You write 薫, I write 馨....

[wombat1138]

(I started to compose this as a comment on ekmisao's LJ, but it got too long and self-indulgent so I'm putting it here instead.)

According to Wikipedia, the name "Kaoru" is written with the kanji 薫 in RK, Prince of Tennis, Futari wa Pretty Cure, Hikaru no Go, and Flame of Recca, but with the different kanji 馨 in Ouran High School Host Club and Honey and Clover. Of these serieses, RK is the only one I'm familiar with, but I gather that most of these characters are male, even though by Western standards, the meaning "fragrance" (shared by both kanji) may seem somewhat girly.

Larger-fonted versions: kanji #1, 薫; kanji #2, 馨.

The former kanji has a "plant/grass" radical on top and a "fire" radical at the bottom, which probably means that the original concept was the scent of smoke from burning herbs.

The latter kanji is written a completely different way. By comparison with zhongwen.com, this character is now pronounced "xin" in Mandarin and is etymologized as fragrance (the bottom half, 香) that resonates like hollowed stones (uh, the top half, whose discrete existence seems questionable but is essentially a phonetic element). 香 further breaks down into millet + sweetness, to increase the synesthetic factor just that much more.

Since in Japanese, the latter kanji seems to have the further connotation of "distant fragrance", this may generally mean a more lingering or pervasive scent. And now that I check zhongwen on the first one, that's etymologized as "plant (the radical at the top) that's fragrant like smoke (熏)" -- and ooh, neato; "smoke" breaks down to "vapor" (another vestigial radical on top) plus "black" (黒).

All of which makes me think I really have to copy the radicals from the section headers in Nelson onto index cards, because while I can now recognize most of them and have absorbed the general meanings of a few, I'm making up my own doofy names for them like "critterbeast" and "tabletop" with random actual relevance to their meanings and traditional names.

Comments

[ekmisao.livejournal.com]

Oh, so the Romanization is the same but the kanji is different. Thanks a lot! ^^v

EK 8 )

[ekmisao.livejournal.com]

Thanks a lot for the clarifications! Very helpful!

EK 8 )