Cool Compound – 未明
Still trying to get my feet under me back home. I’m not jetlagged anymore, but I’m still in the process of getting organized, so just a small cool compound this week.
This post, “Reading Strategies – Skimming and Kanji Compounds,” on how to break down different kanji compounds is probably one of the most important that I’ve written. Study Japanese long enough and eventually you make it to the point where kanji compounds don’t even look like two characters – they parse like a single word when you read them. But inevitably you’ll come across ones that you can’t remember or don’t recognize. In those cases knowing how the characters work together is invaluable.
One of the prefixes which I did not include in the prefix/suffix category is 未. It implies incompletion. You see compounds like 未払い (みばらい, unpaid), 未婚 (みこん, unmarried), etc. While reading 1Q84 I came across this compound 未明 (みめい), which I hadn’t seen before but figured out from context and the characters. 明 means dawn or to dawn, and when prefixed with 未 it takes on pre-dawn or early dawn connotations – I guess when it’s light out but the sun has not risen yet. Pretty cool. This Google Images image best expresses the idea.
June 12th, 2010 at 3:24 pm
Lovely, lovely compound and an example of Japanese at its best, if you ask me for my humble opinion.
I’ve read 1Q84 and hadn’t noticed this compound, so I guess the parsing that you refer to in your second paragraph is happening for me, even though I’d never thought about it quite like that before. Great find!
June 12th, 2010 at 10:20 pm
Have you read Book 3 yet? That’s where I saw it. I’m not certain it was in the first two Books.