Thread by @ZevHandel

A seemingly bizarre editorial error in a Taiwanese children’s book has a lot to tell us about the history of Chinese characters as they’ve traveled from China to Japan—and back again. Let’s dive in and take a look. 1/40

This is an illustrated children’s book published in Taiwan in 1993, titled Lóngmāo 龍貓—literally ‘dragon cat’. It’s a book version of the classic Miyazake animated film My Neighbor Totoro (Tonari no Totoro となりのトトロ). Lóngmāo is the Chinese name for Totoro. 2/

You can tell it’s meant for young children who are still learning to read because each Chinese character is glossed with its Standard Mandarin pronunciation using the Zhùyīn fúhào 注音符號 phonetic symbols that are widely employed in Taiwan. 3/

For example, 龍 is glossed ㄌㄨㄥˊ and 貓 is glossed ㄇㄠ. (You can read more about Zhùyīn fúhào, known colloquially as Bopomofo, at en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bopomofo .) But this is all by way of introduction; we haven’t gotten to the interesting part yet. 4/

The story’s protagonist is shown here at the upper left, the young girl Kusakabe Satsuki (草壁 サツキ). In the Japanese movie credits, her surname Kusakabe is given in kanji (Chinese characters), 草壁. Her given name Satsuki is rendered in the syllabic katakana script, サツキ. 5/

As you can see from this cast-of-characters page at the beginning of the book, her name in Chinese is written 草壁月 Cǎobì Yuè. The surname is easy to explain: the two kanji writing Kusakabe, which literally means ‘grass wall’, are carried over unchanged into Chinese. 6/

As is typically done in Chinese, no attempt is made to imitate the Japanese pronunciation. The Japanese name is interpreted orthographically. The kanji are read with the ordinary Mandarin pronunciations that they have as Chinese characters: cǎo 草 ‘grass’ and bì 壁 ‘wall’. 7/

What about her given name, Yuè 月 ‘moon’? Where does that come from? As we mentioned earlier, in Totoro her name Satsuki is written with katakana as サツキ. 8/

This is not an uncommon girl’s name in Japan, and although it’s written in katakana in the movie, we know its meaning and how it is written in kanji. The meaning of Satsuki is May (the month), written 五月 (with two kanji meaning ‘five’ and ‘moon/month’). 9/

In practice the name is rendered several different ways in kanji, most of them containing the character 月 ‘month’. For example, Satsuki can be written 五月, 皐月, 早月, 咲月. (Kanji use in onamastics is complicated, and we won’t get into the details here.) 10/

Presumably the translator was aware of the meaning of Satsuki and the typical kanji used to write it in Japanese, and abbreviated these two-kanji forms down to the single character 月, which is pronounced yuè in Chinese meaning ‘moon’ or ‘month’. 11/

I hope you’ve found this interesting so far—but we are only now getting to the really interesting part. Down here at the lower right of the cast-of-characters page, the young boy named Dàyuán Kàntài 大垣勘太 (Japanese Ōgaki Kanta) is identified as “Shāqí’s classmate”. 12/

Who is this Shāqí 莎琪? The structure of the page implies that Shāqí is a character already known to us. Yet no such name appears anywhere else on this page, or indeed anywhere in the entire book. (Now we’ve gotten to the interesting part!) 13/

If you know the story of Totoro, then you know that Kanta is Satsuki’s classmate. In fact, it’s clear from context that Shāqí 莎琪 must be a reference to our protagonist Cǎobì Yuè (aka Kusakabe Satsuki). So why doesn’t the identification say “月的同學 ‘Yue’s classmate’”? 14/

The name of the main character, Satsuki in Japanese, is translated as Yuè 月 ‘moon’ throughout the book, but is translated, without explanation, as Shāqí 莎琪 in this one instance. How could such an error have happened? 15/

The clue to what’s going on here is in the pronunciation: Shāqí in Mandarin sounds suspiciously close to Satsuki in Japanese. 16/

Chinese translators have two choices when faced with a written Japanese name. Nearly all Japanese names are (or can be) written in kanji, and nearly all those kanji are Chinese characters of the Chinese writing system. 17/

This means that each kanji is recognizable to a literate Chinese speaker, and is associated with a Chinese word. (Well, technically a Chinese morpheme, but we’ll stick with saying “word” for simplicity.) 18/

