Touched by an Angle: Part 1
Friday, September 5th, 2008
| Quick Links Welcome to Kanji Curiosity | The Basics | Glossary |
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)
Huh? Had the security sign said, “Please don’t mention the table”?
Multiple Meanings
I wasn’t able to resolve these mysteries until I got home and reunited with Jim Breen (in a cyber way). I found that, as is so often the case, 触 has loads of meanings and multiple yomi:
触 (SHOKU, fu(reru), sawa(ru): to contact, touch, feel; to hit; to proclaim; conflict)
Breen makes no mention of “mention” as a possible meaning. Ugh! Nor do Halpern or Henshall. But after consulting Spahn and a native speaker, I came to understand the following:
• Sawa(ru) only means “to touch, feel” in the physical sense.
• Fu(reru) can similarly mean “to touch” in the literal sense but can also have a broader, more abstract meaning, as in “to touch (upon), announce, mention.”
Here’s another way to think of it. If a butterfly alights on a leaf, that’s either sawa(ru) or fu(reru). If I alight on a topic, that can only be fu(reru).
In English, as well, “to get in touch” usually has a nonphysical meaning (although I now realize that nonnative speakers might mistake “I’ll get in touch with you” or “I’ll contact you” for come-ons!).
Henshall offers more insight into 触 and how its components have evolved.
Let’s look at one of these meanings today, leaving others for next time.
Sensory Experiences
You probably know 感 (KAN: emotion, feeling, sensation), an extremely common character that shows up in loads of words about feelings. When it teams up with 触, they produce this useful word:
感触 (kanshoku: sense of touch; feeling; sensation; texture (of food while chewing))
This compound plays a part in one interesting phrase:
外観と感触 (gaikan to kanshoku: look and feel)
outside + appearance + feeling + to perceive by touch
I like the repetition of KAN in this phrase. And I like the way the perspective changes from outside (sizing up the appearance of something) to something more internal (as when one closes one’s eyes and runs one’s fingers over a surface).
The next word also helps you talk about your impressions of things:
触り (sawari: touch; feel; impression (of a person); most impressive passage; punch line)
There’s a lot going on here—just look at all the possible meanings! Failing to make sense of this strange assortment, I asked a native speaker for his input. Given that 触り can mean “to feel,” he wasn’t surprised to see “impression (of a person)” in the list, because those meanings seem somewhat close. But he has never seen 触り used as “impression (of a person),” and his dictionaries don’t include that meaning. To help me understand 触り as “most impressive passage,” he wrote a sample sentence, which you’ll find at the link.
He also said that Japanese people tend to use 触り in compound forms such as 手触り (tezawari) or 舌触り (shitazawari), where 触り means “touch, feel.” You’ll encounter these compounds in the Verbal Logic Quiz, so I won’t define them here. And guess what? It’s already time for your quiz, so you don’t have to be in suspense any longer!
Posted by Eve Kushner in Kanji Curiosity |
September 7th, 2008 at 2:46 am
I’ve found some answers to the questions that befuddled me, as described in “Japanese in Norway.”
“Cliff” is 崖 (gake). This vocab word is easy to remember because it has the same yomi as kage (陰, shade, shadow), only with reverse voicing.
A high, sharp-edged cliff: 絶壁 (zeppeki: cut off + wall). The second kanji is kabe, “wall.” Love the breakdown of cut off + wall as forming a rugged cliff!
Yunnan in Japanese is actually Unnan: 雲南 (cloud + south), so no wonder the guy didn’t understand me! The Chinese way of writing this province name is 云南 (though it seems that 滇 is an abbreviated way to write Yunnan). And the romanized version in Chinese is Yúnnán.
Meanwhile, Hunan is harder to figure out. The Chinese way of writing it is 湖南 (Húnán: lake + south), though the province is sometimes called 湘 (Xiāng) for short, after the Xiang River that runs through the province. But what’s the Japanese version of this province name? Anyone know?
Finally, I was amused to find this on the Net: “Hunan: Not to be confused with the unrelated provinces of Hainan, Henan, and Yunnan.”
September 8th, 2008 at 7:25 pm
So, did they really *mean* “Don’t touch the table?” Or is it a mistake and they meant to write (in Japanese), “Don’t sit on the table”, and then got the wrong kanji, and then translated the sentence with the wrong kanji?
