Tsuyu (dipping broth, 1914)

[Benjamin Barrett]

On Aug 15, 2011, at 1:05 AM, Douglas G. Wilson wrote:

>
> On 8/15/2011 1:35 AM, Benjamin Barrett wrote:
>>
>> 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.


The katakana ツユ in the dictionary are indeed the same as my hiragana つゆ. Katakana was the norm before WWII, so that is merely an orthographic convention.

I basically agree about the possibilities of the different tsuyu having the same origin. It seems to me that either the English writer might have gotten them confused because they are homophonous, or was making a pun out of playfulness.

I consulted a few dictionaries just now. None of my Classical Japanese dictionaries have an entry tusyu for dipping broth, though one or both of the other two meanings occur in them. And no modern dictionary has a derivation of any form of tsuyu. It seems possible that the dipping broth could be from tsuke (dip) yu (hot water), but that's just speculation on my part.

Benjamin Barrett
Seattle, WA

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