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Tim Griffiths wrote:
On a semi-serious note, an explanation from a Chinese friend of mine:
"People make the translation of 'aiki-do' much too complicated. First, the word is 'aiki', it looses its real sense when you break it up into its two parts. And 'aiki' is an everyday word, not something to do with Universal power or something very spiritual. I heard the word a lot when I was growing up from my grandmother - whenever me and my brother were fighting she would sigh and say "Can't you two try to have a little more heqi (aiki)?" "
Tim
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I agree that people make the translation of 'aiki' much too complicated, but I disagree that 'aiki' is an everyday word in Japanese. So, your friend's Chinese grandmother was probably quite right about the lack of
heqi, but I think this word would have come into Japanese as
gouki (C), but neither
gouki nor
aiki appear in Japanese monolingual dictionaries and none of my Japanese friends have a use for
gouki in everyday Japanese. I thik the term is special to the Japanese martial arts.
Best regards,