Lately, I share a lot of kanji, words, and phrases from Japanese in my twitter stream, but today's word demands a bit more of an explanation. Plus it has one of my favorite units of time built into it: the kalpa.
How long is a kalpa, you ask? In Hindu and Buddhist cosmology, they explain it this way sometimes: Imagine an immense block of stone. Every century, an angel descends from heaven to give the stone a brief wipe with a silky cloth. That stone will be worn down a little at a time by this process. But the stone will be gone long before a kalpa can finish.
Less poetically, some clock a kalpa at 4.32 billion years.
Anyways, looking at today's word, 億劫 okku, meaning troublesome or annoying, we can see the kanji 億 (100 million) and 劫 (a kalpa). So it refers to a task that would take 100 million kalpas, or 4.32x10^17 years. Very troublesome indeed.
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Bonus kalpa fun: A webcomic. The kalpa part comes around panel 31.
What? The post title sounds like what-ism? Wait, I haven't even talked about the black people part. Hello? Did you just hang up in the middle of my blog post? How do you even do that?
This time I am going to talk about something that was one of those things where I turned to the J girl I was dating and was like, I bet x is true about the Japanese language. And she was like what are you talking about. And then I looked it up and was all, yeah I was right! Kind of. For the dumb luck reasons. And then she's like, huh.
See there is this word, 素人 (shirouto) that means beginner, and this other word, 玄人 (kurouto) that means expert and they are antonyms. Know that the 人 in both of them means person. Based on their pronunciation*, I figured that they were at one time written as the much more intuitive 白人 and 黒人. Of course, if you can read simple Japanese you know that 白人 and 黒人 mean white person and black person respectively, and these days they refer to races. But back in the day they referred to beginners and experts.
From the sources I looked into, it's not clear how 白 (white) became 素 (foundation) (I had just figured it was to avoid confusion once white dudes started visiting Japan, but don't see any support for or against that). 素 could refer to the baseness of the beginner. The character for white used back in the day referred to a white-painted performer (I would hazard they mean geisha-like performers).
I also folk-etymologized myself into thinking that one gets a little dirty with experience. Nah, they just used the opposite kanji character than that of white.Gogen says that 玄 has "profoundly not plain" nuance, as opposed to 黒 (black). Even though Gogen wasn't sure about why they switched up the white kanji, it's cool with the reason for the black one.
白人 and 黒人 came along later, I guess, but it's amusing to this white boy to note that 白人 is still listed as being both a racial classification and a reference to beginners even to this day. Also, prostitutes. 黒人 is just a race. Or at least a skin color; I don't know if it implies geographical or anthropological concepts. Race is kinda silly and divisive concept anyways.
*: To summarize phonetic and kanji changes:
白人 shirohito -> 白人 shirauto -> 白人 shirouto -> 素人 shirouto
黒人 kurohito -> 玄人 kurouto
A short post this time. At least that's the plan. Never know when I am going to type up a bunch of stuff no one really cares about. Why just this morning I did a writeup of ways the Monster Manual monsters could be incorporated into Athasian cosmology. That is just one example of things I do all the time that-- hey, nice trick Claytonian, but we are getting to the meat of the post now! You sure? Yes I'm--D'oh! Stop that!
I was curious as to how 未曾有 (mizou, unprecedented) came about. So I looked it up on that Gogen site from the sidebar of this blog. Here's what I found. In the form of a breakdown, cause I love those.
未曾有 Breakdown
未 mi: heretofore
曾 zo: once
有 u: exist
gloss: not existing once before
origin: from the sanskrit adbhuta, via Chinese transcription, referring to the miracles and pious acts of the Bhudda. Towards the end of the Kamakura era of history, It became twisted to mean both good and bad unprecedented things.
I first noticed this word around the time former PM Aso Taro was mangling it. See, readings are hard sometimes for native speakers with elite educations too. I found an article about him and good breakdown for this word after typing the previous sentence. See, this post is not actually unprecidented at all. I leave you with a video of Asoisms:
This vid (a vid not by me for once!) got me wondering about the kanji they use for ika, or squid, in Japan.
Thanks to the ol' Gogen, I found the information that I will provide in a breakdown.
烏賊 Breakdown!
