Tsuyu (dipping broth, 1914)

[Douglas G. Wilson]

On 8/15/2011 1:35 AM, Benjamin Barrett wrote:
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> Sender:       American Dialect Society<ADS-L at LISTSERV.UGA.EDU>
> Poster:       Benjamin Barrett<gogaku at IX.NETCOM.COM>
> Subject:      Re: Tsuyu (dipping broth, 1914)
> -------------------------------------------------------------------------------
>
> Nice!
>
> Generally speaking, we wouldn't expect to see anything much earlier than when the country opened up to Perry in 1854;  that's getting very close.
>
> It's likely that the characters are simply misprints. People make errors today with computers and doing so when reference books were difficult to come by would have been much more likely.
--

I think the characters Victor Steinbok refers to which are constant are
the kana (phonetic symbols) "tsu", "yu" ... although katakana appear in
the dictionary rather than Benjamin Barrett's hiragana. The characters
look OK although I can't make out every stroke.

One might suppose that "tsuyu" = "soup/juice/sap/sauce/gravy/etc." is
originally the same Japanese word as "tsuyu" = "dew", just assigned
different kanji for different meanings/sub-meanings. As for the other
"tsuyu", the kanji mean "plum rain" or so and (AFAIK) the individual
pronunciations of these two kanji have no relation at all to "tsuyu",
they are just attached to "tsuyu" as a pair (jukujikun, I think). Again
this "tsuyu" could conceivably be basically/originally the same native
word as "dew".

However, Starostin's site shows two different Proto-Altaic antecedents
(for those who believe in Proto-Altaic), and three separate
Proto-Japanese words (all *tuju though), so I dunno.

http://starling.rinet.ru/cgi-bin/query.cgi?root=config&morpho=0&basename=\data\alt\japet

(enter [e.g.] <<tsuyu>> in the "Tokyo" box)

I guess one can forgive the writer for thinking the words are/were the
same: hard to prove otherwise, anyway.

-- Doug Wilson

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