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daily-hyosatsu · 6 months ago

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A lovely garden and two names in gold! Both are new, but should be recognizable if you've been following! 矢木 is Yagi, rarely Yaki, and 横田 is Yokota, rarely Yokoda.

矢 means arrow or dart. It's read や or シ.

木 means tree or wood. It's read き, こ, ボク, or モク.

横 usually means sideways, side, horizontal, or width. It can also connote being unreasonable or perverse. It's read よこ or オウ.

田 means rice field or paddy. It’s read た or デン.

#learning japanese #kanji #japanese langblr #矢 #木 #横 #田

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daily-hyosatsu · 6 months ago

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Okay. So.

1. The surname 矢追 is read Yaoi. It only belongs to about 770 people, but both kanji are very useful to know.

矢 means arrow or dart. It's read や or シ. Be careful not to confuse it with 天 sky/heaven or 失 loss.

追 means to chase, pursue/follow, or drive away. It's read お.う or ツイ. The radical ⻌ walk/go hints at the meaning.

2. The Yuri name gave me pause. I thought the sign said 伏 but couldn't find any evidence of 伏 ever being read ゆり (or ゆうり) in any context. I briefly wondered if it might be Chinese, but yuri is two syllables, which makes that extremely unlikely if not impossible.

Usually, my go-to move here would be to look for the business's website for clarification, but Yuri Cottage (which is a restaurant in Southampton, UK) doesn't have any Japanese on their page. So I was on my own!

First, I searched dictionaries for any words that could be read ゆりbut didn't come up with anything that looked like 伏. I wondered if I had read the radicals wrong. Was 亻person actually 彳go/do? Because that will happen. Was 犬 dog actually 光 light? Or maybe礻 sign? But none of these possibilities got me anywhere.

I was sure that it had to be a proper noun, because their readings are so unpredictable, so I searched baby-naming websites for lists of single characters that can be read ゆり, but didn't find anything that could conceivably be mistaken for 伏.

At that point, I actually resorted to just typing ゆり on my keyboard and looking through all the IME possibilities, knowing that it's an extremely common first name with countless kanji permutations, even more than those listed here...

...Still nothing. Okay. Fine.

The next day, I opened tumblr and saw this draft and felt compelled to do some of the same searches again, just in case. You know how it is. Then, for the first time ever in my life, it actually occurred to me to use Google Translate on a kanji photo.

When I pasted the original image, it got confused by the English, so I cropped it to show the kanji only and tried again. Surprisingly, the results were excellent!

Literally "Excellent," unfortunately.

At this point, as a mystery lover, I was beginning to recognize that bleak moment when the hard-boiled detective has encountered so many dead ends that he has a dark night of the soul he starts to suspect that there was never any ゆり there at all. I was starting to despair of ever knowing the answer. That's when—finally—it hit me.

There was never any ゆり here at all!

伏 is just the first character of 伏せ屋 [ふせや], meaning hut or humble cottage. That's it. That's all! They just tried to write cottage and gave up partway through! No yuri! It's actually super obvious. I am actually a little stupid.

But 伏 does not mean cottage on its own, as far as I can tell. And I am certain that it cannot mean yuri on its own. Except inasmuach as how everything means yuri, like in that one post about how sometimes the story is actually about the gay sex that is not happening. The yuri here is subtextual. We can just say "cottage" because we know that our savvy readers can and will infer that we mean Yuri Cottage. No need to spell it out!

Anyway!

伏 has a variety of meanings, most of which are related to being oriented downward. It can mean a prostrated position, bowing, or bending down. It can also mean to cover (something) or lay (pipes). It's read ふ (e.g. ふ.せる, ふ.す) or フク.

The verb 伏せる [ふせる] means to lay/lie face down or to cast (one's) eyes down. 伏せる can also mean to go to bed with an illness, or to ambush/lie in wait—picture soldiers on their bellies in a blind. Relatedly, 伏 also shows up in the word 降伏 [こうふく] surrender.

So why does downward + house mean hut? Because of the connotation of being humble or modest. Japanese dictionaries describe a 伏せ屋 as being a dwelling that is small, shabby, and/or plain.

Final mystery: Why did Google Translate find it so "excellent"? I kinda think(?) it mistook 伏 in this style for 秀, which does mean excellent, but I could be wrong. I am very likely wrong. But at least I figured out this fucking yuri thing and don't have to worry about that anymore!