But- Japanese culture isn’t traditionally like western culture in many ways. Affection can be a difficult thing to express openly and traditional Japanese culture is often more subtle and prioritizes inferring the feelings of others or expressing consideration.
What does this have to do with moon? Read on. Just like English or other languages there are colonialisms and puns and such that don’t make sense to many non speakers or non natives because the context isn’t there. So- traditionally in Japan there are a few words commonly used in a context similar to romantic love. From a western perspective we can consider these words having different “intensity” sort of the way we have “like,” “crush” etc. and words to denote flings and hook ups and different “levels” of things. So the word that most directly translates to “Love” as in “I love you,” it is hardly ever used. Traditionally the Japanese in general weren’t huge on declaring feelings- there was a general belief that your actions..
.. and manners etc showed feelings. Words can be said easily, but if someone cares for you and spends time with and shares intimacy with you, it should theoretically be obvious or assumed that they love you if you are paying attention and valuing your time with them. That’s sort of the idea anyway. So traditionally it might be less common for a man and woman for example to say “I love you” whenever parting or ending a phone call, or for “no reason” etc. and might seem fake or desperate etc. but even still- the most direct translation to “I love you” is traditionally almost never used. It’s like a big deal- like you might say it a handful of times in life or never hear it from people you are super close to even. It sort of phrase that might only be used in romance fiction or when asking to marry. So there are other phrases which are used more commonly (but still traditionally sparingly to many western standards) such as some form of “daisuki.” This word is most often translated to be…
Akin to the English concept/word “I like <you><this thing> <etc.>” in English, “Love” can be platonic or romantic. In Japanese, the closest analog to “love” is romantic only. You wouldn't likely say it to your friend or mom or dad etc. Dasiuki is closer to the English love in that regard, it can be platonic or romantic. You can be saying that something is basically your favorite or you really like it/love it- like “I love curly fries!” Or “I really like curly fries” and likewise it can be used romantically but in that sense is… it is generally considered closer to “like.” But translations are hard. It can be thought of like a “soft” version of love too. So saying daisuke (or the correct variant) to a person can be like a schoolyard crush sort of deal “hey, I like you…” or it can be a less intense way to tell someone you’ve been seeing awhile or are serious about “I love you.” Perhaps a way to explain to the English speaker is to say you probably wouldn’t tell someone you just met…
.. and think is cute: “I love you.” You’d say “I like you” or whatever. Daisuki works that way, and it works to tel a friend you REALLY like them, similar to how we might tell a close friend we “love them” but many friends we’d be u comfortable actually saying “I love you” so we say something “softer.” And the SERIOUS love words are more like- it’s like using one word to say “you’re the love of my life” or “I want to spend forever with you” or “have my baby…” NOT LITERALLY- but the sort of impact and seriousness is more to that level. So you probably wouldn’t walk around just flipping that at your significant other even if you’d been together a long time. Like- not just because it might be odd, but it loses some of its meaning when you say something that intense all the time. What if every single phone goodbye was exchanging wedding vows? It loses some impact right?
So, now let’s move forward. Towards the moon. There are a few things going on here. One is that “daisuki” and “Tsuki” don’t sound identical, but are close enough that one could mistake them if you misheard.
The “suki” at the end of “daisuki” sounds a lot like “ski.” So the word kinda sounds like “die-ski”.Tsuki”sounds more like “s-ski.” So it might not take much to miss that first syllable or get mixed up. Compounding the matter is that there is a story relating to a student and a poor translation of a poetic declaration of love long ago who mistakenly used too intense an expression of love which could be understood multiple ways. Since the phrase would have been considered extremely forward at the time and unlikely to be something said from one to someone they merely liked- it was interpreted something akin to “the moon is beautiful isn’t it?”
we already covered that “daisuki” could be mistaken as “tsuki” (a friend once misheard “hotdogs” as “tapas” , which written doesn’t make…
.. a lot of sense spoken it could. Sort of like the whole “say rise up lights” really fast and it sounds like an Australian saying “razor blades” etc. so daisuki and tsuki could be mistaken- but “daisuki” is a compound word. “Dai” in this case and may others is like “big.” We can say we are fond of something using “suki” which- sounds like “ski” which of you recall- moon sounds like “s-ski.” And so we can see where under the right circumstances there could be some confusion there! Of course generally speaking context is going to tell you what a person probably said, in American English, the mouth makes similar movements and the sounds are similarly close between the phrases “I love you” and “olive juice.”
