Touched by an Angle: Part 1
Friday, September 5th, 2008
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Before boarding a flight to Europe this summer, I passed through the security gate and sat down to put my shoes on again. When I looked up, a multilingual sign caught my attention. In English, it said, “Don’t touch the table,” which struck me as strange. Could someone undermine security merely by touching a table? If so, it seemed there wasn’t much security to be had. I worried about that for a moment until I noticed the Japanese version of this sentence. I’m going from a vague memory here, but the sentence was something like this:
テーブルを触らないでください。
Tēburu o sawaranai de kudasai.
Or was it longer than that? I know I recognized everything except 触.
Leafing through my dictionary just now, I came upon the expression 手を触れるな (Te o fureru na), “Hands off!” Maybe that’s what I saw! Perhaps the airport speaks much more roughly to Japanese people than to others!
At any rate, I deduced that 触 meant “to touch,” but I didn’t know why horn (角) + insect (虫) would combine to have that meaning. Of course, 角 can also mean angle, as in 三角 (sankaku: triangle, three + angles). Did 触 somehow mean “touched by an angle”?
Frustrated at having no way to research this kanji, I kicked myself for not having thought to bring a Japanese dictionary to England and Norway.
I had, however, brought an annotated Japanese book of stories to read on the plane. In a Kawabata sentence, I soon encountered 触 again:
今のことには一言も触れなかった。
Ima no koto ni wa hitokoto mo furenakatta.
She did not say a word about what had just happened.
Here’s what the annotation said:
今のこと (ima no koto: events of the moment)
一言も。。。ない (hitokoto mo … nai: not a single word)
触 (fu(reru): to mention)
Posted by Eve Kushner in Kanji Curiosity | 9 Comments »
