Aiding and Abetting: Part 2
Friday, June 12th, 2009
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If you saw the following, what would you think the word meant?
山荒 (yamaarashi) mountain + rough
The kanji 荒 (KŌ, ara(i), ara-, a(reru), a(rasu), -a(rashi): rough, crude, natural, wild) contains the “grass” radical 艹, so maybe this is a type of plant that grows on mountains.
Then again, the roughness could describe the mountain itself—perhaps the condition of an eroded slope. (By the way, “erosion” is a great word: 水食, suishoku: erosion, water + to eat. Erosion is what happens when water “eats” a slope!)
Mountain + rough could also refer to the unpolished manner of a country bumpkin living on an isolated mountain.
But no, 山荒 means “porcupine”! (Actually, according to Wikipedia, it’s a supernatural sort of porcupine!)
Do porcupines tend to live on mountains? If I knew nothing about kanji and looked at the spiky lines of 山 and 荒, I might indeed spot the pictograph of a porcupine. In fact, 山 looks more like a porcupine than like a mountain!
Otherwise, I’m hard-pressed to see the connection. Perhaps a porcupine’s shape suggests a mountain of spikes. (Turns out, a mountain range in northern Michigan looked like porcupines to the native Ojibwa people, so it’s known as the Porcupine Mountains, or the Porkies for short!!!)
Two more guesses: Perhaps porcupines dig up plants to eat their roots, making the surfaces of mountains rough. Or maybe, like the legendary tanuki, the Japanese porcupine is known for its rough, crude behavior.
Wild Ones
Of course, humans are hardly fit to judge animals for wild behavior. For every disciplined warrior (武者, musha), there have been enough of the following to coin a term for them:
荒武者 (aramusha: daredevil; rowdy person)
savage + warrior + personThe concept of a wild warrior must have evolved into the more general idea of a daredevil.
And for every quiet, self-abnegating monk who tried to do the right thing, there must have been a few who took up arms and terrorized their communities:
荒法師 (arahōshi: ferocious (armed) monk)
savage + Buddhism + masterTogether, the last two kanji mean “Buddhist priest.”
When even priests take up arms, what kind of peace can there be? If I had to worry about both out-of-control porcupines and ferocious monks, I might strongly consider moving.
Easy Money
The kanji 荒 not only creates criminals but also aids and abets crime. Take, for instance, this word:
荒稼ぎ (arakasegi: making a killing, making easy money; robbery) savage + to gain a profitable situation
A sample sentence:
荒稼ぎしているらしいね。
Arakasegi shite iru rashii ne.
I heard you’re raking in the money.
If you truly want easy money, consider working with the suffix -荒らし (-arashi), which means “robbery, burglary, intrusion”:
アパート荒らし (apāto-arashi: apartment house robbery)
車上荒らし (shajōarashi: stealing from vehicles)
interior of car (1st 2 chars.) + robberyWhereas English speakers refer to getting “into” a car, Japanese speakers say they’re getting “on” a car. That’s why the word for “car interior” contains 上 (JŌ, ue: on, above, on board).
Wanton Destruction
But if you’re not content with all that -荒らし can do for you, perhaps you’d like to upgrade to the verb form:
荒らす (arasu: to lay waste, devastate, damage; invade; break into)
Using this, you’ll find it much easier to destroy everything in your path. You can do so, in fact, without the robbery; all you need to do is trash someone’s home:
住み荒らす (sumiarasu: to leave a house in bad shape)
to reside + to damage
Wild and Wonderful
Just when you think you’ve never seen a more destructive kanji than 荒, here it is in a word that offers a sliver of hope:
荒野 (kōya, a(re)no: wasteland, wilderness, prairie)
wild + wilderness
The first meaning of 荒野 is “wasteland.” This makes sense; with ferocious monks, porcupines, and criminals on the loose, things fall into disrepair. But on the other side of that, they can become gloriously wild and free again and can spring back to life in a wilderness (the second definition)!
Drawing on words from this blog and the last, we can imagine that a great storm (大荒れ, ōare: big + being wild) lays waste to (荒らす, arasu) a garden, creating a wasteland (荒れ地, arechi: being wild + land) that then turns into a wilderness (荒野).
Time for your Verbal Logic Quiz!
Posted by Eve Kushner in Kanji Curiosity |
June 14th, 2009 at 12:10 pm
Hahaha! Porcupine…what a riot! I’m trying to carve out time so I can read more of this blog.
June 14th, 2009 at 3:47 pm
Thanks so much, Sonia! Hope to see you here more often! And … good news! I’m trying my best to make these blogs shorter. That should make it easier on everyone, particularly timewise.
June 15th, 2009 at 6:53 am
やった! I discovered Jpod in the beginning of May and later, your great blog here, and I have finished reading (at last!) all the archives. It’s my first comment here and I’m glad to have found a kanji fan as crazy as I am!
(hm.. “ikijibiki” (you’ll like this word, i’m sure) reminds me of Waka/Jawaka, great album of Frank Zappa)
実は、漢字の生き字引になりたい!
Btw do you know about this site: www.chineseetymology.org ? I used this site while reading your posts and it is sometimes useful by providing visually the etymology (in fact all the ancient versions) of a character. You can type these for example: 企、保 or all the simplest kanjis like 車 or 鳥. Some are striking! The only drawback i know is that this site is made for hanzi not kanji, and so it will not really recognize kanji that japanese have simplified in their own way, such as 気 or 竜 and of course the japanese 国字, but still, it remains interesting.
As for 山荒, there is a homophone 山嵐 meaning mountain storm (I wonder how many and which japanese words don’t have homophones!). Did you know 荒らし can mean… troll(the internet forum species, of course), according to Breen! A meaning chinese people couldn’t foresee, i’m sure.
