That Penny Took A Long Time To Drop...

 Last night, my wife asked me if I knew enough Japanese to maybe translate some lyrics, but at least to listen to the song and say if the sounds I heard matched the sounds that the Japanese version of the lyrics should be, and I said that I couldn't promise, but I would try... Naturally, I got distracted trying to translate them, then got distracted by something else and haven't actually listened to the song yet...

But while I was on jisho.org, I remembered about the word for purple and looked it up - むらさき - which I thought was an interesting coincidence.  The name comes from a plant, the Red Gromwell, whose roots can be used to make a purple dye.  Oddly, the start of the name is really close to the Latin name for the sea creatures that they made purple dye from in antiquity in the Mediterranean region - think any emperor's purple robes in movies set in Roman times (I nearly typed the shorter phrase "Roman movies", which could easily have implied they had film technology ;).  From context, no one should have assumed that, but the phrasing... context is so important, even in English).  Anyway, the Latin and Greek name for our inconspicuous sea snail was Murex and it gets used in classification & taxonomic nomenclature today.  But it is really interesting that two things that create the colour purple and get used for purple dye got named with the same sound.  I don't know if there was a proto-language that had the same sound for its purple that influenced both, or if traders of purple cloth traveled from the Mediterranean, from Tyre, all the way to Japan and elsewhere in Asia and the words got merged/exchanged.  I rather imagine a conversation between two dye masters looking at the different purples their local sources make & going "You have to use snail mucus??? We just need to grind up a few plant roots... " and someone asking if they can move to Japan...

But between me going to jisho (a lot - I sometimes think I should just set it as my home page), en.wikitionary.org/wiki/紫 *, and looking up to see what Red Gromwells look like**, google decided that next time I hit new tab, it really needed to give me a new suggestion that combined both of those interests - a link about the Japanese language of flowers.  I believe I may have mentioned the ADHD & distractibility earlier in this post (or in a footnote - I do try to keep my distractions from stopping a sentence from being unreadable) ... so obviously, I clicked the link and spent far too long looking at the language of flowers, especially once I found their calendar of birth flowers and looked up my birthday, and my wife's and a few friends' birthdays... and one friend has an alternate date for the white water lily flower, so I followed it to that page, and there was a legend on there about how the water lily came to be, which I read, and decided that google translate was horrible, and so I flipped the page back to Japanese, and then spent more time on Jisho looking up kanji & words until I had the story straight.  

But one of the words, when I got it over to Jisho***, told me that it was unable to find an exact match, but that it was probably this verb, but in the te-iru form, meaning it was an ongoing action. So, I went 'herhhh', or some similarly intellectual sound of pondering ;), and clicked the inflections link to see this te-iru form.  Nothing.  Jisho had finally let me down****... so today, I was going to do some studying before we went out, and I grabbed my vocab printout because I was going to adjust the tags that I had used in Anki for chapter 4, and maybe add chapter 3. And mixed in with the set of vocab that I grabbed (I printed two, because I might lose or need to take a set with me, etc), was some notes I took in class from chapter 3, and so I glanced at those to organise them, and saw the 3 verb forms, and looked them over.  

When I got to the top of my notes, to the irregular form, it said that there were 3, but only two were listed, so naturally, I thought 'What's the third one?" (& unlike the stupid riddle about the third word that ends in gry, this has a proper answer). Although googling on Japanese irregular verbs has many sites saying that there are just two, and Wikipedia says there are actually about a dozen#, so maybe it is more like the third word that ends in gry... But I briefly wondered if the extra verb was imasu, as we learned that since then. And I mentally converted it to its dictionary form, iru... and checked and I was right about the form (despite the i before masu, it only has one sound before the masu, so it follows the ru conversion rule).  

But it was when I was sitting looking at the word to be, to exist for living beings and had just converted it to its dictionary/direct form, that my brain said "oh!  the te-iru form!!!" and I realised that the reason that is a continuing state of being and the inflection wasn't shown is that iru is getting used as a helper verb there, a little like the desu copula is used.  So it is a different verb bolted on and doesn't get shown in the inflections## & if you are adding "being" onto something, of course you are going to be in a continual state of doing something.  And the original wondering was about 12 hours before I saw the notes this morning as I was about to do some vocab organization, so that penny took about 12 hours to drop... must have had a long way to fall!

