Category Archives: language

Yesterday the weather was clear and my wife was still on term break this week, so we took local trains through small towns and sometimes scenic countryside from Ashikaga to Oyama to Mito to visit the nationally famous Kairakuen (偕楽園 ‘shared pleasure park’), one of Japan’s three most beautiful landscape gardens. As the name implies, the park is open to the public; and the views are indeed spectacular. The blossoms on the 3,000 plum trees for which the park is most famous may have been a few weeks past their prime, but the cherry blossoms were in full bloom (満開, compare 満タン ‘full tank [of gas]) both in the park and across the broad expanse of Senba (千波 ‘thousand wave’) Lake and Park, which the Kairakuen hillside overlooks. Here are two verbal souvenirs from the trip.

Bokeh – This is an English technical term borrowed from Japanese, as I learned from Philbert Ono’s PhotoWords. The Photoxels Glossary of Digital Photography Terms defines it thus:

Boke (pronounced BOH-KEH), and increasingly referred to in print as “Bokeh” – Japanese word meaning “fuzzy” and referring to the out-of-focus (OOF) portions of a picture. A lens is said to have “good boke” if the OOF is pleasant and does not detract from the main subject. A lens with good boke produces out of focus smooth-edged highlights and reproduces an out of focus point of light as bright in the middle and progressively getting fainter with a fuzzy edge.

I’m not sure which Japanese boke this English borrowing comes from. Certainly not 木瓜 ‘Japanese quince, japonica’, which I was excited to find in full bloom, glistening like coral on the garden path down to Senba Lake. My best guess is 惚け/呆け, whose several meanings include ‘dull, dullheadedness’, as in 呆け色 boke iro ‘dull color’, from a verb 惚け/呆け meaning ‘grow senile; become mentally weak; fade, discolor’. The New Nelson kanji dictionary and Kenkyusha’s New Japanese–English Intermediate Dictionary, 5th ed. (in my Canon Wordtank), are not quite in synch on this, and neither of them mentions usage in photography. In any case, both my digital photographs and my digital words here are sure to provide plenty of evidence of boke.

Oddly enough, while English has borrowed a Japanese word for the out-of-focus part of a photo, Japanese appears to have borrowed a Dutch word for the in-focus spot: Japanese ピント pinto, from Dutch punt van focus or (focus)punt. (Dutch u is a front-rounded vowel—front like Italian i, round like Italian u—while Dutch oe renders the equivalent of English oo.)

枝垂れ桜 shidare-zakura ‘branch-drooping cherry tree’, Prunus pendula – Among the few types of cherry trees I can now reliably recognize are the branch-drooping ones. I’m also pretty good on 枝垂れ柳 shidare-yanagi ‘branch-drooping willow’. Yes, yes, I know that most people characterize both types as ‘weeping’, but that bit of poetic license completely bypasses the etymological briar patch that this prosaic pedant intends to poke his nose into.

Leaving out the tree itself, there are two pieces to the attribute 枝垂れ: 枝 shi ‘branch’, whose Japanese reading is eda, as in edamame ‘(soy)beans on the branch (or at least in their pods)’; and 垂れ tare ‘drippings, sauce, gravy, jus’. When it relates to apparel, 垂れ can also mean ‘hanging, curtain, lapel, flap, skirts of a coat’. So 垂れ tare covers the range of ‘drip, drop, droop, drape’ (which helped inspire one English linguist to coin the term phonaesthesia).

The Sino-Japanese phonetic element 支 shi of the two-part kanji 枝 itself means ‘branch’ in a lot of compounds, such as 支社 shisha ‘branch (company) office’; 支流 shiryuu ‘branch (flow), tributary’; 支族 shizoku ‘branch family, tribe’. To be more specific, one can rely on the semantic element 木 ki ‘tree’, which often relates to wood (either woody plants or items once made of wood), to disambiguate the 枝 shi that specifically means ‘tree branch’. Another contrast relies on the semantic element 肉 ‘meat’ (= 月 in combination), which usually relates to the body, so 肢 shi indicates ‘limbs of the body, arms and legs’.

Finally, 支 (in the shape of 枝) shi can be completely redundant. The New Nelson gives shidareru as an alternate reading for simple 垂れる tareru (vi and vt) ‘hang, droop, drop, lower, pull down; dangle; sag; drip, ooze, trickle’, so it’s perfectly okay to say 柳の枝が枝垂れている yanagi no eda ga shidareteiru ‘the branches of the willow are (branch-)drooping’. Webster’s Online Dictionary offers more—much more—on the semantics of droop in a wide range of languages. Turkish and Romanian are particularly rich.

