Ch 6 Kanji Poster 今私月火水木金土曜何来週休






I knew a bunch of these already, but despite knowing them, I had no clue what the image on p243 of Nakama 1 was supposed to be for earth… so I went to my old friend wiktionary (after using Jisho to grab the kanji from for copy and paste) & found that it was supposed to be a lump of clay on the potter’s wheel… Not entirely sure how a round lump on a flat line goes to 土 - even a square box over a line would be closer to a sphere of clay than that, but that wasn’t my biggest worry. I looked at it and thought “Hang on?  When was Oracle Bone Script used again?  And when was the Potter’s Wheel* invented?”  I mean, I’m not talking discovering that if you burn earth it becomes hard & can be used for things, but working clay on a potter’s wheel before burning that earth…

So, a quick google reveals that Oracle Bone Script (often tortoiseshell, not bone, and we will here remember that tortoise’s shells are made out of their ribs, and they cannot moult them like crabs can) was used in the late second millennium BCE (some sources have 1500 - 1000 BCE, others 1300 - 1100 BCE, so we have a range that encompasses the latter half of that millennium).  I also discovered it was used for pyromancey, and I had been assuming that it was used like tossing joss sticks, but with bone inscriptions.  Not so much I Ching then… and pyromancey becomes a topic to research another time**.

Another google search shows that the potter’s wheel was invented at about 3500 BCE in Mesopotamia# -  a few centuries before someone worked out that you could turn them 90 degrees and use them on chariots##.  That’s a lot earlier than I was thinking & I cannot really imagine the thought process that went into “you know how we make bowls by rolling a thin sausage of clay and then looping it round and round, getting larger each time, until it is big enough, then make sure it is jammed tight together so we don’t have any leaks and smooth it out?  Well, do you think it would be easier if we invented something to spin it around really fast instead?”

Anyway, potters’ wheels were definitely invented before that symbol and long enough before that they could easily have spread and been familiar enough that people would expect others to recognize it instantly, like we recognize the cross/don’t cross symbols on pedestrian crossings.

It still doesn’t explain how it became a fairly equal-branched cross on a flat line instead, even with the extra in-between stages that wiktionary and Uncle Hangzi have, but at least the assumption about the original symbol makes sense to me now and is plausible too.  Interesting that some of the images seem to have fire sparks around them for the baking/firing process, and how alike the fire symbol they look then. 

And we had 13 symbols this time (which is really annoying - the initial numbers fitted nicely onto one page and then onto two pages for the poster.  This will either be three (two and a bit, which is irritating and feels incomplete), or I will have to redesign it entirely & break my pattern… and obviously, I have not done the poster yet, but I will and will add it into here once it is done.  Posting this blog now before it becomes too divergent from the topic (I know, probably way too late for that, given the side discussions on mechanics & design, and the dates of use and discovery, for pottery production processes.  I’m also not commenting on 休み in this blog as I have discussed before how much I love it and how poetic and appropriate it is).

☆☆☆

I have to say too how sloppy and lazy it is of the Nakama authors to use the same drawing for water as they did for river (or their proof readers if they had instructions that said “insert 水 bone script drawing here).  The real early water pictures feel like they are a more artistic representation of water, like the surface of water with the characteristic flashes in the sun that you get on non-still water, than the river image is.

☆☆☆

I also have to say that I have felt sorry for 先生 all semester, loving and doing calligraphy and having to see our initial scrawls completely fail to do justice to the kanji… but it is no worse than a violin teacher teaching new violinists, and perhaps getting joy from setting someone on the same path that you love. 

I have terrible English handwriting, but I have tried really hard with all 3 scripts to be accurate and legible to avoid bad habits that might make it less legible or messier. It’s too late for my English handwriting, but not for my Japanese…  

☆ ☆ ☆


* for the purpose of this question, all the times I have discovered the great secret of Pottery while playing Civilisation (II onwards ;)) do not count.

** presumably in that giant gap between Elementary Japanese I and Elementary Japanese II, where I have nothing planned yet***, but suspect that closer to the time, I will plan all sorts of things without the studying commitments & do approximately ~ 5% of them, if I am lucky.  Now that I have written it down, I can feel evil plans to start reading ahead in Nakama (since it is the same textbook for both courses) to help me keep up with the coursework… or read the first 6 chapters again & do any exercises I skipped to give me a  better foundation for part II.  I suspect this is in the 95% zone, although I do know that I will continue studying Japanese every day, I’m really not sure that it will be in Nakama.

*** although getting closer to the actual amount of sleep I require and having time to watch tv/stream anime/read a non-coursework book spring instantly to mind…


# https://www.smithsonianmag.com/science-nature/a-salute-to-the-wheel-31805121/#:~:text=Evidence%20indicates%20they%20were%20created,Western%20philosophy%E2%80%A6and%20the%20wheelbarrow.  Note that a simpler form called a slow wheel or tourney or tournette was in use for about a millennium before that too, which probably could have still worked for the symbol. Which rather answers the question I implied about how do you go from one form of making pottery to the potter’s wheel form instead… you don’t start by spinning it fast, and someone somewhere got tired of turning the pot round all the time by hand to add more clay and check it, and decided there had to be a better way.

## which is also impressive.  I cannot describe how long I spent as a kid trying to work out how you transferred the force from the wind in windmills 90 degrees to get a stone to turn at the bottom at 90 degrees to the way the windmill’s vanes turn…. I never did figure it out for myself, but we went to the science museum in Birmingham some time after I had started wondering about it, and I saw a gear assembly there that did it & it was brilliant.  Would not have meant anything to me if I had not already been wondering about it - and I would never have figured that out on my own.  I would have had to have built windmills with a horizontal vane to turn a horizontal stone (I wouldn’t have been daft enough to build a vertical one with a vertical stone, the grist would fall out…).

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