), I’d also have triggered World War 3 and inspired several peace treaties.

Not bad, not bad.

There be dragons and serpentine geeks prowling about today’s post. Leave now, or tread carefully. You have been warned.

——————–

I got my furry paws on one particular book today: Mastering Regular Expressions.

(This time, it’s for good. Oh, and while I was at it, I managed to pick up the Pocket Reference as well.)

I’ve been dying to get the book, having intended its purchase since a while ago. (But my wallet, and its thinness thereof, would not agree with my intentions, which is why I’ve had to put off the purchase until… well, just now.)

So standing before you today is a very happy man.

Why I Love Scientology Regular Expressions

I’m a recent proselyte to the regular expressions cult, really. At some point in the past year, after being fortunate enough to witness a miracle involving regex functions, I had then chosen to embrace the powers it offered me.

And we move to the present.

These days, most of the stuff I deal with require that I parse through oceans of raw text for duplicate strings, broken tags and/or repetitive string patterns. I’d often be very willing to cut the ordeal short by some automated means; after all, why would anyone want to deprive himself of precious living time? (Unless, of course, he were the kind to derive sadomasochistic pleasure from poring through endless lines of dirty strings, and you of all people would know that such a person could never be me. *Ahem.*)

And here is where regex functions come in. Them being the immensely useful creatures that they are, one would need only a single line of an elegantly pieced code, and that by itself would be enough to strip and sweep away all of the dirt, thus removing any need for endless hours of pointless rote cleaning.

Something like:

[^"\\\r\n]*(?:\\.[^"\\\r\n]*)*

Suffice to say that ever since I discovered regular expressions, one constant thought would always haunt my newly enlightened self whilst I go about any job.

And that thought, is this:

“Baby, where have you been all my life?”

So obviously, a coding bible of some sort, in printed form, like the one I acquired today, would make a lovely addition to the arsenal.

We now march onwards, in search of the Holy Grail (of Regex Functions).

——–

Speaking of which, I intend to write a tutorial on how I’ve used regex functions (combined with a number of other search-replace methods) to learn Japanese. So if you’re reading this, Khatzumoto-sensei, look forward to a hefty entry on that soon, yeah.

The two-thirds majority previously held by the ‘ruling’ party has been broken.

The Opposition parties have finally managed to rip out the red carpet from under the talons of the ‘ruling’ party, who’ve been holding on to it so firmly, and comfortably, for many past consecutive terms. (Or decades, if you’d rather like to count that way.)

And, if my shallow knowledge of Malaysian history does not fail me at this point, I believe that this is quite unprecedented.

(And some people would undoubtedly find it very difficult to throw their weight (in Parliament) this time around.)

Oh, and with four five states in hand and perhaps one other in coming, it’s definitely an interesting time for the Opposition. (And a painful one for the ‘ruling’ party.)

In fact, I have already expended a considerable portion of my life’s battery merely going over the savoury literary meals they have on offer there; poking and poring through the available texts, comparing between and pondering the stylistic choices of different writers, reading, reading, reading and then doing more of just that.

There’s so much to read (and you know you’d never be done with that anyway) that half the excitement comes from wondering, “Hmm, where does this little story lead to?” (Please read that using the Dee-Dee tone from Dexter’s Laboratory.)

And when you’re done with one language, there’s always more where that stuff came from.

Project Gutenberg has come to be of greater use to me ever since I begun my studies of French and Japanese. Classic literature, from different languages, made available to me with immediacy, at the ultra-sexy cost of nothing. Ooooh. (It also came to mean that I wouldn’t have to waste money on the purchase of foreign-language books anymore, seeing that I would not be able to attempt most of them without the assistance of a dictionary anyway. (Yes, the advent of internet dictionaries have made my page-flicking hands weary and resistant of paper dictionaries.))

There’s just one problem: the offerings on Project Gutenberg are mostly literature-based. Which is really beyond excellent if you’re only into reading and writing, but not really so if you’d like to reproduce the same thing in (geek-jargon alert) real-time speech.