How many tales can be spun out of something as small and insignificant as a portable battery? Let’s see.

First, the word itself. In Japanese, ‘battery’ is rendered as 電池 denchi, lit. ‘electricity reservoir’. The second kanji also translates ‘pond’ and (small) ‘lake’, Japanese ike.

Second, where the word turns up. Denchi first lodged permanently in my mind while I was doing fieldwork in Yap, Micronesia, where (1) I was dependent on batteries for my flashlight and portable cassette-radio while living out in a village without electricity (at that time, anyway); and (2) people had managed to borrow a lot of Japanese vocabulary during three decades of Japanese rule (1914–1945), like sikoki ‘airplane’, and sikojo ‘airport’. Some of the more amusing borrowings are now archaic, if not obsolete, in Japanese, like sarumata ‘traditional Japanese men’s underwear’ (now used with reference to adult diapers) (Yapese didn’t need to borrow a word like fundoshi ‘loincloth’), chichibando ‘breast band’ (definitely a foreign concept in traditional Yap), and kachido ‘movie’ (< Japanese 活動大写真 katsudou daishashin ‘moving big picture’).

Third, how the items so labelled are subclassified. The relative sizes of the old familiar cylindrical dry-cell batteries are indicated numerically in Japanese, ranging from largest to smallest: 単１形 tan-ichi-gata (D cell), 単２形 tan-ni-gata (C cell), 単３形 tan-san-gata (AA cell), 単４形 tan-yon-gata (AAA cell). My electronic dictionary requires two 単４形, my digital camera requires two 単３形 (I forgot to bring my recharger), and our gas stove requires two 単１形. I’ve recently had to replace all three sets. At least I don’t have to carry two spares of the largest size around with me. (BTW, Philbert Ono’s Photowords is a great resource for translating photography-related vocabulary, including battery types, between English and Japanese.)

Finally, when I removed the Fujitsu 単１形 batteries from the stove and looked for the size designation, I first thought they were 単０形. After all, the midnight hour in Japanese is 0:00 reiji ‘zero o’clock’. But the characters surrounding the 0 were making a different claim: 水銀０使用 suigin zero shiyou ‘mercury zero use’. When I examined the other replacement batteries I had bought, they all made the same claim, no matter whether the brand was Maxell or Fujitsu (both made in Japan), or Konnoc (made in China). I hadn’t kept up on dry-cell battery technology. Fujitsu Magazine (July 1997) explains.

By using purified materials，a special zinc alloy powder，and a zinc-indium-bismuth-aluminum anode，and by establishing clean production lines，we have been able to develop an alkaline-manganese dry battery that has no mercury．The discharge rate of the battery was improved by remodeling the structure of the cathode．Moreover，by remodeling the anode disc，the battery has been made much safer．

Also，since 1996 we have been producing ferrite cores for the deflection yokes of cathode ray tubes using raw material recovered from spent dry batteries.

There are still a few other products from which mercury needs to be eliminated.

POSTSCRIPT: It’s good that Japan is trying to restrict mercury pollution, which caused Minamata disease. BTW, the Japanese (and general Sinitic) compound for the element mercury 水銀 suigin translates literally as ‘water silver’ rather than ‘quick (i.e., living) silver’. The planet Mercury is 水星 suisei ‘water-star’, and Wednesday is 水曜日 suiyoubi ‘water weekday’, which matches pretty well the Romance-language names for the same day of the week: Romanian miercuri, Spanish miércoles, Portuguese mercoles, French mercredi.

UPDATE: Reader Peter North adds a comment and query:

Sorry, I can’t resist reporting a new usage in Philippine English, not “Taglish” (since 2003). “Low Bat” describing a child lacking energy – needing food or sleep. Presumably derived from abbreviations on cell phone displays – you appreciate how widespread and central to life cell phones have become. Anyone seen this elsewhere?

This Fruitful English website tells you all you need to know about teaching English in Japan. (I found it by way of an ad at the top of my Gmail inbox.) It looks like an online 自動販売機 jidouhanbaiki ‘(automatic) vending machine’, with instructions entirely in Japanese. Selling One-Cup English. English classes in Japan explain the language; they don’t teach it. As if it were Hittite. Well, at least that won’t be a problem after the demise of English on March 31, 2058 (according to Language Hat).

