Close, but not quite :) "Stupid cat" would be "baka neko"; "bakeneko" (or sometimes "o-bakeneko" depending on how polite you feel about them) is "monster cat" or similar, related to the word "bakemono" which is usually translated as "monster". (The "-mono" part is roughly equivalent to "thing" or "object", I think-- there're a lot of food terms that mean "fried stuff" or "sauteed stuff" or "simmered stuff" etc. that all end in the same "-mono".)
Haven't actually tried to track down the etymology of the "bake" half before... well gosh, no wonder that looked familiar: the first kanji in "[ba]ke[neko]" and "[ba]ke[mono]" means "change/transformation" and also shows up in a lot of Japanese technical terms about chemistry, probably with a different pronunciation just to be difficult. By itself, "o-[ba]ke" means "ghost" or "monster"; there's probably some subtle difference between that and "[ba]ke[mono]" that I have no idea what it is.
The "idiot" word is usually written in kana, but the traditional ntwo-kanji compound "[ba][ka]" literally translates to "horse deer". No one knows why. It might be a weird phonetic transcription of a word in the Ainu language, spoken by a (relatively) Caucasian indigenous tribe which is now backed into the island of Hokkaido at the northern end of the Japanese archipelago; it might has to do with some sort of picture-based lottery-card system. Or it might be something completely different. Because. :b
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ninetydegrees
no subject
on 2006-05-01 02:04 pm (UTC)Haven't actually tried to track down the etymology of the "bake" half before... well gosh, no wonder that looked familiar: the first kanji in "[ba]ke[neko]" and "[ba]ke[mono]" means "change/transformation" and also shows up in a lot of Japanese technical terms about chemistry, probably with a different pronunciation just to be difficult. By itself, "o-[ba]ke" means "ghost" or "monster"; there's probably some subtle difference between that and "[ba]ke[mono]" that I have no idea what it is.
The "idiot" word is usually written in kana, but the traditional ntwo-kanji compound "[ba][ka]" literally translates to "horse deer". No one knows why. It might be a weird phonetic transcription of a word in the Ainu language, spoken by a (relatively) Caucasian indigenous tribe which is now backed into the island of Hokkaido at the northern end of the Japanese archipelago; it might has to do with some sort of picture-based lottery-card system. Or it might be something completely different. Because. :b