Saturday, October 18, 2008

A Brief Tribute to 点

First, the character in all its glory (not really), as found in Langenscheidt's Kanji und Kana 1:

Kanji (ten)

The meaning and the main reading follow, along with some examples and some purely subjective interpretations of the character:

POINT (テン)
点く - tsuku, light up, kindle, ignite*
点字 - tenji, Braille
句点 - kuten, period (句点です。)
読点 - touten, comma (日本語が良くできないから、間違いはたぶんありますよ。)
出発点 - shuppatsuten, starting point
. . . and, best of all:
点取り虫 - tentorimushi, someone who works hard in the hope of getting good marks (apparently something like a "swot", but I've never heard that term before) -- The first character, as you have hopefully realized, means "point(s)", the second character means "get, catch, take, etc.", and the last character means "insect", so the image is clear. :o)

Interpretations: a long-snouted creature scrabbling along on four legs, a boat in the water (Grimsly), a showerhead (my hermit friend), or a dictator on a balcony saluting an appreciative crowd (Gnomey)


* Similar to, but not the same as 点ける (tsukeru). As I understand it, they are used as follows: 火が点きました。 (The fire ignited.) 火を点けました。 ([I] lit/ignited the fire.) One is intransitive, while the other is transitive. But I may well be wrong about some or all of the above (corrections are welcome). For example, I think 点く (or rather, つ・く) counts as a reading (though a rarer one), so it should be beside テン rather than among the examples.

1 Comments:

At 5:58 p.m., October 26, 2008, Anonymous Anonymous said...

If you haven't learned about transitive vs. intransitive verbs in Japanese yet then you are in for a treat, hahaha, by which I mean something that broke my brain when I first encountered it. (The distinctions between verbs, like you have in your example there, aren't so bad, but there are some funny little things you have to pay attention to when you go deeper into it.) And yeah, I agree with you that "tsuku" should be listed among the readings, and I always find myself having those kind of issues with kanji books. They and I just never get along, despite the fact that I need them!

And I like the list of interpretations of the character!! I tend to be much less creative than that and just learn them as a bunch of lines. Sigh.

 

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