Re: Japanese "good", consonant clusters etc.

Some people said (and I replied):

> > >             _bijin (no)_, "good-lookin'" (woman, girl)
> >
> > "Bijin", by kanji, is "bi" ("beautiful") and "jin" ("person"), so this
is
> > more of a "beautiful person".
>
> Well, according to my kanji dictionary, _bijin_ is "beautiful woman",
> and I have only heard it used of a woman myself.  Given the literal
> meaning, I would assume it originally applied to both men and women, but
> I don't know for sure.
Well, just like it's fairly uncommon ot refer to a male in English as
"beautiful", I imagine. What I hear for men is more often "bishounen", which
is more literally "beautiful boy" (or a "pretty boy").

So I would imagine it went the same way as "beautiful" in English, but I,
also, cannot say for sure.

>
> The kanji for "beauty" is rather interesting.  :-)  "sheep" + "big"  A
> big sheep was a desirable thing, thus the combination was used for
> "desirable", which came to mean "beautiful"
Every time I try to deconstruct kanji this way, I get reprimanded (for lack
of a better term) by my sensei-tachi and tutor. According to them, a single
kanji cannot be broken down further into meanings. So the "musu" in "musuko"
(son; "ko" means "child") does not actually mean self-heart, even though it
is made of the kanji for "self" and "heart". This makes sense; "mai" (from
"mainichi") means "every", yet also is part of "umi" ("sea"). There really
is no correlation.

So, I think some kanji did arise from pictographs and combinations of
pictographs, but I don't think so for all of them.

(And if you quote radicals at me, I'll hand-wave and say I know. I'm just
not paying attention to that group, but you would be right in noting that
they do exist)

-Keith

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