烏 i= Crow
賊 ka=Enemy
Gloss: Squid
Why: An old Chinese legend claims that squid like to play possum on the surface of the water, hoping to lure in hungry black feathered carrion so that they can wrap them in in a tentaclely death grip. Thus the kanji for crow+enemy.
Now as to the verbal component of ika, nobody knows for sure, but some think it may have something to do with words like ikatsui (stern) or ikameshii (stern), or perhaps with word bits like i (expressing white)+ ka (expressing katai, or hard). All I know is ika wrestler is an awesome concept.
After 30 years, Japan is ready to admit the truth about Pacman. Those little dots he eats are coffee beans. I held the proof in my hands today at a conbini. Behold the 僕らのコーヒー Pacman packaging.
Quite a nice way to celebrate an anniversary. It includes a QR code to a free game, but as I can't do QR on an iPhone, I'm outta luck. Like a ghost being chased by a giant yellow mouth that just had his morning coffee.
On the subject of coffee in Japan, all Japanese 101 students learn that coffee is pronounced kōhi in Japan (it makes for an easy katakana lesson). I've always found this strange, given coffee's ateji: 珈琲. Now you 101 students are probably scratching your head because your 101 kanji doesn't go up to rarely seen kanji like these. Prompting me to take a
C-c-cc-coffee Breakdown:
珈: ornamental hairpin (never used)
琲: string of many pearls (also never used)
gloss: coffee?!
These are truly ateji being used just for their sound. But that sound seems so off to my American ears in part because 珈 has a 力 in it's elements. Kanji with 力 inside them are usually pronounced ka. Kanji with a 非 in them are usually pronounced hi, so I'm cool with that one. So logically, it should be kahi, right? I looked it up on Wikipedia, and it seems that the spoken word came into Japan from Holland but the ateji seem to have been put together by one Udagawa Yōan, a scholar of the Dutch (Western) world that, in between creating new Japanese words for elements, decided that coffee (dutch: koffie) was 珈琲. There were a few other kanji/katakana tried out back in the day too: 可否, カウヒイ, and 哥非乙. These all suggest a ka sound too! My guess is that at the end of the day, Chinese's 咖啡 had the most influence on the choice of ateji. But even they pronounce it kāfēi. Hey, you may be thinking I just wrote the same kanji I've been ranting again. But look close. It's time... for my first ever
So there you have it. Arabic word, Dutch/Japanese pronunciation, Chinese characters, but not the right ones. If you are in Japan, see if you can spot 珈琲 or a ghost on a can or carton of coffee. But if you spot a 啡, don't touch the can.
Recently, I ran across a post about the phrase 刎頚の友 (funkei no tomo, or decapitation friend), which seems to translate as "a friendship that could survive mutual beheadings." Be sure to check out the comments on the post for the origin of this phrase and how it may relate to seppuku.
I got interested in the kanji 刎, which seemed to be supplying the cutting meaning of the compound (頚 means neck) at that point. It's made from 勿 (absence) and 刀 (sword). It appears in the word 刎ねる (haneru) which means many things including flip, spatter, hit with a vehicle, and of course chop off a head.
Here are some other goodies WWWJDIC supplied for me:
刎 words: 刎 [はね] (suf,ctr) (arch) counter for helmets, etc. 刎死 [ふんし] (n,vs) decapitating oneself 自刎 [じふん] (n,vs) committing suicide by slitting one's throat 刎ね上がる [はねあがる] (v5r,vi) to jump up, to spring up
Intriguingly, a word with the same pronunciation as funkei, 焚刑, means burning at the stake. That may have led to some confusion at the courthouse, eh? Ha, ha, I kill me.
-- Bonus morbid knowledge: Ladies don't do seppuku, they commit jigai.
Yesterday I neglected to include 仙台 (Sendai, a city in Japan) in the magical hermit post*, because I thought it didn't match at all. But when Alex brought it up in the comments, I decided to look in Wikipedia. It says,
At this time, Sendai was written as 千代 (which literally means "a thousand generations"), because a temple with a thousand Buddha statues(千体,sentai) used to be located in Aobayama. Masamune changed the kanji to 仙臺, which later became 仙台 (which literally means "hermit on a platform"). The kanji was taken from a Chinese poem that praised a palace created by the Emperor Wen of Han China, comparing it to a mythical palace in the Kunlun Mountains. It is said that Masamune chose this kanji so that the castle would prosper as long as a mountain inhabited by an immortal hermit.
