The Short and Long of It: Part 1
Saturday, November 17th, 2007
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I find 意 (I: will, heart, mind, thought, meaning, sense) to be one of the cutest kanji around. It reminds me of an upright animal with the following assets:
A head beneath a beret
A blocky torso
Two legs, a long tail that curls around, and … well, just
pretend we’ve got a male animal in our midst
Put it all together, and you get something like this:
Long-Tailed Weasel
Photo credit: Anne Elliott
No beret, but the tapering of the cheeks matches the lines in 立! This long-tailed weasel likely sports a long, flexible tail, even if we can’t tell here.
Short and Sweet
Speaking of length, 意 figures into some unusually short words:
意味 (imi: meaning) meaning + meaning
意義 (igi: significance) meaning + meaning
意気 (iki: spirits, morale) heart + spirit
意志 (ishi: will, intention, determination) intention + to intend
意思 (ishi: intent, purpose, mind) intention + to think
Whereas Julius Caesar created the bellicose phrase Veni, vidi, vici (I came, I saw, I conquered), we can concoct softer, more Zenlike versions in Japanese: Imi, igi, iki (Meaning, significance, spirits) or Imi, igi, ishi (Meaning, significance, intent).
Though they say opposites attract, 意 with its ultra-short yomi has paired off with several other short yomi, producing compounds that you can say in a flash:
鋭意 (eii: eagerly, earnestly, zealously) sharp + idea
This compound consists only of vowels!
辞意 (jii: intention to resign) to resign + intention
Look at all the letters in the English definition versus in jii!
他意 (tai: another intention, ulterior motive, malice)
other + intentionI associate tai with a Vietnamese friend (Tai), as well as タイ (Thai) and 鯛 (tai: red sea bream). Now I see that there’s yet another type of tai, this one rather insidious!
配意 (haii: consideration, thoughtfulness)
to concern oneself with + mindIf you draw out your Hai! (Yes!), someone might think you mean 配意!
来意 (raii: purpose of one’s visit) to come + intention
This reminds me of a great Jon Stewart bit about Bush as the “meta-president.” Apparently, Bush thinks he needs to explain his 来意 when he shows up for speeches.
介意 (kaii: worrying about, caring about)
to give a helping hand + intentionDo you kaii about your raii?
The kanji 意 can even stand alone as its own itty-bitty word! The yomi of that word is, of course, i, translating as “feelings,” “thoughts,” or “meaning.”
Sample Sentences with
意 as a Lone Wolf …
That’s true, for example, in the following expression:
意を汲む (i o kumu: to enter into a person’s feelings)
mind + to empathize with
Long and Sweet
It would be misleading, however, to imply that 意 shows up only in brief words. It also appears in this five-kanji compound:
前方不注意 (zenpō-fuchūi: You’re not watching where you’re going!)
Let’s take this apart backward.
不注意 (fuchūi: carelessness, inattention)
注意 (chūi: caution, being careful, warning)
to concentrate on + mind
不- (fu-: prefix meaning not)
前方 (zenpō: forward, ahead of where you are now)
ahead + direction
So 前方不注意 means inattention to the area up ahead. (The breakdown and meaning make most sense when you’re walking backward.)
If a five-kanji compound isn’t long enough for you, try twice as many characters:
注意力不足活動過多症 (chūi-ryoku fusoku katsudō kata shō:
attention deficit-hyperactivity disorder (ADHD))
A person with ADHD will certainly lose interest in this word by the third character. But when it comes to kanji, you’re 汲々としている (kyūkyū toshite iru: to be absorbed in, to think only of), so you’re in it for the long haul (which is what 注意力不足活動過多症 requires!). Here’s the breakdown:
注意 (chūi: caution, being careful, warning)
to concentrate on + mind
力 (ryoku: power, ability)
不足 (fusoku: lack) not + to sufficeSo far, we’re talking about a lack of ability to pay attention.
活動 (katsudō: activity) active + to move
過多 (kata: excess) too much + manyKatsudō kata gives us “excessively active,” or “hyperactive.”
症 (shō: illness)
This is a suffix appended to the names of some illnesses and disorders. We saw it once before, though not as a suffix.
