天気

It's been a while since I've talked about kanji compounds but today I came across a sweet one.

天気

This reads "tenki" and it means weather. I've known the word for weather for a long time, and I've known the first kanji, 天, for heaven or sky for a while too. What is new for me is 気, which I have just learned in the past couple of days. This kanji means spirit or temperament. Thus the compounds for weather is literally, "The spirit of the sky." HA! Genius!

Excellent Kanji Compounds: 警察官

Most kanji are made up of smaller elements which are often times kanji themselves. When these elements are combined together into a single kanji they often lose the meaning they had as a kanji. For instance, 田means rice field. This kanji is also an element in 猫 (cat), which we discussed earlier. What do rice fields have to do with cats? I don't know, probably not much.

This however is NOT the case for kanji combinations. A kanji combination is when several kanji are strung together to make a word and there's almost always a logical pattern to why certain kanji are grouped together to make word. Kushner points out that this can give us some insight into ancient Japan when many of these patterns were established, but more importantly, they can be downright amusing.

And so, I present to you 警察官 (keisatsukan) the Japanese word for “police officer”.

What is a police officer you ask? Why it's simple, a police officer is a person who:

警 - “admonish”es you

察 - “judge”es you and is a

官 - “bureaucrat”

It's the admonishing bit that really gets me.

There you have it, the Japanese have nicely summed up the function police officers.

(Our own etymology is somewhat similar. Police comes from Middle French “police”, essentially meaning government. No admonishment though... sad).