One of the reasons why I enjoy buddhism so much is the occasional (and sometimes even frequent) making fun of being too serious.
いざさらば
雪見に転ぶ（ゆきみにころぶ）
所まで（ところまで）
A typical 俳諧の連歌 consisting of a 5, 7, 5 metre by Matsuo Bashō (松尾 芭蕉).
This could be translated as such:
Now then, lets go out / to enjoy the snow… until / I slip and fall!
Someone on a website made a reference about “Akamai” being a good name for Chinese. I pointed out that “Akamai” was probably based on the Japanese word akamatsu (赤松), which means “red pine”. In Chinese this would be chi4 song1. During this I suddenly wondered about the fact I hardly see any Chinese words starting with a vowel, but almost exclusively with consonants. I will need to consult my dictionaries, but a Chinese friend of mine said that of the aeiou group only a and e are used much at the start of a word, iou seem rare in contrast.
Japanese is very different in this aspect. The vowels are very important in comparison. I wonder how Korean is in this aspect.
This weekend I had the time to watch House of Flying Daggers (十面埋伏) again. I think the first time I saw it was when I was in Japan (日本). Of course, the problem at that point was that my Japanese (日本語) was definitely not good enough to understand the entire story. Although I could make good sense of it though.
In Japan the movie is known as Lovers.
In a previous entry I wrote about how the bone radical is written differently in some Chinese cases. Well, thanks to John H. Jenkins of Apple I found out that the People’s Republic of China made a switch from the traditional character to the one that has the corner on the left side. This way the strokecount is reduced by one. But for font designers it offers a small problem, since it means that you have to know your target audience quite well.
To sum it up: PRC uses the newer character, most likely Singapore does so too being another simplified Chinese user. Hong Kong, Japan, Korea, Macao, and Taiwan use the older character.
In the radical classification system called Kang Xi after the Chinese emperor Kang Xi we find 214 radicals. At position 188 we have the radical nicknamed ‘bone’ (骨 – hone). It is part of the group of radicals consisting out of 10 strokes (部首 – bushu).
The above image shows the character ‘bone’ in four fonts for the three languages of Chinese, Japanese, and Korean. The fonts used are STSong (Chinese), MingLiu (Chinese), MS Mincho (Japanese) and Batang (Korean). As can be seen the Chinese font is the only one that squares off the top image’s corner on the left-hand side. The other Chinese font and the Japanese and Korean font do so on the right-hand side.
I raised this issue on the Unicode list since the Unicode character charts have three points where ‘bone’ is encoded, to note: CJK Radicals Supplement 0x2ee3 (left-hand side), Kangxi Radicals 0x2fbb (right-hand side), and CJK Unified Ideographs 0x9aa8 (left-hand side).
I wonder if the discrepancy is a wrongly written letter during buddhist studies which was taken from China to Japan and subsequently later exported to Korea.
This song is the theme of Kingdom Hearts 2 – Japanese version. The song is written and sung by Utada Hikaru (宇多田ヒカル).
The I need more affection than you know phrase is a sample in reverse.
I need more affection than you know
思い出せば遙か遙か (omoidaseba haruka haruka)
未来はどこまでも輝いてた (mirai wa –I need more affection than you know– dokomademo kagayaiteta)
きれいな青空の下で (kirei na aozora no shita de)
僕らは少しだけ怯えていた (bokura wa –I need more affection than you know– sukoshi dake obieteita)かしい色に窓が染まる (natsukashii iro ni mado ga somaru)
前を向いてればまた会えますか (mae wo muitereba mata ae masu ka)
未来はどこへでも続いてるんだ (mirai wa –I need more affection than you know– doko he demo tsuduiterunda)
大きな看板の下で (ooki na kanban no shita de)
時代の移ろいを見ていたいな (jidai no –I need more affection than you know– utsuroi wo mite itai na)二度と会えぬ人に場所に (nido to aenu hito ni basho ni)
窓を開ける (mado wo akeru)思い出せば遙か遙か (omoidaseba haruka haruka)
未来はどこまでも輝いてた (mirai wa –I need more affection than you know– dokomademo kagayaiteta)
きれいな青空の下で (kirei na aozora no shita de)
僕らはいつまでも眠っていた(bokura wa –I need more affection than you know– itsumademo nemutte ita)ずっと前に好きだった人 (zutto mae ni suki datta hito)
冬に子供が生まれるそうだ (fuyu ni kodomo ga umareru sou da)
昔からの決まり事を (mukashi kara no kimari koto wo)
たまに疑いたくなるよ (tama ni utagai taku naru yo)
ずっと忘れられなかったの (zutto wasurerare nakatta no)
年賀状は写真付かな (nengajou wa shashin tsuka na)
わたしたちに出来なかったことを (watashi-tachi ni dekina katta koto wo)
とても懐かしく思うよ (totemo natsukashiku omou yo)
I need more affection than you know
I recently had the pleasure to provide the Genshi project with the name. It comes from Japanese 原糸 which means a ‘thread for weaving’, which matched the purpose of the project well.
It’s too bad that support for XHTML 1.1 is so sketchy since Ruby support is only available as an XHTML module. Using Ruby definitely makes learning hanzi and kanji way easier (one of the reasons manga is littered with them).
In Zen buddhism we are often in contact with the mondous (read as mondo, with a long ending o). A mondou is a Japanese word standing for a dialogue, or rather a rapid-fire question and anwer session, that tries to push the student closer to enlightenment (nirvana, 涅槃 – nehan). Mondou in kanji is 問答 (もんどう). One can easily see mon (問) from problem/question and kotae (答), read in this case as dou, which is solution/answer.
風が吹いて 痛い 消えない思い
何を持っていこうか 集めて一つ
二度とない 二度とない 捨てるなんて馬鹿みたい
無邪気になって イメージ
As the wind blows, these painful memories won’t disappear.
What were you thinking as you collected the old songs into one?
There is no second chance. There is no second chance. I know how foolish I look
The image of becoming innocentきっとそれは終わらない
きっとそれは終わらない
This definitely isn’t over
This definitely isn’t over愛の胸 焦がせ 線の夢 渡れ
縦横無尽 駆けて 手に掴む世界
雲がちぎれて 日がまた落ちて
ひとりのパレードが 動きだす
The flaming sight of my passion crossing a thousand dreams
passing over the inhuman beasts I seize the world in my hands
The clouds scatter, and the sun sets again.
This one-man parade starts to move母権 基地術 審判 上昇 明暗 遭遇 生命 相愛
Adventure, Lucky Days, Trials, Climbing, Light and Darkness, Encounters, Life, Mutual Loveもしも言ってしまうなら あなたの髪を
嗅いで 吸って もっと 寄せ合う言葉
ワカラナイ ワカラナイ うわべだけじゃわからない
だからもっと深くしたい したい
なんて夢みたい
なんて夢みたい
愛の胸 焦がせ 千の夢 渡れ
縦横無尽 駆けて 巡り逢う奇跡
雲がちぎれて 日がまた落ちて
ふたつのパレードが夜空に溶けて
誰もが持っている ポケットに沈めた夜がある
そいつを灯すように 手を伸ばしては泳ぐ人
見つけられたならいい あなたの景色と同じもの
愛の胸 焦がせ 千の夢 渡れ
縦横無尽 駆けて 手に掴む世界
雲がちぎれて 日がまた落ちて
未完成のパレードでどこまでも
冒険 吉日 心拍 上昇 明暗 遭遇 生命 相愛