On that cheery note about illnesses and disorders, it must be time for your Verbal Logic Quiz!
Posted by Eve Kushner in Kanji Curiosity |
November 17th, 2007 at 9:47 am
If you’re interested in what cutting-edge Japanese architects are up to, you might want to know about the Tokyo firm SANAA. Architects Kazuyo Sejima and Ryue Nishizawa of SANAA have designed the New Museum of Contemporary Art (soon to open on the Bowery in Manhattan) as a stack of displaced boxes, each one shifted off-center from the level immediately below or above. I have a piece about the museum in an online magazine out of London:
http://www.designbuild-network.com/projects/museum-bowery/
(There’s currently a typo in a pull quote, and I’m hoping someone will fix it, but that hasn’t happened just yet!)
SANAA has also designed three museums in Japan:
The N Museum in Wakayama (1997)
The O Museum in Nagano (1999)
The 21st Century Museum of Contemporary Art in Kanazawa (2004)
If anyone out there knows about the significance of the letters N and O in those names, I’d love to hear the explanation!
November 20th, 2007 at 2:52 am
Even for an average Japanese, ADHD must be more familiar than 注意力不足活動過多症. But kanji have the merit that the rough meaning can be understood instantly. When there is no interstitial hiragana in a word consisting of as many as ten kanji, the word hardly looks Japanese, it looks more like Chinese.
Though a different subject, there was a very amusing sight last week. Japanese sentences and words can be written both vertically and horizontally, but when you write horizontally the rule is to write from left to right. But there is an exception. Can you folks out there guess the exception? On the right side of an automobile! As a car passes you showing its right side (namely, going from left to right), the right end of the word or kanji comes into your sight first. Many trucks used to have corporate names running from right to left on their right sides, but this custom seems to have died out. What I saw last week was “AKANAT” (田中） written on a pick-up truck!
November 22nd, 2007 at 11:36 am
The only comparable thing that English speakers have is that the mirror image of the word “Ambulance” appears on the front of ambulances. That way, the word makes sense when you see it in the rearview mirror (as if you hadn’t already figured out why the vehicle behind you was wailing and flashing its lights).
But if you invert a kanji compound, as you’re saying, couldn’t it cause massive confusion, since the word doesn’t look inverted in any obvious way?
November 24th, 2007 at 6:32 am
Nice to hear about the clever idea of reversing “ambulance”. I don’t think the order of kanji in 救急車 (ambulance) in the front sign is reversed in Japan. It may be that because each kanji has its meaning, unlike letters, so you can instantly recognize the urgent nature of the service by the sight of the kanji 急 alone.
Massive confusion? Going back to the kanji on the right side of a car, if they wrote only 中田, yes, you wouldn’t be able to judge whether they meant 中田 or 田中. In actual cases, they write 田中製作所 (Tanaka Manufacturing Co.) for example. If they write 所作製田中, that clearly means (Nakata Manufacturing. Co.). Even though it looks complicated, confusion is unlikely.
November 24th, 2007 at 7:51 am
Interesting that the 急 would jump out for a native speaker, even though it’s in the middle of 救急車.
Awhile ago, there was an email circulating about how, if you scramble the letters in the middle of a word, it’s still legible/understandable, as long as the 1st and last letters are in the right place. Here was a sample from that mailing:
Aoccdrnig to rscheearch at Cmabrigde Uinervtisy, it deosn’t mttaer in waht oredr the ltteers in a wrod are, the olny iprmoetnt tihng is taht the frist and lsat ltteer be at the rghit pclae. The rset can be a toatl mses and you can sitll raed it wouthit porbelm
I see that there’s been a lot of commentary about all this on the Net, some of it debunking the “research.” For example:
http://www.straightdope.com/columns/050408.html [which also incorporates Chinese characters into the discussion]
http://www.theforumsite.com/forum/post/1848762 [which provides links to other such discussions]
Anyway, this is all a roundabout way of saying that it’s interesting that when it comes to this one word (救急車), perhaps the middle kanji is the most important and the first and last are the least significant!
Btw, I think 救急車 is a really cool compound: rescue + hurry + car. A car that comes to the rescue in a hurry!