Hermit versus Mountain of People

Today’s Japanese lesson is: hermit versus moutain of people.

You learn the characters for mountain (山) and person (人) pretty early when you start studying Kanji, the ridiculously-complicated-imported-from-China system of Japanese ideograms. Even though they are basic characters, though, you can still have some linguistic fun with them.

For example, if you combine the two characters, you get 山人, read “yamabito”. It means hermit, although the literal translation of “mountain person” comes pretty close too.

Ironically, though, if you reverse the characters, you get the exact opposite of a hermit. 人山, read hitoyama, means “a mountain of people”.

And for those of you (Hello Porto) wondering why the character for person is read “bito” in one word and “hito” in the other, it’s likely because “yamahito” is hard to say. The “hi” naturally progressed towards the bi-labial plosive “bi” sound. Japanese is full of these sorts of slight shifts in pronunciation.

Posted by pmk at August 14, 2006 5:21 AM | TrackBack