In MOST scenarios it would probably be obvious wether someone was saying they love you or asking for/pointing out Olive Juice.
Though Japanese fiction and pop culture aren’t in the dark on this one- there are all manner of jokes and romantic fiction bits scattered about that rely on a set up that places an oblivious of unsuspecting person in a position that creates an ambiguity wether the other person is talking about a pretty moon or confessing feelings. So “moon” is “tsuki” which means “moon” and that is how language works- but there is more to it than that! Because that’s also how language tends to work.
So Tsuki can also mean “month” or refer to month. Japan used to use a lunar calendar and the moon features prominently in lore and cultural history. Since the old calendar was lunar and blah blah- the month is “he numerical month and the kanji for “Tsuki.” So that’s kinda neat. Most Kanji are pictographic- they represent something- usually relating to their meaning. “dai” likes the beginning of “daisuki” means “big” and is the character for “man” with lines coming out of the sides basically parallel to…
The ground. So “man” looks kinda like an upside down “V” with some curves to it- a little dude and the point is where a head is and the 2 offshoots are like legs. If you had the offshoots from a letter “T” coming off the sides of the upside down “V”, that’s a man holding out his arms- like he’s saying “it was thiiis big!” So the kanji for month/moon no surprise means moon. But the pictographic meaning is a bit debated as to what exactly the character is portraying or if it is (as many characters often are) a combination and modification of two or more loan characters. One hypothesis is that it relates to “star” another “man” or “mouth” kuchi.) which is pretty straight forward a little sqaurish depiction of what could look like a mount to opening. Of course now it’s getting interesting. Japanese at a minimum has 3(technically 4 in modern Japanese) “alphabets.”Katakana, Hiragana, Kanji, and for some modern words or concepts Latin letters are used by technically words can be adapted to…
.. Japanese phonetics by changing some of the sounds that Japanese may not have, so strictly let’s say 3. In theory you can write almost anything using only one of these systems but that sort of communication would be very basic and you’d likely have problems. Kanji found its way to Japan through China. It was originally logograms- literally each character meant an entire word and each character was a picture of what the word meant. You could call this old school meme-ing. So if you wanted to write the word “tree” you might draw a tree. If you wanted to write “rat” you might draw a rat. If you wanted to write “squirrel” you might combine the drawing of “tree” and “rat” and call it a “tree rat.” This is part of why some Chinese words or place names can seem odd or funny directly translated to English. So the Japanese already had spoken language when they adopted written symbols from China. So they naturally just decided that if a symbol meant “dog” in Chinese they’d have it make the…
.. sound of the Japanese word for “dog.” Except that Japan had dealings with China and there was commerce and correspondence between them. So some Japanese learned the Chinese spoken meaning of characters and some learned the Japanese spoken version. Katakana and Hiragana are Japanese writing systems developed later and each symbol is a syllable or sound. Hiragana was developed from two main places- the first was that kanji is hard. Imagine a writing system where every word has its own picture and combining pictures can make new words- so using two words next to each other could have at least 2 meanings- and you have to remember how to draw every picture because you can’t just draw “the earth” to mean “earth,” the pictures are standardized since as hard as individual handwriting can be to read- imagine trying to figure out what a stranger thinks a picture of “dirt” should like like vs “sand” or “flour.” Not to mention you may need to draw something you’ve never actually seen-
How would you write a ghost story or how would someone read a ghost Tory if you didn’t know what a ghost looked like? In the west, we often use a little floating sheet sort of thing and we all know that means those because that’s how it’s been used- you probably were exposed to that at an early age. If you’d never seen a ghost represented as a white sheet and saw a ghost emoji- you might wonder what the hell you were looking at. So that’s reason one. Reason two was because women largely weren’t allowed to learn kanji or go to formal education and have jobs where they’d learn and use kanji to remember all those pictures and be able to write them well. So Hiragana developed based off the syllables spoken for a word. Japanese is very syllable based and all the words break down into pre determined sounds. This is why exaggerated Japanese speech has a distinct inflection. When you emphasize words you might exaggerate each syllable.
