Daniel Merchán
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I studied a little Japanese online, so this puzzle got me thinking about their numbers—often pronounced いち, に, さん, or i-chi, ni, sa-n, which would be one, two, three. (I’ve stopped at three, as four and seven have different pronunciations depending on context. But so does three, for that matter. If your native languages are Indo-European, numbering in Japanese may feel wonderfully unfamiliar. If you ever need your brain rewired, I’d encourage studying Japanese.) Above I’ve written those three numbers in hiragana—one of Japan’s two phonetic syllabaries. In real use, numbers are usually written either in the logographic script kanji, 一, 二, 三, or in Hindu–Arabic numerals, 1, 2, 3. Both sidestep the issue of varying pronunciations. (For completeness, in katakana they’d be イチ, ニ, サン.) Then there are small kana, which modify the sound of the kana before them: ひ is hi and や is ya, so ひゃ is hya. (Likewise: ひょ = hyo, ひゅ = hyu.) Which all got me thinking: _does Japan have crosswords? *HOW DO THEY WORK!??*_ So now I’ve spent an hour down a rabbit hole of Japanese crosswords. Maybe one night your fiancée threw a toothbrush at you when you insisted Magic Johnson’s real first name—six letters—was EARWIG; but crosswords contribute to global understanding, and don’t let anyone tell you otherwise!!
HA! I grinned ear to ear. My French pun: I was LAPIN’ this up! (Can’t quite make canard make sense…) I guess a marriage proposal would be inappropriate, but I do so love this puzzle. I love my tiny circle, but the constructors’ friends and family must also feel like lucky people indeed. Thanks, this really brightened an otherwise gloomy, under-the-weather evening for me!
Phooey! Solving didn’t get me any flying letters. Perhaps it’s you who are wicked!! Promises, promises. :-(
@Andrzej - That’s awesome! I climbed a bit, non-competitively. After a fall, I spent therapy watching videos of others hiking and scrambling parts of the Appalachian Trail—a grueling hike in the U.S. which takes months. Middle age can be a beast, and my climbing days are over, but hiking and scrambling around are still options. Both climbing and watching videos of the sport together sounds like you and your spouse have found a good match in one other. That’s likely the biggest key to happiness, and I wish you both the best! If I may bore you—and I am a rank beginner at Japanese—your example illustrates how counting in Japanese is … *unusual,* to speakers of non-Japonic tongues! If I said “two rocks,” that’s iwa futatsu. I wrote earlier ni is two, but that’s the Sino-Japanese word, like for counting in the abstract, one, two, three. But futa is the native Japanese morpheme for two. That’s still 二 in kanji, ni and futa both. When counting specific nouns, a *counting word* for that noun-group is needed. For small, unspecified, 3D objects (iwa, rock), that’s tsu (つ), and futa rather than ni is employed, so: iwa futatsu. (Other counters are ko, ri, go, and loads more.) In daichi kadai: kadai is problem, ichi is preferred over hito for “one” (but both are 一), and “da” is the counting word for ordinal sequences (first, second, etc.), and here it’s attached as a prefix: daichi. It is a LOT to learn, just to count. I can’t imagine solving crosswords in Japanese—but it happens!
@Colm H - Oof. Terrible! Wonderful! Beastly? Thank you.
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