すみません…

 I just accidentally discovered the root of the expression すみません and that makes me so happy :). 


I have been meaning to look up both finish and close because I finally have start and open firmly lodged in my brain, and both were in last semester’s vocabulary (both はじまる&はじめる were and also あける like to open a window) and after new year, あける is finally thoroughly lodged - something that I couldn’t have honestly said during the semester.


And I went to jisho, like I usually do*, and had meant to type shut or close and typed finish instead… and I was scrolling down the results in jisho trying to see which pinged my brain as the word that had been used there (like class finished or to finish something) and the fifth one was すむ and it’s fourth meaning said “4. to feel unease or guilt for troubling someone; to be sorry​; in the negative” and my brain said “got you!!!” And then actually bothered to fill me in on what it had meant by that, since that wasn’t the word I had been looking for… :D


Anytime that I had looked up sumimasen, it has only tended to give back “expression” and the English meanings for the expression, even though it was obviously a polite negative verb form. And since we learned plain forms and stems last semester, I haven’t tried looking it up and it hadn’t occurred to me to try to backcast it from the stem to the plain form that すみ would obviously go to すむ for the plain form and to look it up that way.  Probably because the word is now an integral part of my brain and my vocabulary… (we won’t talk about how many times I say すみません when I’m trying to squeeze through an inadequate gap in a crowd when people are stopped talking and blocking the way… Here.  In the Midwest. 😳 And not at a Heart of America Japan America Society meeting or anything… 🤦). 


But since it is now such a part of my vocabulary, it no longer occurs to me to look it up - but it has evidently still been bothering my brain in the background, because it instantly grabbed that meaning as I scrolled through and said “got you!” triumphantly :). And thinking of how this is now an integral part of my vocabulary, I’ve known the word for about a year now - but I think that this is my second blog post with this title because the first Tadoku book that we did in JCCC Elementary Japanese 1 course was titled すみません and we had to do a book report blog post about it :D.  Happy days :).


I can totally see how something unfinished, that you didn’t get done, would become an expression and take on those wider meanings and spread through society.


And by strange coincidence, we had just been having a discussion at home about some code that I had been trying to help my wife with, off and on, for getting on two years and failing with… すみません 😔


But happy dance for finding the root source of the expression !!! 


And I think, scrolling further down and remembering the reason I was on that results page in the first place, that the textbook used おわる which was the tenth one down in the results… makes you wonder how commonly used that version of finish is, or at least, what the system is for ranking results order on jisho given how low it was in the results… 🤷


* to be honest, I was already at jisho and had been doing the dictionary equivalent of a wikiwalk, starting off from a sentence in a Jgame in its introduction - I was looking up the kanji in “guide” and what exactly yakuna meant… “ の世界の案内役なの” and wandered through various kanji in the words and linked kanji… like I used to read the dictionary as a child, before the term wikiwalk even existed (or wikis… or the web ;)). After getting to なの, I finally ended on the kanji for stop and bill passage and vetoing, and that reminded me that I had been meaning to look up two words for ages…

Comments

Post a Comment

Popular posts from this blog

Hiragana Chart ひらがな

Image
  I had the advantage when I came to learning Japanese that I had learned another language with a non-roman script before, although that was a long time ago in high school.  I learned Classical Greek which used the Greek alphabet.  It was in high school, so I had the support of school language classes to do it, rather than working on my own.  It enforced discipline and practice.  It was also very different in that it was an alphabet, rather than a syllabary.  Japanese is very different in that style - each symbol is a sound. When I learned to read in England, we learned the letters in alphabetical order, and had pictures of things that began with that letter, such as “a is for apple, b is for bee, c is for cat”.  That last one in particular really does not help - if you try reading it out loud, you will notice that you have just said “see is for cat”, which is a hard c or k sound.  Makes things much harder for children to grasp.  This...
Read more

What a Difference a Year Makes, Part 2...

 It was around this time last year that I was first considering learning Japanese... This year, I went to a ぼねんかい last week hosted by the Nijikaewa group, was cheerfully wishing people よいおとしを ＆あけましておめでとうございます( & 楽しいクリスマス・メリクリスマス a week earlier too), and yesterday, at a regular check up appointment at the doctor's office, was studying Kanji while I was waiting - which I assume is the reason that when they called my name, I automatically, loudly, called "はい!" in response - and why on my way hoping and trying to find the nearest branch, I typed "starba" into google maps, instead of "Starbucks"... 😵 Luckily, Google knew exactly what I meant (often, it suggests the right thing until you misspell it, then it disappears off the suggestions list.  That didn't happen this time, and when I automatically hit enter without thinking, Starbucks still popped up as the searched for item.  It is evidently used to people googling starba 😁).
Read more

Perfect…

Image
 I was playing a game on my tablet and I found that I already had the last of the five items I needed to level up… and when I saw it and as I dragged it across to merge it, my brain was going “あー、かんぺき！” And I thought “really brain?  That means perfect?  You’re just making things up now!” So I went and checked it in the dictionary and I owe my brain an apology 😳 I had a similar thing happen the other day with a crossword clue - I had just binged about 6 episodes of anime before deciding to do the crossword puzzle and the clue was “sufficient, nice, fine, pretty, quite” and my brain instantly said “けっこう” which I thought was highly implausible as I would have sworn we had never had it as a vocabulary word - despite all those hiragana (& more) being available in the answer candidate pool for the app.  But I entered it in anyway, and it was right…then realized that I had heard the word multiple times in the anime episodes that I had just binged and my brain must have...
Read more