15 Feb
2017
15 Feb
'17
9:30 p.m.
From: Larry McVoy
Are you sure? Someone else said moshi was hi and mushi
was bug. Does
mushi have two meanings?
Yes:
http://www.nihongodict.com/?s=mushi
Actually, more than two! Japanese is chock-a-block with homonyms. Any
given Japanese word will probably have more than one meaning.
There's some story I don't quite recall about a recent Prime Minister who
made a mistake of this sort - although now that I think about it, it was
probably the _other_ kind of replication, which is that a given set of kanji
(ideograms) usually has more than one pronunciation. (I won't go into why,
see here:
http://mercury.lcs.mit.edu/~jnc/prints/glossary.html#Reading
for more.) So he was reading a speech, and gave the wrong reading for a word.
There is apparently a book (or more) in Japanese, for the Japanese, that lists
the common ones that cause confusion.
A very complicated language! The written form is equally complicated; there
are two syllabaries ('hiragana' and 'katakana'), and for the kanji,
there are
several completely different written forms!
Noel