So hiragana became a writing system that was simpler than kanji, once you knew the basic sounds and the symbols for each (sort of like the English alphabet except picture the letters being more like pairs or several letters making repeating sounds like “ka,ki,ku,ke,ko,sa,shi,se,so,etc…) you could theoretically write any word you could speak similar to “sounding it out” in English and you didn’t need to memorize thousands of pictographs. Hiragana is most often used to express Japanese native words, as opposed to foreign words and loan words.
In time, katakana developed. Katakana is a simplified kanji but is very similar to hiragana in how it works. There were so many kanji that dudes often had trouble remembering or reading them. Since official and formal documents between men had to be written in kanji, men would often scribble simplified notations to remind themselves what a specific kanji meant if it was hard to read. In time this became standardized and became katakana.
Of course it didn’t take long for these writing systems that each largely started out to suit the different binary genders needs to work around complex kanji to become non gendered. So most often, Hiragana is used mainly for Japanese native words, katakana is used for foreign words or names, and kanji- why do they still use that…? Well… each kanji represents a concept right? So not only can it be shorter to write out a single picture to mean a longer to pronounce word, but some concepts don’t travel well. What’s more, Japanese doesn’t traditionally use spaces like English. So without spaces between words or similar punctuation to ours, you need ways to break up writing or clarify where words end etc. “psychotherapist” could be read as a doctor or “psycho the rapist.” A classic SNL moment- “analbumcover” can be “an album cover” or “anal bum cover.” There are way more examples- “everyday” means ordinary and “every day” means each day etc…
We also know many examples of sentences that without punctuation like commas change meaning. “Twenty five-dollar bills” is $100. “Twenty-five dollar bills” is $25. “Let’s eat,Tim” is asking Tim to eat. “Let’s eat Tim” is suggesting we consume the flesh of Tim. So in writing systems that don’t have spaces but use letters based on Latin (like English) the first letter of each word is often capitalized to tell us where each word starts. English and many modern similar languages have spaces to help make it easier to read, but we still use conventions like capitalizing the first letter of a new sentence or proper nouns. So in Japanese without spaces and without upper case and lower case- they often use a change in characters to break up words and ideas etc. it makes it easier to parse. So much the same as an English sentence has a certain structure and you can follow because of that- the Kanji is usually sort of the “meat,” the “noun” etc. the kana or hiragana around it are usually..
.. either modifiers to the kanji, changing how it is pronounced or such, or they make up the actual grammar of the sentence. So in English- “Neil and his Dog went for a walk last week in the park.
If we simplify that to just who what weee and when we get: “Neil,dog, walk park, last week.” Maybe you’d understand that… maybe not? It’s easy to picture how other sentences could get confusing. So those things in that sentence there might be the Kanji, and the words we cut out like the tense (“went”) and conjunctions (“and”) can be thought of like the hiragana and katakana which fill out what we mean and the nuances that make the big ideas easier to understand and place in context. So by structuring writing without spacing like this, if someone understands sentence structure they can get an idea where complete thoughts end and new ones begin by watching how the characters are used.
