hana-kotoba the hard way

[wombat1138]

Found a little book entirely devoted to Japanese flower symbolism. However, it is almost entirely in Japanese. *headdesk*

At the moment, am slowly transliterating the individual flower names onto paper. They're all indexed in katakana regardless of etymology; I still deeply suck at recognizing katakana, and so am limping back and forth between the book and my handy kana ref chart. Some of them are obvious loanwords from the English flower names, throwing doubt on the traditionality of those particular flowers, but all of the species names are also provided in romaji, which should help with the final identification later. Each entry also seems to start with a brief summary of the meaning (I haven't started any kanji lookups yet), so hopefully I won't have to translate the full paragraphs of text that follow.

Still flailing through Okami; stalled on some of the timed minigames, some of which are supposedly optional but really aren't if you want any hope of being able to deal with certain beasties in normal combat without using up inventory items. OTOH the "thief's glove" makes it possible to generate goodies at will, though not by specific selection.

Comments

[branchandroot]

Yeah, there are twelve "houses" that the 28 fall into. And that isn't the source of the shikigami either, which I thought rather unfair. They seem to come more out of some of the accumulated legends of the four (or five counting the center) quarters, only... elaborated. And with some other stuff tossed in. That's the point in the search I'm at now, trying to find the other stuff. It's all amazingly more complicated than you can see from the commonly translated stuff. Par for the course. *wry*

[wombat1138.livejournal.com]

Have you already seen the original Chinese list of the "Twelve Branches" before they were overlaid onto the animal zodiac? The Japanese juunichi beasties now use the "Branch" kanji, but there's an earlier list of meanings that doesn't seem to've ported online into Wikipedia etc.: 子 = "bud, young shoot, beginning of all things"; 丑 = literally "tied" but more loosely "the growth of things" and so on.

Source: Chinese Geomancy by Evelyn Lip, Singapore: Times Books International, 1979; I was particularly happy to find this book because it's a discussion of feng shui that predates the Western New-Ageification of the concept. (I still cherish the memory of seeing a book called "Celtic Feng Shui".)

[branchandroot]

No, I hadn't seen the older characters. That could be a promising link, thanks!

*weakly* Celtic... feng shui?