Comparatively Speaking: Part 3
Friday, May 8th, 2009
| Quick Links Welcome to Kanji Curiosity | The Basics | Glossary |
Two weeks ago, I introduced the following sentence:
ペンギンと背比べ！南極に生息する4種類のペンギンの脇に立ち、あなたの身長と比較してみて下さい。
Pengin to seikurabe! Nankyoku ni seisoku suru 4 shurui no pengin
no waki ni tachi, anata no shinchō to hikaku shite mite kudasai.
Stand beside the four Antarctic penguin species and see how tall they are compared to you!
At first glance, it might seem as if this text is about penguins, and of course they play a vital role. But the more I look at it, the more I see that it’s full of body parts!
See how many components or whole kanji you can spot that relate in some way to bodies or their functions. I’ll post the original sign again to block your view of the answers, which come immediately afterward.
OK, let’s start with whole kanji. Here’s what I found:
1. 背 (se, sei: back)
2. 生 (i(kiru): to live)
3. 息 (iki: breath)
4. 脇 (waki: side)
5. 立 (ta(tsu): to stand)
6. 身 (SHIN, mi: self)
Looking for components makes it really interesting:
7. Inside 背 and 比 we find ヒ, which means “fallen person” or “seated person.”
8. Inside 背 and 脇 we find the “flesh” radical 月.
9. Inside 息 we find 自, which means “self” and originally depicted a “nose,” says Henshall (since some Asians refer to themselves by pointing to their noses). For the purposes of this game, you might maintain that you spy with your little eye an eye (目), but somehow I think that doesn’t count, and I hope that’s OK with you!
10. Inside 息 we find 心, the “heart” radical.
11. Inside 類 we find 頁, which means “head.”
12. Inside 脇 we find 力, which means “strength” but was originally a pictograph of an arm with bulging biceps! I didn’t know that! (I think this one counts, but it’s debatable. I hate debates, so if you disagree, please don’t take it up with me!)
There are so many body parts here that you might mistake the text for a gory passage about dismemberment, rather than an innocent one about a cardboard cutout of penguins!
So much to explore, and so little time! Always the case with kanji. Well, if I have to choose one thing to discuss this week, I’ll choose #7.
Back to Back
In asking people if they’re taller than penguins, the sign featured these words:
身長 (shinchō: height) body + length
比較する (hikaku suru: to compare) to compare + to compare
But another word in the text conveyed the same thing much more efficiently:
背比べ (seikurabe: comparing heights)
back, height + to compare
Halpern feels that 背 means “height” here. But we primarily associate 背 with “back,” and that makes sense in this context; people compare heights by standing back to back.
And if you stare at 背 for a long time in a kanji-delic daze, losing awareness of the world as it spins along without you, you’ll see that the top of this character pictographically represents a back-to-back comparison. At least, that’s what came to me after a protracted space-out, and to my utter delight, Henshall confirmed that that was the case! The 月 in 背 means “body, flesh,” and 北 literally shows people sitting back to back. They’re not standing but sitting! And that makes sense, because ヒ represents a fallen or seated body. (Although this is a very literal pictograph, try not to be too literal here, or else you’ll wonder why the two people are sitting on top of someone else’s flesh!)
But how can 北 represent two people sitting back to back when I thought 北 meant “north” (with the kun-yomi of kita)? Ah, Henshall ties those two ideas together. In his discussion of 北, he says again that this kanji originally showed two people with their backs to each other. Turning one’s back expressed both “fleeing” and “north.” That is, because north is the coldest direction, this kanji came to mean “shunned.” The ancient Chinese favored the south and shunned the north. Makes sense to me, when I consider just how cold northern China must be for much of the year.
Side by Side
With ヒ now fixed in our minds as “seated person,” we can’t look at the following compound without doing a double take:
背比べ (seikurabe: comparing heights)
back, height + to compare
Make that a quadruple take! There are four people in this compound!
If 北 shows people sitting back to back, are the two people in 比 sitting in some kind of railroad-car formation? No, Henshall says 比 originally showed two figures sitting next to each other. This led to the idea of comparison. An associated meaning is “ratio.”
Oh, there’s also this: 比 (kura(beru): to compare) has the on-yomi of HI, which one would represent with the katakana hi … which is ヒ! And lo and behold, ヒ came from 比! In the eighth or ninth century, elite men wanted a writing system for themselves that was simpler than kanji but not as girly as hiragana, with all its loops and flourishes. So men broke off parts of kanji characters and created katakana, which is how ヒ emerged from 比. See Crazy for Kanji, pp. 48–50 for more on this.
One more thing you must be wondering about: If 背比べ means comparing backs or heights, what’s going on with the following compound?
比較 (hikaku: comparison) to compare + to compare
It looks like this might be about comparing and swapping cars (車) before doing some kind of exchange (交). But that’s not, in fact, the case. See the link for the real deal.
At this point, are you as twisted up in knots as I am? We’ll return to the penguin passage next week to talk about more body parts. For now, it’s time to relax with a Verbal Logic Quiz! Enjoy!
Posted by Eve Kushner in Kanji Curiosity |
May 8th, 2009 at 11:34 pm
Novelist Wendy Tokunaga (who writes novels with Japanese themes) was kind enough to interview me about Crazy for Kanji. You can find the interview transcript here:
http://chirashi.wendytokunaga.com/2009/05/crazy-for-kanji.html
May 9th, 2009 at 6:00 am
Loved your Tokunaga interview.
