Gruesome Kanji - slaves and slavery

Happiness, happiness, the greatest gift that I possess.... That almost undefinable feeling that we all strive for in one way or another. Unfortunately, one gets the impression that the common people in ancient China didn't have an awful lot of it. Given its importance to the human condition, its no surprise that the concept is written using a relatively simple kanji: 幸, a pictograph of some shackles.

This isn't a phonetic borrowing and the leap from shackles to happiness is surprisingly short: if a slave was punished, chances are they would be put to death. If they were lucky, they'd just be clapped in chains. Happiness is all relative.

The original character for 'railway station' 駅 was 驛. Here you can see a beady eye 目 looking over the shackled prisoners 幸 from one to the next 睪. In the same way, a station is where you move from one horse 馬 to the next. The derivations of the meanings of kanji is often difficult for us to appreciate, but this would have been more obvious to the ancient Chinese reader as 睪 and 驛 were pronounced the same way.

辛 looks similar to 幸, but the two are not directly related. 辛 is a needle, and its modern meaning of 'hard going'  tsurai or 'spicy'  karai (both, confusingly, written 辛い) are from the sense of prickling with needles. However, 辛 does appear in characters related to people in less than fortunate circumstances for a slightly different reason.

童 means 'child', and is in words such as 児童 jidō 'child', 童話 dōwa 'children's story' and 童謡 dōyō,  'a children's song' or 'nursery rhyme'.

The original character has a needle 辛 above an eye 目 and a weight 重 at the bottom. This needle is a tattoo needle, and indicates that the person has a mark above their eye. In other words, a person with a marked forehead that carries heavy weights: a slave. From there it meant someone who was not a full person, and by extension a child. Marking slaves with a tattoo was a common practice, and was used in Japan up to the Edo period as a means of identifying criminals. The actual mark depended on the region. One method was to write the kanji for 'dog' in three stages for each crime committed 一 ナ 犬 ; the fourth punishment would be death.

The kanji 僕, which, although is used as the male first-person pronoun boku, is also read shimobe to mean slave or servant.

The original character again shows a needle 辛 marking a person's forehead, and 其, a winnowing basket. The basket is filled with grain, and then the grain is repeatedly tossed into the air as the wind carries away any chaff, the worthless part. The person also has a tail (the ↟), i.e. caught by the tail. So we have a caught, worthless, marked worker: a slave. The needle and the winnowing basked merged together into 丵 and then were replaced by 菐 which had the same sound as the original character, despite having a different meaning.

The Winnower, Jean-Francois Millet 1848

The character for people (as in 'the people of a nation') 民 comes from a pictograph of an eye being stabbed by a needle. 

A common punishment for slaves was to blind one eye. It made them easily identifiable should they try to run away, as well as being gruesomely oppressive enough. The character then became a way of referring to slaves: 'hey, you know, those people who we stab in the eye', and from there to mean 'those people', 'the people'. At first it may seem inappropriate that China includes the character in its modern name: 中華民国. But it's a reminder that, ideologically at least, the oppressed are now the ones calling the shots.

Any old iron

Iron is a common element, and the kanji for iron 鉄 is taught in the third year of the Japanese education system. The modern form is actually a simplification of the far more complicated original:
鐵
Whilst it's fortunate that a 21 stroke character has been reduced to a mere 13 strokes, the new form is less than lucky.

It was first used as a military abbreviation and appeared in a list of approved kanji for weapon names in 1940. Two years later, the abbreviated form was included in a list of government approved common kanji, but with the old form after it in brackets. On 5 November 1946 the approved list of tōyō kanji, the precursor to today's jōyō kanji, was released and included both characters as alternatives. However, the very next week, the old form was removed; 鉄 would be the only approved form. The final nail in the coffin for 鐵 came in 1948, when parents were limited to the 1850 kanji in the tōyō list for naming their children. As 鉄 was the approved form, 鐵 was not permitted.

What this also meant is that company names also had to use 鉄. This wouldn't be a problem, but the new character is made up of 金 (metal or money) and 失 (to lose). お金を失う?!! That's not particularly auspicious for a company that hopes to make a profit.