Ashikaga was once an important center for Japanese textile manufacturing, dating back to the days of silkworm-raising. In the early days of Japan’s industrial revolution, there were waterwheels (水車 mizuguruma) all over this piedmont town. Nowadays, the textile industry has left town, leaving behind a legacy of handicraft artisans, fine textile shops, and a few working pieces of machinery in a “play-learn” emporium (遊学館 yuugakkan), where you can learn how to weave a coaster on a small floor loom. (It costs ¥400 and usually takes 30-45 minutes.) Last week, while my visiting in-laws were trying their hands at weaving, I stood around translating, looking up words in my electronic dictionary, and listening to the two old timers who were demonstrating a braiding machine and a spinning machine that was plying thread from bobbins onto reels (clockwise on one side, counterclockwise on the other). They were excited to have an interested audience for a change.

One of the best things about doing fieldwork in a second language is that you often learn new things in the process, and also get a better command of vocabulary in your primary language. I learned a lot of English fish names a couple of decades ago when I elicited the local names for several hundred fish in a coastal language of New Guinea. Here are a few items of useful vocabulary from my 遊学館 experience.

機 hata, loom – The Chinese character with which Japanese hata is written also indicates all manner of new-fangled machinery, such as 洗濯機 sentakki ‘washing machine’, 飛行機 hikouki ‘flying machine (= airplane)’, and the Japanese ‘machine man’ superhero Kikaida. So now ‘loom’ can also be rendered as 織機 shokki ‘weaving machine’, and ‘power loom’ as 機械機 kikaibata (lit. ‘machine loom’). Worse yet, the same character also occurs in the famous Sinitic compound meaning ‘crisis’: 危機 kiki, danger + something not quite equal to opportunity—more like ‘wit, resource, device’.

杼 hi, shuttle – In sharp contrast to 機 ‘loom’, the character for ‘shuttle’ is rare enough that my electronic dictionary ranks it last among the ten kanji pronounced hi and Microsoft’s Japanese-language input system doesn’t even offer it among its 42 ways to write the syllable hi. I had to go copy the character from unicode.org. In any case, most Japanese are quite familiar with the word adapted from English: シャトル shatoru, as in shatoru basu and supeesu shatoru.

縦糸 tateito, warp thread; 横糸 yokoito, weft thread – The terms that translate ‘warp’ and ‘weft’ render a whole range of similar oppositions: 縦引き鋸 tatebiki nokogiri ‘ripsaw‘ vs. 横切り yokogiri ‘cross-cut saw‘; 縦波 tatenami ‘longitudinal wave’ vs. 横波 yokonami ‘broadside wave, cross sea’; 縦揺れ tateyure ‘pitch (of a ship)’ vs. 横揺れ yokoyure ‘roll (or a ship)’; 縦書き tategaki ‘vertical writing’ vs. 横書き yokogaki ‘horizontal writing’. Finally, the highest rank in sumo is the 横綱 yokozuna (lit. ‘horizontal rope’), who is entitled to wear the ceremonial rope (綱 tsuna) across his waist.

Postscript: Weave : Weft :: Heave : Heft :: Leave : Left :: Bereave : Bereft. Can you think of any more English words that follow this pattern? Aha! Language Hat adds Cleave : Cleft.

Today we have naming of parts. Yesterday,
We had daily cleaning. And tomorrow morning,
We shall have what to do after firing. But today,
Today we have naming of parts. Japonica
Glistens like coral in all of the neighboring gardens,
And today we have naming of parts.

What particular plant did Henry Reed intend to refer to in this poem? (I remember reading it in an English lit class during my freshman year at the University of Richmond in the spring of 1968—before I dropped out of ROTC, and then out of college altogether, ending up in the Army anyway.) I’m guessing either camellia or Japanese quince, both of which bloom in the spring.

My Canon Wordtank edition of Reader’s English–Japanese Dictionary lists three Japanese entries for English japonica, each telling its own story: ツバキ (camellia), ボケ (Japanese quince), and サルスベリ (crape myrtle).

椿 tsubaki, Camellia japonica – The cherry blossoms are getting all the attention in the Kanto (Greater Tokyo) area these days as they reach their peak, but the light pink to dark crimson camellias have been in full flower for a few weeks already. A great variety of cultivars of Camellia japonica are all over the place, often in hedges.

木瓜 boke, Chaenomeles speciosa – Japanese quince is also known as Chaenomeles japonica. The normal Sino-Japanese reading for the name of the plant should be mokka (< moku ‘tree’ + ka ‘melon’), the name owing something to its melonlike fruit. Another name for a flowering tree formed on the same pattern is 木蓮 or 木蘭 mokuren (lit. ‘tree lotus’ or ‘tree orchid’), Magnolia liliflora or lily magnolia. A slightly different variety of Magnolia, Magnolia kobus—from its Japanese name 辛夷 kobushi—is in full, brilliant white bloom these days.

