Why Japanese Is Impossible: Example #30,649

[muckefuck]

Crape 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.

Comments

[snowy-owlet.livejournal.com]

The crepe myrtle in our front yard looks like the strung-out heroin junkie kid sister of the one in that photo.

[niemandsrose.livejournal.com]

Lots of J things have a kun'yomi name, like sarusuberi, and an on'yomi name, like that whatsit is probably pronounced. [I don't have CJK.]

Which one they use probably depends on the genre being used, e.g. Chinese-derivative classical J poetry vs. colloquial J conversation. So it's as much a register shift as anything.

Kind of like using the Latin name for a plant vs. the polite Norman Frenchified name vs. the Anglo-Saxon rude name.

[muckefuck.livejournal.com]

It's not a matter of kun'yomi vs. on'yomi but of an ateji pronunciation. An on'yomi for 百日紅 would be something like *hyakunichikou (cf. sennichikou for 千日紅 "globe amaranth"); a theoretical kun'yomi is harder to come up with--hyakuhibeni? The point is that neither of these pronunciations is ever used. That these three characters together are arbitrarily pronounced sarusurebi is just something you memorise when you learn Japanese, like the fact that 河童 is kappa or 大人 is otona.