So, what you often find in company logos is an alternative, completely non-standard form. JR East, the railway company that serves Eastern Japan, writes its logo like this:

It's looks normal at first glance, but the 鉄 in 鉄道 is rendered as 金+矢 instead of 金+失. 矢 means arrow; apart from its resemblance to 失 it is entirely unrelated, but at least it can't be construed as having a negative meaning.

Now, JR and other companies with 鉄 in their names aren't paranoid about using the character, and will only use the non-standard form when practical. Their web site isn't filled with lots of tiny image files at every occurrence of the offending kanji.

This demonstrates two interesting features of kanji: the potential for hidden meanings, and the ease with which new forms can be made up. It's particularly ironic when the made up form only became necessary when the original was made obsolete.Kanji is a very serious word game!

The history of the character 鉄 is taken from here:
http://dictionary.sanseido-publ.co.jp/wp/2011/02/24/tetsu/

Unique Japanese

Japanese is not unique. As a human natural language it shares many similarities with every other language in the world, some more than others. But Japanese is unique, as it appears to have no common relatives, sitting as it does in its own language group. There have been various theories as to where it comes from, but none has been conclusive.

Numbers often a good way of determining the origin of a language as their social importance means that they cannot radically change from one generation to the next, and Japanese numbers show some unique properties.

In modern Japanese the Sino-Japanese numbers imported from China have all but replaced the native numbers, but the latter is clinging on for dear life as generic counting words up to ten.

ひとつ、ふたつ、みっつ、よっつ、いつつ、むっつ、やっつ、ここのつ、とお

The older forms were:
ひとつ、ふたつ、みつ、よつ、いつつ、むつ、やつ、ここのつ、とお

Believe it or not, there is a hidden pattern.

Going from one (ひとつ) to two (ふたつ）: hito→huta
Three (みつ) to six (むつ): mi→mu
Four (よつ) to eight (やつ): yo→ya
Numbers are doubled by changing the internal vowels.
Five (いつつ) to ten (とお) doesn't follow the rule, unless you take the stem of five to be つ, so it would be tu→to.

The first recorded person to notice this was a chap called 荻生徂徠 (1666-1728), so as far as we know, until that point nobody had realised that such a rule existed.

Finding the rule opens up new questions:

• Why does changing the vowel lead to doubling?
• Why don't five and ten follow the rule exactly?
• Is the same rule seen elsewhere in the language? 
• Are there any other languages that share the phenomenon?

The pattern is too consistent to ignore, but it is not shared by any other language that Japan has historically had ties with. Mysterious....

Actually, as unique as Japanese may be, the answers to some of these questions are more related to how similar the language is to others than how different it is. Similar phenomena can be seen in all natural languages. But it's still quite amazing that the two times table is hidden in the number system, and that hardly anybody notices.

References
数字とことばの不思議な話　窪薗晴夫 岩田ジュニア新書　（p.2～)
日本語　金田一 岩波新書　（上、p.51～)

Peace, harmony and all things Japanese

The character 和 has the meaning 'peace' or 'harmony' such as in words like 平和 and 和音, but it is also used to mean 'Japanese'. Do the Japanese really think of Japan as being that harmonious? Is 和食 a more peaceful cuisine than 洋食? And anybody who's ever used one will tell you that a 和式 toilet does not instil a feeling of one with the world.

In fact, this use of 和 is similar to the use of 英 for English and the UK. 英 can mean 'hero', but the UK 英国 (hero + country) is no more a heroic nation than France 仏国 (Buddha + country) is a Buddhist one. Chinese uses similar sounding characters for transliterating foreign words. So England approximates to 英吉利, and the first character is then used as a form of abbreviation.

Often Japan is represented by the character 日 from 日本. So, the Anglo-Japanese Alliance was 日英同盟, using a single character to represent each country. However, a Japanese English dictionary is usually a 和英辞典.

