The Konomi Yomi: Part 5
Friday, March 7th, 2008
| Quick Links Welcome to Kanji Curiosity | The Basics | Glossary |
If someone said, Konomi wa konomi desu, would you know what they meant? Maybe it would help to see the kanji and kana:
好みは木の実です。
Konomi wa konomi desu.
Or perhaps things remain unclear. If so, a translation should help:
My preference is nuts.
If you still feel a little confused, thrown off, discombobulated, or miffed without quite knowing why, it’s probably because the yomi didn’t shake out as you expected. The kanji here have atypical yomi, compared with what one usually sees for these characters. Here’s the breakdown:
好み (konomi: preference)
This kanji often appears as 好き (suki: liking, taste, choice).
木の実 (konomi or kinomi: nuts, fruits, berries) tree + fruit
You may have been tempted to read 木 and 実 as complete words with the yomi of ki and jitsu, respectively. But in this case, you need to take 木の実 as a unit. There are two possible yomi here: konomi and kinomi. The latter is actually more common, but only the konomi yomi allowed for the wordplay above! I also like konomi because it’s a permutation of kimono!
Whether one reads 木の実 as konomi or kinomi, 実 has the yomi of mi in this word. With that yomi, 実 means “fruit.” (As we saw last week, 実 can also have the yomi of sane, which means the seed or pit inside fruit.) Take, for instance, this term:
実がなる (mi ga naru: to bear fruit; produce a crop)
The meaning is simple and clear. As なる (naru) means “to become,” this construction means “to become fruit” or “to become a crop.”
I should say that if you send 実 out into the world on its own with the yomi of mi, it won’t necessarily conjure up images of peaches or grapes for native speakers. To accomplish that, you’ll need the following word:
果物 (kudamono: fruit) fruit + thing
This word allows you to say, Kudamono o kudasai. (Fruit, please.) This colloquial term is the one you would use in a grocery store, because 果物 refers to picked fruit.
果実 (kajitsu: fruit) fruit + fruit
Don’t use this one in a market. But do use it if you’re talking about fruit growing on trees, the crop yield of a fruit farm, the relative acidity of pineapples and lemons, and the berries that birds eat.
You’ll notice that 果 takes first position in each word, so you might wonder what this kanji has to offer in a fruity discussion. In fact, this character bears striking similarities to 実, in that both can refer to edible or inedible fruit.
We’ve seen the edible sort of fruit thus far in this discussion. With terms such as 果物, 果実, and 木の実, we’re talking about yummy-in-the-tummy kind of fruit.
But then there’s the matter of “inedible” fruit, by which I don’t mean poisonous berries or anything like that! Rather, I’m talking about the “fruits” of one’s labor. Both 実 and 果 can give off the sense of a reward for hard work. More on that next week. Now it’s time for your reward—a Verbal Logic Quiz!
Posted by Eve Kushner in Kanji Curiosity |
March 8th, 2008 at 4:15 am
I hope nobody minds my commenting on the content of a previous entry, because that one is already so crowded (11 comments!) that another comment will never be read! “Yes, I saw him with my own eyes.” does not sound as weird to me as to Eve. It may probably be that we Japanese are much more tolerant or insensitive to redundancy. Look at, for instance, 睡眠: both of the kanji basically mean “sleep”. A certain degree of redundancy is inevitable when one wants to be extremely emphatic (though I don’t think the word 睡眠 belongs to this category). The English language seems to be very strict about avoiding redundancy.
March 9th, 2008 at 7:00 am
I was amused to see that, at the Oscars, the clip they showed from “Atonement” was of the very scene I mentioned—the one where the girl says, “I saw him with my own eyes.” I cringed all over again with my own face.
Actually, the phrase I just used reminds me of one of the more famous redundant phrases in English: Yogi Berra’s “This is like deja-vu all over again.” So maybe we’re not as strict as you think, Hiroshi-san—at least not in baseball (or the game of baseball, as athletes rather redundantly tend to say).
March 9th, 2008 at 5:24 pm
Thank you for gearing the subject toward baseball which happens to be my favorite subject. But are you saying that Yogi Berra epitomizes a typical English speaker? Probably not. Another episode of his: his son asked him to buy an encyclopedia, and his response was “What kind of bicycle is that?”
March 10th, 2008 at 11:26 am
Ha ha ha! I hadn’t heard that one!
No, YB probably isn’t typical–or so one would hope! But it IS interesting that we’ve glorified his malapropisms as we have. Would other cultures do that?!
March 12th, 2008 at 12:07 pm
There is another way to look at the glorification. Sometimes it takes cleverness to come up with a ‘malapropism’. It all depends on how sly the humor is and if it implicitly lets you know it is a joke. Then you are in on the joke as long as you can distinguish between a redundancy or contradiction and what appears to be one. I have always believed Yogi knows the difference which is why he comes up with so many and they’re always witty and, in a way that is difficult to describe, understandable. Ringo Starr was also famous for them..remember ‘A Hard Day’s Night’? What does this have to do with Kanji? I’m vaguely uncertain.
March 13th, 2008 at 2:14 am
Ah, great points, Ameriman (who clearly enjoys inside jokes)! I didn’t know much about YB, so I checked out his site: http://www.yogiberra.com. He’s selling books of his “Yogi-isms,” so chances are pretty good that he coined them on purpose! Can’t imagine that GWB will ever hawk such a book (but then he’s already sold people a whole bill of goods, and I never imagined that either!). Anyway, interesting to reread (or encounter for the 1st time) some of YB’s quotes with a new sense of the intentionality behind them.
Btw, he showed up rather unexpectedly on my TV the same night I wrote my first YB comment! He seemed sharp enough, though I didn’t catch much of the interview.
Meanwhile, the Ringo reference is lost on me. What did he say in this vein?
Finally: What does this have to do with kanji? Everything connects to kanji in some way. Fall in love with it, and you’ll see it everywhere! For instance, even YB must have had kanji on the brain when he said, “We made too many wrong mistakes.” Nothing else so aptly describes the process of reading or drawing kanji!