Turns out that the city's name has a pretty cool back story after all. Learning gets.
BTW on the kanji above, 体 is a counter for humanoid forms, such as statues. 臺 is just the old form of 台.
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* Magical hermit post is so the next blogging craze.
I've been studying a lot lately, and during my breaks I often spend a few minutes (and I do try to keep it to just a few) exercising lightly or playing old Japanese SNES games to let my brain rest a bit. A recent game I've been into is a fung shui room builder/RPG called Chaos Seed which is kind of... unique. Anyways, I noticed the kanji 仙 (sen) gets thrown around a lot, so I thought I would tell you about some of it's uses that I found.
First off, its basic meaning is hermit, which in Asian culture seems to also mean wizard or immortal. I recall finding when I read about a mosaic at a Bangkok palace that within the omnipresent monkey king-related traditions of Asia, hermits seem to crop up a lot and they often have magical powers. I think it's the influence of ancient Taoism with its immortals. Immortals, like hermits, often dwell in the mountains, so I think this is why they are equivocated. This is all my armchair-summation of Asian mysticism, but I think I got the gist of it.
So here are some of the interesting words I found after 仙 started to intrigue me:
◆ 仙人 [sen'nin] (n) (1) immortal mountain wizard (in Taoism), mountain man (esp. a hermit), (2) one not bound by earthly desires or the thoughts of normal men.
◆ 仙窟 [senkutsu] (n) enchanted cave
◆ 仙女 [senjyo] [sen'nyu] [sen'nyo](n) fairy, nymph, elf
◆ 仙丹 [sentan] (n) the elixir (of life) [there's that immortality I'm talking about]
◆ 仙薬 [senyaku] (n) panacea, elixir (of life)
◆ 仙境 [senkyou] or 仙郷 [senkyou] (n) fairyland, enchanted land
◆ 仙術 [senjyutsu] (n) wizardry, secret of immortality
◆ 仙界 [senkai] (n) dwelling place of hermits, pure land away from the world
◆ 登仙 [tousen] (n,vs) becoming a saint, death of a high-ranking person
◆ 羽化登仙 [ukatousen] (n) a sense of release (as if one had wings and were riding on air)
◆ 神仙 [shisen] (n) (1) mountain wizard, god
A couple that don't have much to do with the running theme:
◆ 歌仙 [kasen] or 詩仙 [shisen] (n) great poet
◆ 酒仙 [shusen] (n) heavy drinker [drunken master? Nah, that would be 酔拳(すいけん, drunken fist)]
I also found talk of the 八仙 (hassen, the eight immortals) on Wikipedia. They remind me of the 七福神 (shichifukujin, seven gods of good luck) of Japan. Oh and speaking of them, once I made a mistake asked an old lady shopkeep how much her 七面鳥 (shichimenchou, meaning turkey, which quite far from a god of luck) figurines cost. We had a good laugh at that.
If you are in term overload, maybe this movie about immortals will recharge your brain. It's like a Chinese lord of the rings.
And yes, there are more parts to this movie on YouTube. I recently found the whole thing here.
When I didn't include kanji I know the meaning of but can read aloud, I scored 1400-500 kanji. When I go back and add those kanji, plus others I didn't know until a second glance/missed due to being inattentive, it goes up by a hundred.
As I said before, I want to create a primitive together with you, the reader. What? No readers? Well I'll push on anyways. So, as far as I've looked, Heiseg never assigned a primitive mnemonic keyword for 品 over 木, as in the following kanji I generated thanks to the previously blogged super tool that is JEDict:
So as you can see, this "product over tree" primitive always provides an on'yomi of ソウ. This has tempted me thus far to try to call it "SOme things", so I could get the reading in there too. But I also noticed while looking at the list that loudness may be a good meaning to get in there somehow. So, if you can rise to the challenge, please leave your idea in the comments: what can we call this primitive? Wild images are good too; I've been thinking about a loud tree with many mouths (product=three mouths), but what would we call it?.
