2006-12-13

Kanji of year boring, lame as usual

Like Mark, I find myself profoundly inspired by this year's kanji of the year, viz, 命 (mei, myō, inochi, mikoto, etc.: "life", "order", "target", "highness", etc.). The runners-up are also disappointing: 悠 ("think", "far") because it's in the name of the prince who was born this year; 核 ("nucleus") and 北 ("north") because you-know-who successfully detonated a you-know-what; the everstales like 新 ("new") and 心 ("heart", "soul")... No sign of the playfulness that got 萌 ("moe") into the running last year.

Probably the most interesting way 命 can be used is to write mikoto, which is the "highness" (as in "your") that I mentioned above. "Highness" is, obviously, a gross translation that takes the cultural context out back and breaks its kneecaps; the word mikoto is from /mi/ (honorific) + /koto/ ("word") and was first used to refer respectfully to what gods and emperors said, or did, or were -- the distinction was not always clear-cut, as is often the case with gods and emperors*. In any case, that is why everyone who's anyone in Japanese mythology has a name ending in -no-Mikoto.

Nothing to do with mikado (as in "The") by the way; that's an entirely different circumlocution from /mi/ (honorific) + /kado/ ("gate"). Oh, I guess they share the same honorific.

* And did you ever notice that koto, "[non-material] thing", also means "word(s)"?

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Anonymous:

I did notice, and I've always wondered about "thing-leaf".


Anonymous:

In Chinese, yuwu 御物, as used by historians such as Sima Qian, means the "things" exclusively used by the king or Emperor. Most disyllabic words starting with 御 refer to specific 'yuwu', like e.g. 'yuyao' 御藥, "the Emperor's medicine/drug", 'yuzhuan' 御饌, "the Emperor's food", and of course 'yulan', "the Emperor's reading", which gave its name to the Song encyclopedia Taiping yulan 太平御覽.


Anonymous:

Is that the same "mi" in the family name 御手洗?


Anonymous:

Off topic, but - um - Takekurabe? What happens next?


Matt:

anon-0: I think most people understand that nowadays as "word-leaf", as in a single leaf of the great tree that is Words In General. (Not that a kotoba has to be a single small-w word...) Although originally, obviously, "koto" signified a single concept encompassing both words and things.

Jimmy: 御 is the standard kanji for this /mi/ as well, as well as the /go/ in Chinese words which is presumably a sibling to the modern Chinese /yu/... but /mi/ isn't restricted quite so strongly to king or emperors, it got devalued as time went on thanks to the population's (especially the gentry's) insatiable hunger for honorific prefixes. /go/ too.

anon-1: I would assume so, though I've never looked up the name.


Matt:

anon-2: Sorry... I got busy at work (shame). Should be up soon!


Anonymous:

This is embarrassing, yet still interesting:
because you just wrote "thing", I got koto 事 confused with mono 物 (my Japanese is very limited when there is no kanji and/or on'yomi to cling to). Hence my puzzlement as to why you wrote "[non-material]" (事 can often be translated as "affairs") and your translation as "word(s)"; that's why I commented on the Chinese meaning of 'yuwu', which is now pointless.

There is a 'yushi' 御事 in Chinese, but it generally is a verb-object construction meaning "to rule/administrate/command 'things'" (御 has here its first meaning of "driving a horse-cart") and is not exclusive to the sovereign, so this is distinct from the "honorific" usage.

This leaves me wondering about the meaning of "words" you assign to the character. Is there any possibility that this 'koto' is actually 言? I ask, because this is one of the choices my Japanese text editor gives me (along with 事) when I type in the romaji. If this is the case, it would make sense, though I think the most common expression in Chinese for "the Emperor's words" would be 'yuyin' 玉音 ("sounds of jade") OR 'yuyan' 玉言, which is a perfect homophone of 御言. The latter appears in one of the quadrisyllabic expressions describing the Emperor's speech: 'jinkou yuyan' 金口御言 (the one used by annalists is 金口玉音 "jade sounds [spoken by] the mouth of gold").


Matt:

Jimmy: Ah, I see! I should have made that clearer. The /koto/ in /mikoto/ is (most likely) both "thing" and "word" (and "deed"), in the sense that it is so old that it dates from before koto 事 and koto 言 were understood as different things, if that makes sense. In the oldest surviving Japanese texts, it is already used in both the sense we would understand today as "emperor's words" and the sense we would understand as "emperor himself".


Anonymous:

Thanks for the clarification, Matt. I am still puzzled by that ambivalence of koto, but I will have to get used to it, I guess.
The relation with 命, instead, can be rationalised pretty easily: giving orders (令) is an activity (other meaning of 事) of the ruler (御事 in the Chinese sense), and he does it by saying words (言) with his mouth (口). Additionally, the Emperor's legitimity comes from the Heavenly mandate (天命).
(This, of course, is not at all a scientific hypothesis, merely an imitation of those a posteriori explanations that are so common in traditional philology.)


Anonymous:

I mean "an activity typical of the ruler".


Anonymous:

To get back to 御, it's also a verb in kanbun for "to go" or "to be." And for fun examples of "how many times can you stick an honorific in a classical Japanese sentence?" try the お湯殿の上の日記, a record kept by the female staff around the emperor from the late Muromachi period. (It can be found in one of the 群書類従 supplimentary sets.)

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