Empty Sky at Night, Kanji-phile’s Delight: Part 1 of 3
Friday, June 8th, 2007
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A Japanese friend wrote a tongue-twister and presented it to me in rōmaji, challenging me to convert the words into kanji and hiragana. I did fine until I encountered this line:
Kono bin itsu kara kara, kinō kara kara, ototoi kara kara?
I associate kara with “from” and “because,” so I thought the repeated kara kara phrases might have meant “because it’s from.” Wrong! For every kara that appeared before a punctuation mark, I should have written 空, meaning “empty” in this case.
For The Answer to
the Kara Kara Puzzle …
Just as kara has multiple personalities, so does 空. Look at all its yomi!
KŪ: sky, empty
a(keru): to empty, leave blank
kara, kara(ppo): empty
muna(shii): empty, vain, futile
sora: sky
su(ku), a(ku): to be empty, unoccupied
utsuke: empty-headed
utsu(ro): hollow, blank
The kun-yomi sora sounds like “to soar” (and sora is even an anagram of “soar”), so it’s easy to remember sora as “sky.” Despite that, I frequently fail to recognize 空, perhaps because its meanings don’t seem to match its shape.
Because 空 can mean both “empty” (for instance, with the kun-yomi kara) and “sky” (with the kun-yomi sora), we can concoct the fun phrase 空の空, kara no sora, “the empty sky.”
Air and Space
The most common words containing 空 involve the concepts of air:
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Posted by Eve Kushner in Kanji Curiosity | 7 Comments »