Of course it’s not that simple. Katakana can sometimes be used for emphasis- kind of like “bold” or “italic” text, and there are other sorts of conventions too- it may seem complex and you may still think having three writing systems for one language seems extra- but overall it seems to work for Japan, or at the very most there are those who would like to replace Kanji with katakana or hiragana and have 2 writing systems. Because there are three distinct writing systems and a whole bunch of nuance and subtext and history though- there are all sorts of deep thoughts and concepts and puns and poems on an entirely different level. Like a level so deep that even if someone explained a specific passage to you and translated it out you’d probably lose the full impact. Like, even if you studied the language and went and lived in the country for ten years you’d probably not be able to appreciate or perhaps notice. Like- even if you were born in the country and just native proficient but not..
.. like crazy into history and language and having an in depth “classic” education. You’d probably miss a bunch still. So that complexity can perhaps be a burden when you just want to read what the cereal box says, but man… when you start making jokes or writing poems or doing philosophy or analyzing the meanings or names and such- it does make that stuff pretty darn rich. So going back to moon- moon is “Tsuki” but you don’t generally write it that way since using Latin letters for it would be like writing your address in Korean Hangul when you live in the Bronx. But you could write “Tsuki” in Latin characters- it would give it a certain emphasis and probably reduce the number of people who could understand what you were saying- but it gives you an optional level of expression. You could simply use the character for Tsuki- or use hiragana, or katana. But you could also take the the Chinese pronunciation and then that gets into dialects and some nuances in meaning and things go sideways
So the character for “mountain” in Chinese and in the Japanese kanji is like a sort of 3 tipped thing that looks like a trident with all right angels.. sort of. Look it up if you don’t know. The Japanese word for mountain is “Yama.” Simplified Chinese tends to use “Shān” which sounds like “San” in Japanese phonetics which in Japanese “San” is an honorific- it is said to be like “mister” but it is gender neutral more or less and is maybe more like “mr. Miss etc” combined. So Mount Fuji- has the character for mountain and foreigners often think it is “Fujiyama” or worse- “mount Fujiyama” (that second one is saying “Mount Fuji mountain…” which is an odd way to speak anywhere just about. With a little more knowledge one would know that the kanji for “mountain” in Mount Fuji is pronounced based off the Chinese for the character which is like “San” if you recall.
“San” is an honorific often translated to mean like “Mr.” if you recall as well- and so some people inevitably think the proper name of the mountain is “Mr. Fuji.” It is not. In this case, “San” means.. mountain. Didn’t I just say that the kanji character and thus the word “mountain” in Japanese was “Yama”? Yes I did. But… like 900 paragraphs ago I told you that when kanji was brought to Japanese from Chinese to create a written Japanese language, some people and some characters were given their Japanese pronunciation and some were given their Chinese or “sino-Japanese” pronunciation (in English. The Japanese have their own words to refer to each concept too!) So “San” here isn’t the Japanese “San” but the sino-Japanese San and that’s why we get the possible misunderstanding.
So wow. Languages sure can be crazy interesting. I’ve written quite a bit- I’m going to go so something else now. Hope you liked it if you got this far.
That would generally be the translation to English, but it can be a bit more complex with names. Just like names can have deeper meanings in many other cultures, names can also have deeper meanings in Japanese. While generally, you could theoretically use any of the three writing systems to substitute a sound that is the same for a different character in another system (there are some rules and conventions there, but generally you COULD do it…) the same name can be often written different ways.
This differs a bit from the spelling used in examples like “Sean/Shaun/Shawn” etc) but in some ways is similar. There are a few levels to it- but you may be able to use multiple Kanji to form what is effectively the “same” name, and the Kanji used tends to influence the meaning of the name, or some of the context as far as wether a name is “strong” or “beautiful” or “good for XYZ profession” etc.
Tsukuyomi (shortened form) can be written multiple ways, and when you use the long form there are obviously more ways to write that. In most spellings, Tsukuyomi will begin with the character for Moon/month. The common 2 character form has moon/month and then a character that generally means to “read, study, pronounce.” The three character form keeps those characters and adds to it the character to “revere, honor, respect, venerate.” Sometimes when characters follow each other thief meaning changes based on the relationship- but I’ll try to keep this short because I blew up the thread already. We can also go off into Chinese and Sino-Japanese meanings and pronunciations etc. but reducing a translation to the most fundamental and literal level you could either read the characters as above and assume that translation, or you could use the pronunciation as the translation.