September 8th, 2008 at 9:06 pm
The Japanese version of 湘 is 湖南省 (Konan-shou). It is so difficult to identify Chinese place names: all Chinese maps should have both kanji (hanzi) plus alphabetical spellings!
If there is a well-known lake, river, or mountain, it is reasonable to name the neighboring provinces in relation to the reference (river, lake, or mountain).
I found out that, in Japan, there is 湖西線 (Kosei Railway Line) that runs on the west coast of Lake Biwa (琵琶湖) in Shiga Prefecture as well as 湖北町 (Kohoku-chou), a town located north of the lake. There is also 湖南町（Konan-chou) south of Lake Inawashiro (猪苗代湖) in Fukushima Prefecture.
September 9th, 2008 at 2:24 am
Hi, Charley. This was at San Francisco Int’l Airport, so native English speakers must have written the English part of the sign, which said “Don’t touch the table.” From there, it had translations in several other languages, and they all seemed to say the same thing: Don’t touch the table!
I’ll be passing through the international wing again in Dec., on a trip to New Zealand, so I hope I remember to check it out once more and even take a picture. Wonder if they’ll arrest me for taking a picture of their table, which obviously must be protected at all costs. By then maybe they’ll have changed the sign to “Don’t even think of LOOKING at our table”!
Hiroshi-san: Thanks for clearing up the place name mystery! It’s funny to me that in another language, a lake or something in a place name sounds idyllic. But in America, such a thing sounds generic and blandly suburban: Clearlake, Pleasant Valley, Pine Valley (the fictional town in which a soap opera is set), etc. Then again, if I overhear a conversation in a language other than English, I feel sure that it’s about something profound, whereas my assumption is that an English conversation is probably going to be mundane and even vapid!
September 10th, 2008 at 2:16 am
Everybody would agree that not only are 凹凸 and 凸凹 two of the coolest compounds but also 凹 and 凸 are two of the coolest kanji of all. If I had no knowledge of kanji at all, I would guess that 凹凸 (and 凸凹 ) means a mating pair of sockets. Does anyone know the stroke orders for 凹 and 凸, by the way?
The use of these kanji are not limited to the above compunds. Here are the most common examples where 凹 and 凸 do not team up with each other: 凹レンズ(ou renzu; concave lens) and 凸レンズ(totsu renzu; convex lens).
September 11th, 2008 at 8:52 am
You inspired me to look further into other compounds with 凹 and 凸. I found that, just as in English, “to depress” can refer both to a physical indentation and to low spirits:
凹む 【へこむ】 (1) to be dented; to be indented; to yield to; to give; to sink; to collapse; to cave in; (2) to be snubbed; to be overwhelmed; to feel down; to be forced to yield
凹ます 【へこます】 to dent; to indent; to depress; to humiliate
I like the graphics in this compound–the striking rectilinearity of it:
凹田 【くぼた】 rice field in a low place
Another cool word:
凹目 【くぼめ】 sunken (deep-set) eyes
Whereas the eyes are sunken, the brow is prominent:
お凸(P); 御凸 【おでこ】 brow; forehead
Speaking of brows, I’m not sure what’s going on with this next word!
凸坊 【でこぼう】 beetle-browed boy; mischief
Breen says that 凸 can mean “convex; beetle brow; uneven,” whereas 坊 means “boy” or “priest.” Boy OR priest? Hmm!
Btw, if you look these kanji up on Breen, you can see a demo of the stroke order. But it goes almost too fast for me to follow. The demos do include some surprises; three lines show up in one fell swoop.
September 13th, 2008 at 2:14 am
I keep noticing that the battery icon on my Mac resembles 凸. Inside it, there’s an icon of a plug, and it looks an awful lot like 凹. Or maybe the plug icon is more like 凹 and 凸 stuck together, end to end.
September 16th, 2008 at 5:40 am
Stopping by to say that I just discovered this blog and the Kanji curiosity section and I LOVE it. This is the first entry I read but if the rest is anything like this… thank you!
September 16th, 2008 at 9:08 am
Wow, thanks so much, Anders. Your comment gave me a huge lift on a day when I very much needed one! (Details about that in a blog to appear in a few days!)