Reinventing the Wheel: Part 3
Saturday, August 30th, 2008
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Sometimes it’s wonderful to find that the Japanese (or the Chinese before them) have coined a word for concepts that don’t exist in English. But occasionally I have the opposite feeling, as with this compound:
脱輪 (datsurin: wheel going off the road, usually into a ditch; wheel flying off its axle) to take off + wheel
Why did they need to coin a word for these disasters? How often do they happen in Japan?!
Last week we investigated the way 輪 (RIN, wa) can mean “ring, circle, loop.” Now we’ll look at its other meanings, starting with “wheel.”
Wheel Power
At the link, you’ll find sentences in which 輪 means “wheel.”
Free-Wheeling Sentences with 輪 …
Here’s my favorite sentence of that type:
一輪車は車輪がーつしかありません。
Ichirinsha wa sharin ga hitotsu shika arimasen.
A unicycle has only one wheel.
This sentence seems to contain its own inverse! If you take just 輪車は車輪, you find a palindrome! And if you remove hiragana from the sentence, you can find an even longer palindrome: 一輪車車輪ー. How cool is that?!
But … back to reality. The first compound is actually 一輪車 (ichirinsha), rather than 輪車. The word 一輪車 can mean either “unicycle” or “wheelbarrow”! I wonder what kind of confusion that causes. There’s a big difference between a unicycle race and a wheelbarrow race!
If that flusters you, here’s a nice bit of logic:
輪止め (wadome: brakes; wheel stops, wedges, blocks, parking curbs) wheel + to stop
You can’t ask for much more clarity of thought. Brakes stop wheels!
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Posted by Eve Kushner in Kanji Curiosity | 1 Comment »
