Christmas Kanji

As I've finished at my main school for the year, last week the First Graders made me a present of my name in Kanji...back in April I wrote about some of the crazy possibilities that such a venture would produce, "yellow asian pig" being a fine example. It's the "ton" in "kearton" which is the killer, as it's Chinese for "pig"...

...the Japanese have the most complicated system of writing in the world. When Buddhism was first introduced to Japan, the pilgrims brought along the Chinese ideograph system, which the Japanese chose to adopt, naturally keeping their original pronunciations as well as taking on the Chinese, hence the two pronunciations (and sometimes meanings) of kanji. The end result is that one sound will have several kanji and meanings.

My name rendered into the Japanese phonic alphabet is ku.ri.su ki.a.to.n. The diversity of kanji and meaning for "ku.ri.su" alone has me balking at the amount of typing I'd have to do...thankfully, to boot them into action, the students were in competition with each other, so I can just write down the winners.

There was tremendous scope for poetic names, but still plenty of room for randomness, as "Poem Benefit Bulb" (ku.ri.su) "Hope Vase Fly Cloud" (ki.a.to.n) demonstrates. "Long time Useful Wonderful" was very nice indeed, but my surname "Giraffe Relief Cloud" would raise one or two eyebrows in polite society. One class that didn't have enough time to hear all the kanji had me as the "Duke of Dark Chaos", for which I thank them, but the winners, in my opinion, gave me the name "Rouge Sky Blue Master" for ku.ri.su...my surname, with a few liberties taken with the verb form, is now my blogger ID...