>>> Item number 8286 from WRITERS LOG9302B --- (62 records) ------ <<< Date: Mon, 15 Feb 1993 10:35:21 JST Reply-To: WRITERS Sender: WRITERS From: Mike Barker Subject: Word of the Day Hi - this week I'm going to do a daily word. These are mostly Japanese words borrowed from English. I'll include the standard spelling (Hepburn), a guide to pronounciation, and some discussion of the local meaning. Hope you enjoy learning the real meaning of these English words! mike ------------------------------------------ Hepburn: hirari pronounced:hee-rah-ree. as in hee-rah-ree coo-ree-n-toe-n. (you know - bee-ru and...:-) The Prez and his wife are going to be surprised when they visit Japan to learn that everyone knows her name. It's hee-rah-ree. But what they may not realize is just why this is a familiar name here. First, no one is likely to tell them about this year's national T.V. saga with a main character named hirari. Since the show was produced last summer, it seems unlikely that the name was chosen to match the U.S. Presidental Lady. The show runs every day for one year, a 15 minute piece each day (which is rebroadcast several times during the day), and is a favorite for most people. Everyone knows it, and talks about it. So hirari is quite well known. Second, hee-rah-ree is a fairly common name here. It is a derived name, from "hira, hira, hira". Hira, in turn, is a "sound" word used to describe a leaf or piece of paper falling through the air. It falls hira, hira, hira, you see. This is one of a class of words here in Japan that doesn't have any simple parallel that I know of in English. Some people call them onomotopia, but pika is one of these words, and it is used to describe something shining and glittery (her earring is pika pika). There is not really an explicit meaning to the word, just a common way of using the sounds to add to a description, mostly in spoken Japanese. It's almost as though a mother's "nonsense" sounds had been regularized and included in adult speech. (Regularized? Yes. I'm constantly using the wrong one and being corrected, gently. There are tables of these word-sounds intended to help foreigners, but I have trouble memorizing them.) So when people say hirari, they are (mentally) hearing the gentle sound of falling leaves in the air. So the Prez's lady is going to come in with the advantage of a well-known "friendly" name. Incidentally, don't make the common mistake of thinking that the Japanese are using "r" or "l" when they say this. When you say "lily", your tongue touches your teeth. When you say "rock", your tongue is near the top of your mouth. But when the Japanese say "rah", "ree", "rue", "ray", "roe", (the five r phonemes) the tongue is near the ridge behind the teeth in the top of your mouth - more relaxed than an American "r", but not down and extended like the "l". Americans need to practice to say the five Japanese phonemes correctly, and have real trouble with them, both in saying and hearing them correctly. So think of a gently falling leaf, and the sound it makes as it falls - doesn't it remind you of hirari clinton, now? ------------------------------------------