In this post I will be writing in English, Japanese, Chinese, but I will include phonetics (romaji for Japanese, pinyin for Chinese) so you can follow along. Japanese uses traditional characters, so I’m going to stick with traditional rather than simplified Chinese.
Backstory
If you’re just interested in the etymology, skip this section 🙂
Mandarin is my first language but my reading fluency has slowly deteriorated since the age of 5, when I moved to the U.S., with slight bumps here and there as I attended Chinese school as a kid, took (too-easy) Chinese through high school and then struggled through a semester of Chinese literature in college. English is my native language by a long shot. During the last 8 years I haven’t been practicing my Chinese, and so it is currently shit. But I have been dabbling in Japanese.
Japanese is fascinating. It has two phonetic systems, hiragana and katakana, which represent the same set of sounds. It also has kanji, which are Chinese characters (sometimes slightly adapted) that can represent entire words. It feels like a mishmash of the two languages I know best and simultaneously completely alien. I recognize loads of kanji, and the meanings are often similar to the Chinese, but the sounds are completely different. To complicate things further, a single kanji can have many, many different pronunciations depending on the context. Japanese also borrows many words from English as well as a few here and there from other languages – usually written in katakana – but tends to twist the words around or abbreviate them so they’re barely recognizable.
パソコン (pasokon) – abbr. from English ‘personal computer’
アルバイト (arubaito) – part-time job, from German ‘Arbeit’
パン (pan) – bread, from French ‘le pain’
I find the etymology of Japanese words super interesting, partly because it helps me remember my vocab, and partly for its own sake. And if learning kanji improves my Chinese, awesome.
As the context for where I get my vocab, I’m going to try to work my way through translating the first volume of Piano no Mori, a manga about two boys of very different backgrounds who grow up playing the piano. I love this story, and I hope that will motivate me to put time into this project, which is already proving way more time-consuming than expected. Just the first page took me an hour to get through. What the heck, let’s go.
The Text: Piano no Mori, Chapter 1, page 1
Characters: Amamiya Shuhei, Kanehira Daigaku
A: 東京から来ました (tokyo kara ki mashita)
A: 雨宮修平です (amamiya shuhei desu)
A: 特技は4歳から習ってるピアノで… (tokugi wa yongsai kara naratteru piano de)
A:目標はピアニストになること！(mokuhyo wa pianisto ni narukoto!)
K:ピアノだってよ (piano datte yo)K:男のくせに (otoko no kuse ni)
My English brain immediately picked out “tokyo”, “piano”, and “pianisto”1. My Chinese brain sees 東京2, 来3, 特技4, 歳, 目標5, and 男.
The interesting etymologies, and also just some stuff I learned.
Amamiya’s last name, 雨宮, I found very interesting. 雨 (ama) means rain, and is just the Chinese character for rain. However, the sound is from the Old Japanese word for sky and not at all close to the Chinese pronunciation, which is yu3. This linking between Old Japanese pronunciation and the Chinese character of the same meaning is very common, and is partly why each kanji can have so many pronunciations. It also makes learning Japanese so much harder for me. 宮 (miya) means palace or shrine. (In Chinese, 宮 (gong1) also means palace.) Miya is actually a compound word in Japanese, from 神 (kami, meaning god or spirit) and 屋 (ya, meaning house).
歳 (sai) is an adaptation of the Chinese 歲 (sui4), which means years-old, as in 4 years old. (Can you spot the difference? It’s very slight.) I also learned today that in Japanese it’s often simplified to 才, whereas in Chinese it’s simplified to 岁. This might be because 才 already exists in Japanese, with the same pronunciation (and unrelated meaning), whereas 岁 is a simplification of the ideogram itself.
習 (nara), to study, has the same meaning in Chinese (pronounced xi2, as in 学習). What I found interesting about this character is the “glyph origin” of the ideogram. The top half of the character, 羽, depicts a pair of wings. The lower half originated as 日, which depicts a sun. The image of studying is one of learning to fly. (Much more motivational than the oft-memed ‘the word “dying” is in “studying” ‘ in English.)
男 (otoko), man/male, has the same meaning in Chinese (pronounced nan2). This also has a fun glyph origin, depicting rice paddies on top (田) and strength below (力).
After all this, my literal translation would go something like this.
A: (I) came from Tokyo.
A: (I’m) Amamiya Shuhei.
A: (My) talent is I started learning piano when (I was) 4 years old.
A: (My) goal is to become a pianist.
K: The piano, huh?
K: (What) a habit in a man.
… I should not be a translator. Anyway, please go read the manga. I promise it’s good, and you can find an English version here.
References:
Jisho is Japanese dictionary I am using here.
MDBG is my all-time favorite Chinese dictionary.
Wiktionary is where all my etymology info is coming from.
An English translation of Piano no Mori can be found here, and I use this to check my work.
1. Pianist, if that wasn’t clear.
2. 東京 (dong1jing1) is the Chinese name for Tokyo. It literally translates to “Eastern Capital”.
3. 来 (lai2) means to come in both Chinese and Japanese. In this case, Japanese took the Old Japanese sound, ku, and linked it with the Chinese character of the same meaning. In this sentence, it is in past tense and becomes 来ました (kimashita)
4. 特技 (te4ji4) is a bit awkward in Chinese, but the breakdown makes sense. 特 means special, and 技 means skill or technique. Special technique sounds more like a move from a fighting game than “talent”, which is what it means here. The Japanese pronunciation, tokugi, is more Middle Chinese (600 A.D.) than modern, but it’s close enough.
5. 目標 (mu4biao1) means goal in both Chinese and Japanese. It literally translates to “the sign which you see”.
Etymology Adventures 