>>very
much worth wading for<<
Well - I wasn't actually about to wade into the river to
collect a class-a on Ibaraki-Saitama-Tochigi - it seemed a bit deep -
hehehe
In Japanese, as in English, there are many words for the
same thing and the same word can have more than one meaning depending on the
context. There are subtleties and shades of meaning that may or may not be
universally understood or interpreted. As for whether "kuni" (the part that
means country) denotes "nation state" or not, I really can't say. I believe that
"Han" is the word for what we refer to as "prefecture" - although you will see
the English word "prefecture" on signs all over the place, as you will have
observed from some of my photographs. Therefore I think that, today, you would
probably not find that "kuni" would be used to refer to provinces (from the Edo
period) but I can ask, as this might be an erroneous assumption - and I have
been known to make those in the past :).
As an aside, and an example of one of the more difficult
parts of the Japanese language for westerners, "mi" meaning 3 is the
pronounciation only in some circumstances (I've noticed that it usually seems to
be when it is followed by a "k" sound) - the more usual pronounciation is "san"
(not at all similar phoenetically!!). Regardless of the pronounciation, the same
Kanji character (3 horizontal lines for those with Kanji challenged computers)
is used in each case when writing it - that's because Kanji is ideographic, not
phoenetic. This phenomenon seems to be quite widespread in Japanese. The
phoenetic Katakana symbol for "mi" is almost the same symbol although the lines
slope top left to bottom right more (ミ). The Hiragana symbol is,
however, totally different - (み).
Cheers
Hugh
thanx for following thru on
http://groups.yahoo.com/group/BoundaryPoint/message/18797
etc
with
this interesting addition
which was indeed very much worth wading
for
& which i take to confirm not only that not all
tripoints are
mikuni tripoints
but also that the traditional japanese word
for
countries within the word mikuni
is
or is more nearly
synonymous with
the present japanese word for the provinces
rather than
the modern japanese words for the
prefectures
let alone for countries
in the sense of nation states
except of course insofar as the provinces
used to be
like separate countries
--- Hugh Wallis
<hugh@...> wrote:
> Just following up on the
disucssions earlier on the
> meaning and use of the
> Japanese
word "Mikuni" ( »° ¹ñ ) - literally
> meaning 3 countries. I
had
> some discussions with some Japanese speaking friends
> and
they all felt that
> this word should properly be used to refer
to
> tripoints, only where a place
> has been specifically named
as such. For example
> »°¹ñƽ which means "Three
> Country Pass"
or "Mikuni Pass". Therefore it seems
> it is appropriate in our
>
disucssions to refer to prefectural tripoints that
> are not so named
using
> the English word tripoint.
>
> Cheers
>
> Hugh
>
__________________________________
Yahoo! Mail - PC Magazine Editors'
Choice 2005
http://mail.yahoo.com