百日紅 sarusuberi (lit. ‘monkey slide’), Lagerstroemina indica – The native Japanese name for crape myrtle describes its smooth (guavalike) trunk and stems, while the Chinese characters describe the flowers, but the two names bear no relation to each other beyond referring to the same plant. You can pronounce the name of the plant according to the characters as hyakunichikou (lit. ‘hundred day red’), but I’m not sure how many Japanese speakers would recognize it by that name on first hearing it. (I would have spelled the name in English as crepe myrtle, but the spelling crape myrtle generates a much larger number of hits on google.co.jp.)

塩盛り shiomori ‘salt pile’ – The other night, as we were leaving our favorite local fish restaurant in Ashikaga, my recently arrived Minnesota in-laws noticed what looked like a small pile of snow beside the door as we left. It turned out to be salt, and there was a matching salt pile on the other side of the entranceway, so I went back in and asked the very friendly and talkative sushi chef (who trained 3 years in San Francisco and 1 on Maui) what the story was. There were no customers at the sushi bar at that moment, so he came outside in the chilly wind and told us the story. The salt has two functions. The most commonly recognized one is to purify the premises by keeping evil spirits out. But the more interesting one is to attract customers in. The latter function apparently goes back to the days when goods traveled by oxcart. The idea was to tempt the oxen to stop and lick the salt, whereupon the traveler might also decide to stop for food or rest. The salt piles were called 塩盛り shiomori ‘salt helpings’, a term which is otherwise chiefly found in restaurant menus for assorted salty dishes.

義母 gibo ‘mother-in-law’ – Earlier that same evening, I had introduced my visiting in-laws to the waitress in that same fish restaurant. Both she and the sushi chef are always happy to assuage my curiosity about obscure readings (obscure to me, anyway), especially of fish names and sake brands. After I had introduced my mother-in-law as my 義理の母 giri no haha, she referred to her by a shorter version, 義母 gibo. So I asked her what the shorter version is for younger sister-in-law, 義理の妹 giri no imouto. In comprehensive kanji dictionaries, you can find 義妹 gimai, but she had never heard that term. The only such shorter term she had heard was 義兄 gikei ‘elder brother-in-law’. The longer version is 義理の兄 giri no ani, and my New Nelson’s kanji dictionary lists the full range for siblings-in-law: including the combining terms 義姉妹 gishimai ‘elder and younger sisters-in-law’ and 義兄弟 gikyoudai ‘elder and younger brothers-in-law’. (The 義理 giri here is the same one used to mean ‘duty, honor, debt of gratitude’; and the shorter prefix 義 gi is also used to indicate artificial human components, as in 義歯 gishi ‘artificial tooth’ or 義眼 gigan ‘artificial eyeball’.)

紅き羹 akaki atsumono ‘vermilion broth’ – one of our two favorite coffee shops in Ashikaga is Café de Furukawa, an elegant place whose 12-page menu and guide to coffee history and brewing is titled 紅き羹 akaki atsumono, a purposely archaic and obscure phrase that I’ve translated ‘vermilion broth’. Both elements tell a story. The reading aka for 紅 is archaic in Japanese, and the pronunciation akaki for akai ‘red’ is both archaic and regional, I believe. Nowadays, akai ‘red’ in Japanese is written 赤, while 紅 is normally read beni ‘crimson, rouge, vermilion, lipstick’, as in 紅生姜 beni shouga ‘red pickled ginger’, 紅染め benizome ‘red-dyed cloth’, or 紅鮭 benizake ‘red salmon’. Chinese 紅 hong still means ‘red’ (and shows up in many given names of people born during China’s Cultural Revolution). Its Japanese rendition kou- shows up in many compounds such as 紅茶 koucha ‘red tea’ (= ‘black tea’ in English), 紅海 Koukai ‘Red Sea’, and 紅灯 koutou ‘red lantern, red light (district)’. The much rarer character 羹 atsumono ‘hot soup, broth’ (literally ‘hot stuff’) has a much shorter story. It shows up in a Japanese proverb that matches English “Once bitten, twice shy”: 羹に懲りて膾を吹く Atsumono ni korite namasu o fuku ‘Learning from hot broth, you blow on cold pickles’.

UPDATE: Thanks to Language Hat reader Matt for catching a grammar error in my rendition of the coffee-shop title. I originally wrote 紅きの羹 for what is actually 紅き羹. I’ve made the correction in the text above. Another Language Hat commenter turns up a different explanation for the doorway 塩盛り in a fun Youtube video guide to eating sushi.