Quote Originally Posted by lackofwords View Post
  • Can an astrologian also be and astrologian, or are they exclusively an astrologian?
  • Do they need to train as an astrologian before becoming an astrologian?
  • Are all Ishgard Astrologians astrologians, or can they be astrologians?
I've made it sound silly intentionally, because it is silly.

But if this were an actual occupation, can't you imagine the confusion? It's like the difference between calling someone a field medic oppose to being a general physician.
Yes, it's quite easy, and you provided the basic idea. When you ask if there's a doctor in the place and someone says yes, do you know if they're a surgeon, a field medic, a general physician, veterinarian, psychiatrist? Are they even a medical doctor, or are they a physicist, a lawyer, a philosopher, or some other type of doctor?

If you asked your questions aloud in proper Japanese to a Japanese audience, they would be at as much a loss to answer your questions as you intended them to be for English speakers.

This is because they use a homonym. Translated to English, the homonym is lost. The actual comparison would be if you wrote Astrologian as Astrologer but still pronounced it as Astrologian. And since Astrologian and Astrologer mean the exact same thing in English regardless of context, the only way to create the equivalent to the Japanese difference is to add a term to distinguish them; either Ishgardian or Sharlayan.

If you treat Ishgardian Astrologian as the "war-like" term and Sharlayan Astrologer as the "civilian" term, but pronounce them as Astrologian and Astrologian then you have the proper equivalence to Japanese. However, since we in English don't like having specific names to describe generic terms, we just drop the first names and are left with the written Astrologian and Astrologer, and since those are both basically the same term as well, and are pronounced the same for the purposes of this explanation, one of them gets dropped. In this case, that leaves Astrologian behind.