'Wa' is what China originally called the people of Japan. It was written with the kanji 倭, and there was some controversy over possible hidden meanings. The character consists of 人 (person) with 委 (entrust, give over). 委 provides a phonetic component, but also represents a woman 女 gathering rice or grain 禾, with an extended meaning of 'bent over', as one is when harvesting by hand. In addition, it is very similar to the character 矮, meaning dwarf, and 倭 itself can also mean 'diminutive' when used in names of pygmy animals such as 'pygmy hippo'. It's arguable whether the meaning was originally derogatory, but being ambiguously offensive doesn't really make it any easier to take. So pretty early on, during the 8th century (the Heian period) the homophone 和 supplanted 倭 to mean Japan. 倭 is still used occasionally instead of 和 with no change in meaning, or implication.

The older name for the country, Yamato, became one of the kun readings of 和 and 倭, although it's more usually written as 大和.

Historically, Japan has had as much inner strife as any other country with a reasonably long history, and the use of 和 was not to indicate that Japan was more peaceful. The choice was more to avoid a possible insult, rather than cultural arrogance.

Regular vowel movements

Previously, I mentioned how there is a pattern in the way numbers are formed in Japanese, with only changes in vowels between related numbers. However, although it is unusual to find such a relation in numbers, the phenomenon is very common in natural languages.

Just to recap, one hito and two huta, share a common root in h_t_. Three and six are both m_, and four and eight are both y_. Change the vowel to double the number. In modern Japanese such vowel changes are rare, but their former importance in the language is still very clearly evident.

Transitive verbs and intransitive verbs often show this relation, although there is no regular pattern for all verbs. I'll talk about these in more detail another time.
あげる　ageru (to raise) : あがる agaru (to rise)
しめる　shimeru (to close something) : しまる shimaru (to close by itself)

There are some common nouns that change in a few compounds. Many of the compounds have been absorbed to the point that they are considered as words in their own right.

• 瞼 mabuta = 目 me + 蓋 futa
• 手綱 tazuna = 手 te + 綱 tsuna
• 杯 sakazuki = 酒 sake + つき tsuki
• 風見鶏　kazamidori = 風 kaze + 見 mi + 鶏 tori
• 爪楊枝 tsumayōji = 爪 tsume + 楊枝 yōji
• 木陰 kokage = 木 ki + 陰 kage
• 炎 honoo = 火 hi + の + 穂 ho

These seem quite random at first, but closer inspection reveals two groups.
A final e mutates into an a, and a final i mutates into an o.

me ⇒ ma
te ⇒ ta
sake ⇒ saka
kaze ⇒ kaza
tsume ⇒ tsuma

hi ⇒ ho
ki ⇒ ko

Clearly it isn't a random change, but it's far from universal. 毛 ke never forms compounds as ka*, 血 chi never mutates to to, and 竹 take is never taka. The rule that determined how vowels alter in compounds is dead, but its spirit lives on in daily vocabulary.

Once the change has become established, it is then only a small step for the modified form to take on a new meaning. For example 魚, now normally read as さかな. The common reading used to be うお, and さかな was written 酒菜 (sake + vegetables) meaning something eaten with sake. Now the original meaning has been lost completely, a process which was made all the easier by the change in the vowel.

By way of comparison, Proto-Indoeuropean, the language from which most European languages originated, modified words through vowel mutation, and relics of this system are still found in English as so-called irregular plurals and verbs.

So, for plurals:
mouse ⇒　mice (both have the form m_s)
foot ⇒ feet (both have the form f_t)

and verb tenses:
sing ⇒ sang ⇒ sung (a common s_ng root)

Also, there are related words that come from a common source: sit, seat, set. All have the common s_t root.

Now the pattern in the Japanese numbers doesn't seem quite so strange. In both modern English and modern Japanese, new words are usually made by adding a suffix or prefix. The lack of living examples of vowel mutation means that it is not obvious how the process took place, so we shove the words that have resisted the new rules into a category we call 'irregular', forgetting that these were once the regular forms.

In the same way, the rule that determined the significance of the vowel changes in the numbers 1-10 died hundreds, possibly thousands of years ago, but its been passed on through the generations as a hidden message from ancient history.