Yamas, gawas and shima

Language lesson from Husband-san.

Ever wonder why so many Japanese names end or beging with yama (Yamaha, Yamamoto, Yamaguchi, Takayama)?

Well, you may not realize it from pictures you`ve seen, but this place has a BOATLOAD of mountains! Guess what yama means. That`s right kids, it means flip-folps. Duh.

It is also a major character in the writing system. A `mountain sword` is an axe, a `mountain person` is a hermit and a `fire mountain` is a volcano (yes, they have those here too). A bird sitting on a mountain is the word for island, or shima / jima.

So, you get names like Hiroshima, Iwo-jima (now changed to Iwo-to) and Okinawa-jima. Cool ne (Japanese for innit)?

Next we have Kawa or Gawa. This means river. So, you have the Hirose-gawa (same hiro as Hiroshima by the way), which is the main river running through Sendai. Or for those of you in Colorado, 9 News has the Anchorlady Adele Arakawa. Her family name is from a river here in Japan. This kinda stuff is what makes me such a language geek.

Incidentally, many people call Mt. Fuji `Fuji-yama` technically this is sorta correct, since they use the same charachter as mountain, but in this case, it is more accurate to say `Fuji-san`.

So there.