“Yomi” could theoretically have a few meanings- it can mean something like to “read” or perhaps akin to “predict” in concept- perhaps seemingly not surprising since we know one of our constant Kanji in the name can mean to “read,” but “yomi” can also be other things such as a reference to the underworld. Generally speaking there are both context and etymology that prescribe the proper interpretation for such ambiguities if one has no inherent familiarity to rely on. So the answer is… it can be winding but at the end of the day the simplest and most generally accepted answer would be “yes.” If we don’t take a “direct translation” we would most likely translate the name as “moon god.” If we take a direct translation- see above.
What does this have to do with moon? Read on. Just like English or other languages there are colonialisms and puns and such that don’t make sense to many non speakers or non natives because the context isn’t there. So- traditionally in Japan there are a few words commonly used in a context similar to romantic love. From a western perspective we can consider these words having different “intensity” sort of the way we have “like,” “crush” etc. and words to denote flings and hook ups and different “levels” of things. So the word that most directly translates to “Love” as in “I love you,” it is hardly ever used. Traditionally the Japanese in general weren’t huge on declaring feelings- there was a general belief that your actions..
The “suki” at the end of “daisuki” sounds a lot like “ski.” So the word kinda sounds like “die-ski”.Tsuki”sounds more like “s-ski.” So it might not take much to miss that first syllable or get mixed up. Compounding the matter is that there is a story relating to a student and a poor translation of a poetic declaration of love long ago who mistakenly used too intense an expression of love which could be understood multiple ways. Since the phrase would have been considered extremely forward at the time and unlikely to be something said from one to someone they merely liked- it was interpreted something akin to “the moon is beautiful isn’t it?”
we already covered that “daisuki” could be mistaken as “tsuki” (a friend once misheard “hotdogs” as “tapas” , which written doesn’t make…
In MOST scenarios it would probably be obvious wether someone was saying they love you or asking for/pointing out Olive Juice.
So Tsuki can also mean “month” or refer to month. Japan used to use a lunar calendar and the moon features prominently in lore and cultural history. Since the old calendar was lunar and blah blah- the month is “he numerical month and the kanji for “Tsuki.” So that’s kinda neat. Most Kanji are pictographic- they represent something- usually relating to their meaning. “dai” likes the beginning of “daisuki” means “big” and is the character for “man” with lines coming out of the sides basically parallel to…
In time, katakana developed. Katakana is a simplified kanji but is very similar to hiragana in how it works. There were so many kanji that dudes often had trouble remembering or reading them. Since official and formal documents between men had to be written in kanji, men would often scribble simplified notations to remind themselves what a specific kanji meant if it was hard to read. In time this became standardized and became katakana.
If we simplify that to just who what weee and when we get: “Neil,dog, walk park, last week.” Maybe you’d understand that… maybe not? It’s easy to picture how other sentences could get confusing. So those things in that sentence there might be the Kanji, and the words we cut out like the tense (“went”) and conjunctions (“and”) can be thought of like the hiragana and katakana which fill out what we mean and the nuances that make the big ideas easier to understand and place in context. So by structuring writing without spacing like this, if someone understands sentence structure they can get an idea where complete thoughts end and new ones begin by watching how the characters are used.
So wow. Languages sure can be crazy interesting. I’ve written quite a bit- I’m going to go so something else now. Hope you liked it if you got this far.
This differs a bit from the spelling used in examples like “Sean/Shaun/Shawn” etc) but in some ways is similar. There are a few levels to it- but you may be able to use multiple Kanji to form what is effectively the “same” name, and the Kanji used tends to influence the meaning of the name, or some of the context as far as wether a name is “strong” or “beautiful” or “good for XYZ profession” etc.