Kevin Kirton
Cooma, Australia
It's just that the book looks otherwise well edited.
I thought perhaps that the kanji 安 was intended (since that's
often/usually given as the origin of the hiragana あ), but even then
none of the dictionaries or Chinese etymology sites gives a meaning
close to "lucky."
Once something like this gets in my head, I can't let it go. So I
emailed the publisher.
But I thought there would be someone here with at least a guess.
Kevin Kirton
Cooma, Australia
> I picked up an English-language kids book in Kyoto recently called "All
> About Japan" (a Tuttle book) and on its page about Japanese writing
> it shows 亜, あ, and ア as examples of kanji, hiragana, and katakana
> respectively. Then next to 亜 it states: This is the kanji for the word
> "lucky."
> But none of the Japanese or Chinese dictionaries I've looked at
> seems to back this up.
> I'm guessing this is a mistake of some sort?
> Any ideas?
Well, since no one else has spoken up, let me speculate.
Yes, this is clearly a mistake. 亜 has no meanings anywhere close to "lucky" as far as I can tell, either in Japanese or Chinese.
Now for the speculation part. Since this is a kids book, the authors probably wanted so simplify things but still make it interesting. I can only guess that the author first picked 亜, あ and アin order to represent the sound "a" in the three different scripts. Fair enough.
But then an editor or someone important wanted to know what亜 "meant" and thought they should include the meaning of the character in the book. Of course, we all know that 亜 does not have a very distinct "meaning" itself, but rather it either represents the sound "a" in kanji place names or means something like "sub-" in various scientific terms. Neither of these are terribly easy to explain to children, so maybe someone had the bright idea to change the character to one that means "lucky" (presumably 福 or something).
So the editor changed the English but then someone dropped the ball about changing the kanji to one that does mean "lucky." Or maybe someone else objected to changing the character because it would destroy the neat "a" sound theme. So the character didn't get changed, but the "lucky" bit remained.
Editors that don't know everything about their subject can cause these sorts of problems.
Regards,
Alan Siegrist
Carmel, CA, USA
斉藤 完治
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"Alas, there is no luck in 亜. I’m very sorry to report that the
solution to this mystery is that we made a mistake."
How the mistake was made is still a mystery. But I imagine it would be
something along the lines of Alan Siegrist's theory.
It's a new book, so perhaps in 20 years time from now we might see a
celebrity of some kind being interviewed about his tattoo of 亜 meaning
"lucky" and that he read it in a book so it must be true.
Kevin Kirton
Cooma, Australia