Now that I have submitted Encode-0.99, I am ready to go casual a little
while....
On Tuesday, March 26, 2002, at 02:56 , Nick Ing-Simmons wrote:
My earliest exposure to Japanese was from Judo terms - in Judo
black-belt grades are known as "1st Dan", "2nd Dan" etc. I seem
to recall (it was years ago now) that "Dan" in that meant "master" - but
which of many english senses of master was meant I don't recall.
Oh my! This is like confusing 'perl' and 'pearl'. 'dan' as in Judo
is spelled differently from my 'dan'; 'dan' in Judo means 'Step' and
spelled U+6BB5 while mine is U+5F3E. Jim Breen's WWWJDIC at
http://www.csse.monash.edu.au/~jwb/wwwjdic.html
found some 22 different Dan's. One of the reasons that Japanese love
Kanji, despite the fact it is grammatically very, very different from
Chinese (Chinese is much closer to English with that respect) is that
Japanese has much fewer phonemes than Chinese or English, there are so
many words that have the same pronunciations (I forgot the terminology
for that...). By spelling in Kanji rather than Kana, you can tell the
difference so easily.
There is a famous sentence that goes like;
KiSha no KiSha ga KiSha de KiSha shita.
all KiSha are in two Kanjis but they are all spelled differently.
To make the matters even funkier, there are multiple ways to pronounce
a given Kanji in Japanese. My 'Dan' can also be pronounced "Hazu" when
postfixed with Hiragana m[aeiou]. Hazu-mu is a verb that means "to
bounce". Hazu-mi is an adverb that means by accident. I had no
hasitation when I named my first daughter Hazumi (all in hiragana); it
tells not only from whom she was conceived but also how she was
conceived :) It also rhymes with Naomi, her mother and my wife.
Dan the Man with No Judo Belt
