2008-03-10

Hajikko

Hashi is a Japanese word meaning "edge" with two emphatic variations ("very edge"): hajikko and hashikko. Hajikko, the "voiced" version, seems to be more common in speech than hashikko, but why should this be the case when hashi's own voiced variant, haji, is so rare that I can't recall ever having encountered it in the wild?

I should probably admit up front that I didn't find a satisfactory explanation for this. The closest I came is a question at Yahoo! Chiebukuro hinting at an east/west divide: here on the eest side we say hajikko, out west they say hashikko, and there's one poster from Tottori representing hazukko. Well, hajikko does feel more Edo than hashikko...

While I was searching, I also found this great 2ch thread in which the participants snipe at the great unwashed (and, before long, each other) over usage -- "Osaka. Lots of people who say shuppai for shippai (mistake)" / "Nobody fecking says that, you tool" -- and talk about 『進ぬ！電波少年』 (Susunu! Denpa shōnen), a television program with a nonsensical name derived from its predecessor's『進め！電波少年』 (Susume! Denpa shōnen, "Onward, idiot boys!") by extending the loop on the め (/me/) to get ぬ (/nu/). Good times.

Popularity factor: 7

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naoki:

Oh, really? I usually say like
Sokono haji ni aru yatsu totte.
I wont say hashi ni aru yatsu...
It feels like I bite my tongue saying so. For the record,
I'm from Tokyo.

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Matt:

Interesting, thanks for the data point. Do you say hajikko or hashikko?

The Google hits for "haji ni aru" vs "hashi ni aru" are 12,600 vs 265,000; assuming that they reflect actual usage, you're in the minority but it's a respectably large one in absolute terms. (Maybe I have heard it before and just forgot.)

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Peter:

Broadly speaking, you find the haji variant (or some variant of it: handzu, hajikko, hanzukko etc) more in the Eastern dialects, and the hashi variant in the West. Hashikko does not appear much in my dialect dictionaries, but is used in some places like Nanao, Fukui, Mie, and Nara.

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Shannon:

I have trouble getting your RSS feed. I get the title of each post, but none of the body.

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naoki:

I conjecture the difference is between writing and speaking. I don't know how I write haji, definitely not in kanji and I wont write it in hiragana either. You hit hashi ni aru more maybe because in writing it's more normal and even I opt for hashi, when I write.

Personally, I don't use the form
--ko form. Since I don't know when, I 've got an odd feeling(kimochiwarui) for that form phonetically.

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Matt:

Peter: Thanks! Is there any more general phonetic rule involved there?

Shannon: That's outrageous. What reader are you using?
Naoki: True, Google does blur the diff. between writing and speech.

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Peter:

re: "more general phonetic rule" Possibly it is related to the Eastern dialect phenomenon whereby medial C that are voiceless in Western dialects (and current Tokyo Japanese) are voiced in the East (so that mato 'target' corresponds to mado in Sendai, for ex.). Mado 'window' then corresponds to mando, or mãdo. These are thought to be reflexes of earlier pre-nasalization on medial C.

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