Let us consider the implications: should I learn a language — say, Japanese, or French — entirely from literary sources — a possible feat too, by the way, and this has already been successfully attempted by many, so I would not consider myself a pioneer of any sort as regards this — and I then try to speak to a native speaker of the language using what I’ve learned, the first analogy that comes to mind is this: of someone speaking English to another whilst employing the Sherlockian/Victorian tenor.

Indeed, a pompous, though (of course) stylishly anachronistic affair.

But, what the hell.

So these days I’m getting off from trying to memorize Cyrano de Bergerac, and the Japanese translation of the Sherlock Holmes stories. (Specifically, A Scandal in Bohemia. I love that one.) If you’re wondering why, blame Heinrich Schliemann: I’m just applying his methods to my language studies. Anyway, I hope to have internalized sufficient sentences to be able to have improved my command of both languages (especially with regards to Japanese grammar, which I find rather difficult) by the end of the year.

And whenever I’m tired, I remind myself of Joseph Conrad. Woot.

(The judgments come from five different states, the applicable law of each being either common law or its derivation thereof. Look at the quotations in detail, and try to take notice of the how the usage of English differs from region to region. And if you’re wondering, I intentionally chose to exclude the names of cases and the names of the judges who had decided them. But if you are still curious, a simple Google search will reveal to you their details.)

I do this quotation thingy out of sheer curiosity; also, I’d like to allow the curious reader an insight into the difficulty inherent in deciphering (no, not understanding, or comprehending, or interpreting, but deciphering) legal judgments.

(Because some people I know actually think that law is as easy as knowing how to waffle your way about words.)

Enjoy.

——

India:

That is also the reason why both these Articles begin with a non obstante clause and thus in our opinion exclude the concept of domicile for the purposes of these Articles. If that was so and if the concept of domicile is excluded from these two Articles and we have no doubt that it is so excluded by the use of the non obstante clause in both these Articles, the word migrated used therein must be given the wider meaning. If we give the narrower meaning to it we shall be introducing the concept of domicile in these two Articles which was obviously not intended by the Constitution-makers and in any case was definitely negatived by the use of the non obstante clause at the beginning of both these Articles.

England:

The rule that you are to love your neighbour becomes in law, you must not injure your neighbour; and the lawyer’s question, Who is my neighbour? receives a restricted reply. You must take reasonable care to avoid acts or omissions which you can reasonably foresee would be likely to injure your neighbour. Who, then, in law is my neighbour? The answer seems to be - persons who are so closely and directly affected by my act that I ought reasonably to have them in contemplation as being so affected when I am directing my mind to the acts or omissions which are called in question.

America:

It was not until after the War Between the States that legislation began generally to replace the common law. Most of these initial statutes dealt severely with abortion after quickening but were lenient with it before quickening. Most punished attempts equally with completed abortions. While many statutes included the exception for an abortion thought by one or more physicians to be necessary to save the mother’s life, that provision soon disappeared and the typical law required that the procedure actually be necessary for that purpose.

Australia:

Here the question is different. It seems to me a mistake to approach the case by asking whether the plaintiff is precluded by considerations of public policy from asserting a right of action for negligence. The proper inquiry seems to me to be simply: is there for him a right of action? That depends upon whether in the circumstances the law imposed a duty of care; for a right of action and a duty of care are inseparable. The one predicates the other. Duty here does not mean an abstract and general rule of conduct. It is not the duty to God and neighbour of the catechist’s question.

Malaysia:

I cannot but conclude in the circumstances that there is in fact by the exercise of the power conferred by s 418A on the Public Prosecutor an incursion into the judicial power of the Federation and that any other view would ex necessitate rei result in relegating the provisions of article 121(1) vesting the judicial power of the Federation in the curial entities specified to no more than a teasing illusion, like a munificent bequest in a pauper’s will. The power of the Public Prosecutor under s 418A is uncanalized, unconfined and vagrant.