I’m on my looong way to reach JLPT level 2 but as I read books upon books about japanese language, culture, and especially kanji, I have come to know a bit about kanji, so if you have questions please ask me anytime, I will gladly help if I can. I practice 書道 with a japanese 先生 too.
Please excuse the mistakes, if any, フランス人ですからね。
Many thanks for your blog, Eve.
お疲れ様でありがとうございました。
June 15th, 2009 at 11:41 am
Great to get so many nice comments this week! Thanks for this last one! Amazing that you plowed through all (ALL?!?!?) the Kanji Curiosity posts.
As it happens, 生き字引 was one of the first Japanese words I fell in love with!
Thanks for the link to www.chineseetymology.org. Great to see the old (e.g., Bronze) versions! No, I don’t think I’ve run across this site. I refer to a few useful Chinese sites. But when I wrote my book (Crazy for Kanji), I was using a wonderful Chinese etymology online source, and then when all my bookmarks got erased, I lost track of it and never did find my way back to it. It’s always good to have more sources for that kind of thing.
Yes, I knew about 山嵐 as a homonym, but I somehow didn’t know about 荒らし as an Internet species of troll! Not sure how that escaped me, as I pore over Breen before writing blogs. So thanks.
>A meaning chinese people couldn’t foresee, i’m sure.
Undoubtedly!
Hope to hear from you again!
June 15th, 2009 at 9:43 pm
Hi, Eve ! おはようございます!
Yes, I read ALL of them. Like you, I hate to be forced to do something, but when I like it I must know everything about it! I can’t stop studying kanji from every angle! I read also a bit about chinese and korean, but I’m not learning them for now:one language at a time, japanese is enough! And I’ll add I like the korean alphabet, hangeul, because of its simplicity and its logic (I’m a mathematician at heart). Well, enough of me!
Did you know a great japanese american author is living not so far from you ?Stan Sakai is a 三世の日系人 born in Kyôto, he grew up in Hawaii and finished his studies in California where he still lives with his family in Pasadena. He’s the author of the greatest comic book I’ve read in my life: Usagi Yojimbo (兎用心棒), the story of a ronin rabbit (the comic is anthropomorphic) based on Miyamoto Musashi and living at the beginning of Edo era. It’s thrilling, moving, very well documented and unlike any other I’ve read so far. It’s truly unique! If you like Kurosawa movies, you’ll like it also! For more info, you can see this http://www.usagiyojimbo.com/index.html
じゃ、またね。
June 16th, 2009 at 11:05 am
Wow, I’m really in shock that you read through the whole lot of them and lived to tell the tale. Time for a well-deserved vacation on the Mediterranean, I would say!
I’m not aware of Sakai, but then I’m not into the world of comics, and Pasadena is 5-6 hours from me (Calif. is a huge state!), so it’s no surprise. Is Sakai’s Usagi related to the one in your gravatar?
I looked up the site, and I’m intrigued by the kanji (no surprise there!): 用心棒 【ようじんぼう】 (n) bodyguard. The breakdown is service + heart + pole. Serving as a bodyguard by beating off people with a pole and therefore protecting the heart?! Ah, Halpern says the last kanji can mean “tough guy.” Makes a little more sense…
I like the pic. of Sakai on his site. Has a Robin Williams quality to his face somehow…
Thanks for the info!
June 17th, 2009 at 8:06 pm
There’s no 休み for kanji fans!
). I read many other comics and mangas besides, but this one is so… japanese! It has this touch of sobriety and wisdom (of bushido & zen) that can’t be found elsewhere and it’s worth many novels. If there is one comic to read or to take on a desert island, this is it! (ok ,ok, I’ll stop with it, no, please, not the 鉄棒! ^_^” )
Yes, my gravatar is actually Usagi drinking tea (I see your interest’s rising
About 棒 meaning “guy”, there is also 泥棒 (dorobou=thief), I knew this one and forgot it somehow. There is also an interesting yojijukugo 針小棒大 which means “exaggeration”. It seems to me that it comes directly from “The Journey to the West”, a classical chinese novel by Wu Cheng’en, referring to the magical staff of 孫悟空, the Monkey King.
June 18th, 2009 at 4:05 am
Hey, 針小棒大 (しんしょうぼうだい) is great! Needle + little + pole + big. That is, making a big pole out of a little needle. It’s the Asian version of “making a mountain out of a molehill.” I love it! Thanks for bringing that to my attention.
And yes, I probably should have made the connection to 泥棒 (which I wrote about in my book, p. 85), but I … didn’t!
Funny that you should mention “no 休み…” because last week, right after my Japanese proofreader and I finished with one blog, I sent him the draft of a new one. I wrote “No rest for the weary!” in my subject header. He wrote back that the only comparable expression in Japanese is “貧乏暇なし” (bimbō hima nashi: there is no rest/leisure for the poor). In other words, he said, the poor have to be working all the time in Japan. In the West, I guess we ALL have to work constantly!
Your introduction to Sakai’s work gave my husband a great idea, which I’m going to pursue by approaching Sakai! I’ll let you know how it turns out. Could be just the solution I was looking for … so THANKS!
June 18th, 2009 at 6:08 am
Whow!! It sounds great! To approach Sakai-sensei! I didn’t think of that! I’m very happy to learn this! それも、私の鼻がちょっと高くなりそうですね。
I just met him once (quickly) for a sign, and I heard he doesn’t really speak japanese, but he does have a reputation to be a very nice person! So I wish you all the luck for your project! And thanks to you for letting me know what will happen!
どうもありがとうございます。