Know Your Picture Characters Entry #61
I’m not going to repost all the characters here, because man, that takes up a lot of space.
I expected people to get creative with the kanji I suggested. I did not expect them to go quite as far as Shirley did, but I guess when you’re on a roll you can’t really stop yourself. She proposed a description of fireworks rather than a word for fireworks, but if we were to take all the characters she referenced and smash them together, it would look something like this:
明火翔空祭爆雷轟天花
And if you wanted to try to pronounce all that–which I wouldn’t recommend–it might come out something like meikashoukuusaibakuraigoutenka. With any luck, the fireworks really are as loud as thunder, so no one will be able to hear you.
Dragon demonstrated a little more restraint, proposing this word:
翔天雷花
Which we could say as shoutenraika.
A Fan made use of components meaning sky, fire, explosion, and soar to create this:
空火爆翔
And I’ll say that’s kuukabakushou.
No one’s a loser this time around. Shirley’s is a little hard to judge, but as for the other two, I think I prefer the combination of meanings in Dragon’s “Soaring Heaven Thunder Flower” and the hypothetical pronunciation of A Fan’s kuukabakushou (gotta love those hard K’s).
But it seems that Theoman was the only one familiar with the “correct” answer–at least, he certainly wants us to think so. If he had contributed this week, then, he probably would have written this:
花火
This is the actual Japanese word for fireworks, or hanabi.
白赤黄緑青藍紫黒
And now for the part that actually has right and wrong answers. Dragon technically got one right, I suppose, though I’m pretty sure she made up at least one of those so-called shades of red. A Fan should really review his colors of the rainbow (remember Roy G. Biv!), because, as a matter of fact, the colors are listed in that order, except that there is no kanji for the color orange and they are bookended by white on the left and black on the right. This means that Shirley very nearly got them all right, correctly identifying white and simply reversing red and blue. Her reference to “a lot of stuff” might suggest that she meant to write “sixth” instead of “fifth,” but here at KYPC we’re always . . . well, almost always willing to give people the benefit of the doubt.
Here’s an easy one for next week; you’ve got a one-in-four shot. See if you can pick out summer from this list of the four seasons.
A. 秋 B. 夏 C. 春 D. 冬
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6 Comments »
July 11th, 2011 at 11:19 am
An actual Swede told me once that the Northern winters are so long, dark, cold and dreary that when the sun returns people go sort of bonkers. Hence the cavorting around the maypole at Midsummer’s eve and other excesses. (that accounts for a lot about Scandinavians.) B. and C. are entirely too sedate for cavorting and A.’s little men just stand there raising one little hand in a restrained “Skoll” – It means something like “Here’s to you, kid”. No cavorting here. But in D., Ah, talk about your cavorting! Even the maypole itself is tipsy. And those little people dancing around it. WELL!!! Anyone who celebrates the long, dark, etc. midwinter with a slug or two of glug knows a thing or two about cavorting. Which is never intended to suggest that the Japanese would drink glug, but they have to feel more like cavorting in the summer time than in winter. Doesn’t everybody?
July 11th, 2011 at 12:54 pm
Great, more stuff I actually know. Guess I’ll sit this one out, too.
Incidentally, the reason I knew last week’s challenge is because Fire Flowers in Super Mario Bros. came from taking the kanji for fireworks (flower-fire) and reversing them.
July 11th, 2011 at 1:21 pm
A.
July 11th, 2011 at 1:21 pm
B.
July 11th, 2011 at 1:22 pm
C.
July 11th, 2011 at 1:23 pm
D.
After all, where does it say you can only have one guess?
But in the spirit of the competition (if there is such a thing), I’ll go with D. as my “real” guess.
Or maybe B.