That word has a meaning and a pronunciation, which means that to a Chinese speaker, each kanji is associated with a meaning and a Mandarin pronunciation. 19/

A translator deciding how to render a Japanese name into Chinese has two choices. The first option for the translator is to imitate the sound of the Japanese name by choosing some Chinese characters whose Mandarin pronunciation approximates the Japanese pronunciation. 20/

This is the same way that translators render Western names in Chinese. The resulting Chinese characters will bear no relationship to the meaning (or appearance) of the kanji used to write the name in Japanese. 21/

莎琪, pronounced Shāqí in Mandarin, is obviously an attempt to approximate the sound of the Japanese name Satsuki 五月. The translator has chosen two characters that not only write the syllabic sounds shā and qí, but are also culturally appropriate for a Chinese girl’s name. 22/

It’s not much different from the way the English name Sally is rendered into Chinese as Shālì 莎莉. 23/

However, there is a second option, one that is available because of the unique orthographic intersection of the Chinese and Japanese writing systems. The translator can preserve the meaning that the name connotes in Japanese by using the exact same written form in Chinese. 24/

The Chinese pronunciations of the kanji may well be totally different from the Japanese pronunciations. But Chinese speakers don’t care about that; they are unlikely to know how the Japanese name is pronounced in the first place. 25/

Yuè 月 is the result of this approach. It preserves part of the orthographic form of the Japanese name Satsuki 五月—the tsuki part—while abandoning any similarity to the original Japanese pronunciation of the name. 26/

There is no way to know for sure why these two Chinese forms of Satsuki’s name appear on the cast-of-characters page, but I’ll take a risk and speculate: The translator initially decided to translate the name as Shāqí, and used it in an early draft of the book. 27/

Then the decision was undone. Perhaps the translator had a change of heart, or perhaps an editor felt that the name Yuè would work better. 28/

Satsuki’s name was revised in the manuscript from Shāqí 莎琪 to Yuè 月. Except someone was sloppy, and left one instance of the earlier name unnoticed and unchanged on the cast-of-characters page. 29/

But this isn’t the end of the story. The apparently bizarre juxtaposition of two very different ways of translating the name Satsuki from Japanese into Chinese reveals to us powerful forces in the history of Chinese characters and, indeed, the history of human writing. 30/

The two methods available when translating Japanese names into Chinese reflect the two fundamental mechanisms by which Chinese characters were originally adapted to represent the unwritten Japanese language around 1500 years ago. 31/

And these same two fundamental mechanisms were also at work in the adaptation of Chinese characters to write Vietnamese and Korean. And in the adaptation of Sumerian cuneiform to write Akkadian. 32/

These instances of historical script borrowing, and the universals underlying them, are the subject of my book Sinography. 33/

https://twitter.com/ZevHandel/status/1210037069919248384

Take the character 月, which has been in use to write the Chinese words meaning ‘moon’ and ‘month’ for over 3,000 years. Because it represents a word, it has an associated sound and meaning: in modern use for Standard Mandarin, the sound is yuè and the meaning is ‘moon’. 34/

Japanese speakers used this character to write the Japanese word that was synonymous to the Chinese word for ‘moon’, although pronounced completely differently: tsuki. This is the very meaning and pronunciation we see in the second part of the name Satsuki. 35/

At the same time, other Chinese characters were adapted purely for their sound value to write Japanese syllables. For example, the Chinese character 加 now used to write the Mandarin word jiā ‘to add’ was pronounced ka in Chinese 1500 years ago. 36/

It was used by Japanese speakers to write the syllable ka in Japanese words. The form 加 later simplified into the hiragana and katakana syllabic signs か and カ, respectively. 37/

Everything old is new again. The Chinese character 月 was in use 1500 years ago to write the Chinese word ngwat ‘moon’ (which has become yuè in today’s Mandarin). 38/

It was adapted based on its meaning to write the synonymous Japanese word tsuki ‘moon’, and thus was used to write the second half of the word satsuki ‘month of May’: 五月. 39/

In this children’t book, that kanji was adapted back from Japanese to render the name of the main protagonist, where it is read with its modern Chinese pronunciation: yuè. 40/

Thanks to an editorial flub, we see here, playing out in complex ways, the fascinating adaptability of Chinese characters. 41/end

Oh, and here’s the publication info for the book.