I'm still not sure how throwing yourself into a lake can be a continuing action - it seems rather binary###, with a distinct start and end to it, to me, but perhaps the continuing nature is the implicit idea behind it, and the emotional state/impact - she was throwing herself into the lake to drown herself, and she didn't throw herself in and bounce out like a yoyo, or someone on a bungee rope, so perhaps it is "threw themself in and stayed in".  It is possible that switching on a light (or a kotatsu, more on that next blog), would be a continuing action form - you switch the light on & it stays on, even though you only did one single, discrete, action.  Obviously, that is going to take more research, although I have a vague inkling that I may have met it in a Japanese Pod episode, with someone visiting China on holiday, there was a sense of "having gone and being there still" form...

And between one thing and another, this has taken nearly two hours to type & I didn't do my vocab work!

* I also sometimes think that the wiktionary kanji etymology should be set as my homepage, the number of times I grab an old URL from my history and paste the current kanji of interest on to the end.  Did you know that you can have more than one homepage in newer versions of Chrome? I can get my adhd multiple-tab distractions right out of the gate when I first open up the browser!!  One of my browsers on my iPad has over 450 tabs open, it popped up a number when I was tabbing between it and another window.  I have three other browsers open on that iPad - so if they are similarly loaded, that is ~ 2000 tabs open at the same time.  It's a wonder it has any working memory left. That's not counting the tabs open in the google app and the duck duck go app on there either... or the browsers and apps on my phone or my pc... It's a wonder I ever get anything done!

** It isn't actually red, it's the roots that are, which the taxonomic name shows - Lithospermum erythrorhizon - Stone-seed red rhizome/root.

*** If there is a lot to translate, do not just grab a word and paste it, you will be there all night.  Copy a whole sentence and paste it.  Jisho stores the whole thing in its search box, but only returns the first word/word-like object from its search.  Then you can delete out the start of it and its particle(s) and hit search again.  Much faster, way less tabbing back and forth between source and destination and ability to get distracted by another tab...

**** OK, it let me down ages ago, because when you tap on the ヨ radical, it doesn't take you to that radical, just to words starting with yo.  It has a similar issue with ﾋ which is why I ended up googling on Japanese radicals and several of those open tabs are still sites on radicals and their meanings/descriptions & also how they change when combined and if they can be a left side, right side, etc, position in a kanji and if it changes their meaning if they are, etc.  Which made it irritating when I tried the wanikani system and it wanted to start you off with radicals - which I really wanted to do for base building blocks - and then it gave them a different name than the ones I knew them by, presumably because whoever created that system thinks this is a better name/mnemonic for English people to learn it by.  Apparently pot lids and the really gorgeous and far more culturally appropriate calligraphy paperweights aren't good enough for them.  I think I am going to like anki much more because even if I load someone else's deck, I can edit it to the name/mnemonic I know it by, instead of having conflict and trying to learn two systems at the same time.

# wikiversity, which I found for the first time in that search, said that the copula, desu, is the third one, but 1) it's a copula, not a verb, so that's cheating, and 2) in the same article, they listed the masu form as the infinitive, rather than the polite form, so I can't believe a word they say, as they are obviously talking out of their arses.

## the te form does appear int he inflections, so you would know to use the te form and add the iru yourself if you needed it.

### which is ironic considering... speaking of which, I was putting away the t-shirt that I was wearing in class the night that we did colours.  It has a purple background, and a moon crescent that is in the nonbinary flag colours - yellow, white, purple and black, and a black cat sitting on the moon.  I looked at it and thought "Wow, that is quite a colourful shirt!" And my brain instantly responded with "well, of course, it's nonbinいろい..." :D  I do like puns, and puns that combine two languages, like catatsu (& the portmanteau nekotatsu) for when the cat takes over the kotatsu make me smile even more.