A recurring theme in this substack is “native” Japanese. It’s Japanese before the arrival of Chinese and foreign loanwords. In Japanese this is called 大和言葉/Yamato kotoba, “the language of Yamato”, where Yamato refers both to an era in time and a culture. That language continues to serve as the backbone of modern Japanese.
What does the word “Yamato” mean, anyway? The characters 大和 don’t help us; they are merely 当て字/ateji (Chinese characters assigned after the fact to a Japanese word). Wait—could the yama part be 山, meaning “mountain? Yes! And the ”‘to” of “Yamato” is the word meaning gate, or door (which today we would write 戸 or 門). So “Yamato” means “gateway to the mountains”. Two thousand years ago, the Yamato tribe gazed southward from their base in Nara towards Mount Yoshino (吉野山) and other sacred mountains on the Kii peninsula and chose this topography to serve as the name for their culture and language. Mount Yoshino, a UNESCO World Heritage Site, is renowned for its brilliant cherry blossoms.
Why do we study Yamato kotoba?
It’s fun.
It helps us learn and speak modern Japanese better.
It teaches us important linguistic lessons about principles for organizing lexicons, languages, and grammars.
It provides insight into the mindset of Japanese people both ancient and modern.
To take just one example, let us consider the native Japanese word あらわれる/arawareru. You will recall this as meaning “appear”, “emerge”, “come to light”, “be revealed”, or “come into sight”.
You may never have given this word a second thought. But the ーわれる/-wareru is the signature of the passive form for verbs ending in -u in Japanese. In this case, the underlying word would be あらう. That’s right: arawareru is the passive form of 洗う, meaning “to wash”. To Japanese both ancient and modern, something hidden appearing is a matter of it being washed, in the sense of the dust or dirt covering it being cleaned away.
But there is an alternative explanation: the dirt being washed away is not on the object that is appearing, but rather on your own mind. One is reminded of “cleansing the doors of perception”.
Kanji for arawareru
We love Yamato kotoba. But we also love kanji. We learn kanji for many of the some reasons:
It’s fun.
It helps us learn and speak modern Japanese better.
It teaches us important lessons about principles for designing writing systems.
So let’s talk about how this word arawareru is written today in Japanese. The most common character would be 現, as in 現れる.
The Chinese (on) reading of this character is gen. Here ancient Chinese character designers played a very cool trick: they brought in the component on the right, 見, for both its phonetic (it’s read ken) and its semantic value, for seeing. In other words, it is both a 会意文字 (compound ideograph) and a 形声文字 (phono-semantic compound) at the same time. This case is described in the Wikipedia article on Chinese character classification:
However, the phonetic component is not always as meaningless as this example would suggest. Rebuses were sometimes chosen that were compatible semantically as well as phonetically.
However, that article does not give a name for this type of construction. If you know, please leave a comment.
The part on the left (⺩) looks like a king (王), but actually it’s the jade radical, 玉/tama, with the little dot removed. In Japanese this radical is called 玉編 (tamahen). It is used for things made out of jade and/or related to jade, and since jade is often made into spherical objects, spherical things (which is why it is used in characters like 球/kyu, meaning “globe”):
The original character for 玉 was a pure pictogram of a string (the vertical bar) with beads strung onto it (the horizontal bars. In some ancient forms the vertical bar originally stuck out at the top and the bottom:
Over time this character lost the parts sticking out and came closer and closer to 王, which is why the dot was added to differentiate it.
Fun fact: in Japanese, the vertical stroke for this character (and also 王/king) is drawn before the middle horizontal stroke, whereas in Chinese it’s the reverse. There are intriguing reasons for this and many other differences in stroke order between Japanese and Chinese, a topic which we hope to address here soon. Here's the Chinese order, which you will note is different from the stroke order you probably learned:
The jade ball of seeing
But we digress. The question is, what do jade or spheres have to do with “appearing”? Why would the jade radical be found in the character for appearing?
Well, jade is a crystal, and appearing is the crystallized state of seeing; it’s what’s called the stativization1 of seeing. If you have trouble remembering this character, just think of it as the “jade ball of seeing”.
There are other kanjis for writing arawareru, such as 表れる. People who study such things claim that that orthography is used for more abstract things such as feelings, whereas 現れる would be for more concrete things such as people or objects.
Homework: Consider the character 理, found in innumerable compounds such as 理論/riron/theory and 理由/riyū/reason. What is its stand-alone meaning? And what on earth could it have to do with jade or spheres?
Very interesting! I did not realize that stroke order is sometimes different between Chinese and Japanese; I had just assumed I'd learned the stroke order incorrectly. I wonder if stroke order sometimes changes over the centuries...