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muckefuckCrape myrtles were in full bloom everywhere in Virginia. They had all the more impact on me since I never remember seeing them outside of a botanical garden before. I kept telling whoever would listen that every Japanese novel I've ever read mentions a crape myrtle at some point. I think someone asked me what the Japanese name is, but I don't know; I wasn't reading those novels in Japanese. Still, I decided to look it up in case it comes up again.
The word is sarusuberi, literally "monkey" (saru) "slide" (suberi, from suberu "glide, slip"). The conventional explanation is that the trunk is so slippery that not even a monkey can climb it. How is this written, though? With the usual characters for "monkey" (猿) and "slide" (滑り)? Oh, why? That would make sense! There's no poetry in that. Let's use the characters for "hundred", "sun", and "red"--百日紅. Read as Chinese[*], this would be "A hundred suns are red." Isn't that lovely? Isn't that clever? Isn't that totally obscure and confusing? Isn't that the way we want our language to be?
[*]This is, in fact, a proper way to write a Chinese name for the crape myrtle. 紫薇 is a vastly more common term, however.
The word is sarusuberi, literally "monkey" (saru) "slide" (suberi, from suberu "glide, slip"). The conventional explanation is that the trunk is so slippery that not even a monkey can climb it. How is this written, though? With the usual characters for "monkey" (猿) and "slide" (滑り)? Oh, why? That would make sense! There's no poetry in that. Let's use the characters for "hundred", "sun", and "red"--百日紅. Read as Chinese[*], this would be "A hundred suns are red." Isn't that lovely? Isn't that clever? Isn't that totally obscure and confusing? Isn't that the way we want our language to be?
[*]This is, in fact, a proper way to write a Chinese name for the crape myrtle. 紫薇 is a vastly more common term, however.