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Old 05-20-2007, 10:33 PM   #46
Josh Lerner
 
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Location: Renton, WA
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Re: Parsing ai ki do

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Erick Mead wrote: View Post
Careful, your sarcasm is showing.
D'oh! And here I am, thinking I'm so subtle.

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Erick Mead wrote: View Post
When I want to do scholarly linguistic argument, I''ll make a note of your critique.
My critique is specifically of your attempts at a scholarly linguistic argument. Because none of your scholarly-sounding reasoning about reading "aikido" as a Chinese poetic compound is based on scholarly linguistics. It's not even based on simple undergraduate level linguistics. If you don't want to be criticised from a scholarly point of view, you would be better off not trying to sound scholarly. Criticism of each other is what scholars do, you know. And I'm not even a scholar. Just an ex-scholar wannabee.

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Erick Mead wrote: View Post
The inverse process is where there are independent homophones in both Japanese and Chinese at the time of adoption that are cognate even before the introduction of the kanji.
What independent homophones are you talking about that are cognate with each other? Maybe if you can explain that, I'll have a better idea of what you are talking about. Are you talking about "he" and "ai"? The Chinese "he" and Japanese "ai" of "aikido" are neither cognates nor homophones. "Ai", as I've explained several times now, comes from the native Japanese verb a(u), and has nothing to do with any historical Chinese pronounciation. If the Japanese had never had any contact with China, they would still have used the verb "aimasu" and made noun phrases that started with "ai". If you have some actual reference to cite that proves otherwise, please post it.

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Erick Mead wrote: View Post
The later classification into kunyomi/onyomi can arbitrarily pick one as "kunyomi", even though the Chinese is the original associated with the kanji.
"Ai" as kunyomi is not arbitrary. "Ai" was never taken from a Chinese pronounciation. Look at all the Japanese references you can. For anyone who can read Japanese and is willing to do just a little research, it's as plain as day.

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Erick Mead wrote: View Post
Who said I said that?
I said you said that, obviously. Maybe I misunderstood your reasoning. You wrote -

Quote:
Erick Mead wrote: View Post
On the poetic front, "ai-ki-do" 合 氣 道 is onyomi, meaning it is pronounced (more or less) as a Japanese pidgin of Classical Chinese. The connotations appropriate to onyomi in poetry are Chinese in origin, with whatever other gloss the Japanese have given it, not unlike Latinate words in English.

Classical Chinese was transmitted to Japan before the development of modern compounds (two characters typical per word/idea). Plural is by context, or number marker. Chinese syntax is precedential in word order: subject/predicate; modifier/modified, verb/object, and the order of sentence/clause structure, typically: topic, predicate, comment. Reading it in the Classical Chinese manner may thus give a variety of associations or connotations appropriate to poetic license.
I took your reasoning to be the following, based on what you wrote above -

a) "aikido" is onyomi
b) onyomi is a Chinese way of reading kanji
c) reading "aikido" as onyomi is therefore a Chinese way of reading the compound
d) "The connotations appropriate to onyomi in poetry are Chinese in origin"
e) therefore the word "aikido" can be parsed according to the way Chinese compounds are parsed in classical Chinese poetry, and doing so will give us an insight into what Ueshiba wanted to say.

Which of these steps doesn't reflect what you are trying to say?
The reasoning, if this is what you are trying to say, is faulty, because the very first step is not true, and because Ueshiba had nothing to do with the creation of the word "aiki".

Awaiting further clarification . . .

Josh
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