Just curious, but what are the next 15 languages you would like to study?. And why thaose particular ones?
LW
May 9th, 2009 at 12:35 pm
Hey, Lonnie. Thanks!
Let’s see–quite a big question you’ve asked, but a fun one to try to answer. I’ll list them as they come to mind; not sure this is the exact order in which I would expand my repertoire.
1 and 2. Italian, then Portuguese: These should be low-hanging fruit, since I’ve studied Spanish, French, and Latin. Everyone says how similar Span. and Italian are, but I have yet to experience that for myself. Italian always seems just out of reach somehow, as does Portuguese. Maybe part of the problem is that spellings are so different from Spanish, and I learn languages primarily thru the written word, so it feels like a bigger barrier than perhaps it should.
3. German: Since English is a Germanic lang., I would gain such great insights about my native lang. by studying German, or so I’m led to believe.
4-7. As long as I’m going the Germanic route, it would be great to fold in some Dutch, Norwegian, Swedish, and Danish, since they’re all so similar. Maybe Icelandic, too, but that seems like a low priority somehow! I’m intrigued by Dutch; it seems easy to suss out at some level … but not quite!
8. Ancient Greek: This would yield huge benefits on the etymology front.
9. Modern Greek: While I’m at it, and as long as I’ve bothered to learn the alphabet…
10. Mandarin: It’s such a logical leap from Japanese, of course, that I can’t really believe it’s 10th on the list. But the tone thing…. I don’t know. I’ve heard it’s a killer!
11. Korean: Everything in my life seems to point toward Korea. Lots of people I know seem to go there. I LOVED the scenery in 2 Korean movies. Love the food. And then there are such interesting links to Japanese.
12 and 13. Umm … I think by this point I’d be REALLY tired! But if I must press on, then I will. At one time in my life, I thought it would be incredibly useful to know Swahili and Hindi, as well as Mandarin. Then I could communicate with enormous nos. of people. Same would be true for Arabic. Now, though, I don’t know…. I must say I’ve always been charmed by Welsh and Hawaiian, so I’ll make those 12 and 13. I love the meanings of the place names. (And Maori would be a logical extension from Hawaiian, but I’m not ready to commit to that.)
14. Russian: It’s my heritage. Quite a few friends have studied it. Maybe there’s something there for me???
15. I really should return to French and reclaim all that I once had, but that doesn’t count for the purposes of this list, I think. So what’ll it be? Oh! Sanskrit. We learn little bits of it all the time in yoga, and I’m intrigued by similarities to Hebrew. So maybe that could be #15.
Realistically, though, Japanese is going to absorb and occupy so much of my time for the next decade, I think, that I’ll never even get started on this overly ambitious list!
Thanks for the stimulating question! That was fun!
May 9th, 2009 at 2:55 pm
Hi, Eve san
I like your interview with Tokunaga. I have never had a chance to be asked
in my life what is my favorite kanji. When I was a sixth grader and looking
at my father’s Kadokawa kanji dictionary, I found one kanji which has 33 strokes
to write. This is the only one 33 stroke kanji and surprisingly easy to write and remember, and pronouced (so、そ）. We don’t use and find in our ordinary life. If someone asks me what my favorite kanji is, maybe this is my favorite one. 麤
May 9th, 2009 at 3:07 pm
Hi, Noriji-san.
So now we’re compiling a list of things you wish people would say to you:
1. のりじさんは美人ですね！
2. What’s your favorite kanji?
Consider yourself asked!
The kanji you mention appears in Crazy for Kanji in a list of 15 kanji that have the same component tripled! The kun-yomi is ara(i). So the single component 鹿 (shika) means “deer,” but when you triple it, you get something rough!!! Very cool! Thanks for the fun comment!
May 9th, 2009 at 9:02 pm
Hi Eve!
15 languages??? oh! I am surprised!!! as for my own experience, Italian is quite difficult, I mean to master it, even for us who may understand 60% of a normal speed conversation…I studied 3 months intensively Italian language and it is far harder than I expected. German: it took me months to start talking while living in Germany, it is a fascinating language though. Russian, I attempted to learn just cyrillic (so as to understand “how to read” just that) a friend of mine studied Russian and probably it is the most difficult one among your 15! wow, I am really surprised if you attempt all those hard languages! I have enough with my Japanese and English
May 11th, 2009 at 7:59 am
Alberto–nice to hear from you! Also nice to hear your comments on Italian … altho. if you’re able to grasp 60% of what you hear, you’re doing pretty well! Anyway, I’ve never heard anyone say that it’s really hard, so that’s good info. So much for low-hanging fruit!
And then look how many languages you mention. So you know Spanish, English, and Euskara fluently, plus quite a bit of Japanese, Italian, German, Russian, and who knows what else?! And you’re surprised at my merely making a wish list?!
May 11th, 2009 at 8:01 am
Hey, guess what? The current blog post got mentioned in someone else’s blog:
http://www.redroom.com/blog/keikoamano/mothers-day-and-kanji
Thanks to Noriji-san for mentioning an interesting kanji that led someone else to write a blog!