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[tammaiya]

SO. Today I decided to be intrepid and investigate the tsutsuga some more. I went and asked Ikeda-sensei, who knows practically everything about kanji; he didn't know it (unsurprisingly, as it The Most Obscure Kanji Ever), but he directed me towards a kanji dictionary called 大漢和辞典 (Oo-kanwa-jiten) and said if it wasn't there it was nowhere.

I looked this up on amazon, thinking "maybe I can buy it"-- AHAH. AHAH. NO. There are 12 ENORMOUS TOMES, plus index, and they each cost around $100 second-hand. Maybe when I'm a billionaire. *covets*

Anyway, I was in luck, because as it turns out they had two sets in the basement of the asian studies library (which, for the record, is creepy).

Guess what? TSUTSUGA WAS THERE. Victory! Not so brilliantly, most of the definition was taken from 3 Chinese dictionaries. Dunno about the third, but the first is from 1008 and the second from 1037 respectively. Uh. But oddly most of it still made sense. Here is my written copy of what it said:



Sorry about my hand-written kanji, I couldn't type about half of it so this was the best I could do. <<

Anyway, here is my attempt to translate. Please keep in mind I do not know Chinese, let alone 11th C Chinese. (It does help knowing Japanese, though.) Any speakers of Chinese, feel free to correct what I'm sure is, at least in parts, hideously inaccurate. XD

---

YAU [Shuuin ] Yokuryousetsu (?)

Wild animal that looks like a lion. Same kanji as (YAU).

[Guangyung ] Tsutsuga: A beast like a lion; eats tigers, panthers and humans.

[Shuuin] Tsutsuga: Animal name. Looks like a lion , eats bears, possibly written (YAU).

[Shin’ikei ] A beast existing in the centre of the great northern desert/wasteland. Its bite causes illness to humans. Historical names are (tsutsuga), (tsutsuga), and (tsutsuga). It commonly enters human dwellings, and it was killed by the Yellow Emperor. There’s a saying when a person is not depressed or ill that there is “no Tsutsuga”.

Now, I shall make myself a salad and eat dinner.

Comments

[tammaiya.livejournal.com]

Yeah, that's what I thought. I'm not sure about some of it-- I mean, Chinese grammar and Japanese grammar are nothing at all alike-- but most of it matches things that Mirage said about "つつが無" and what it looks like, eats, etc. The one thing I'm not certain of is whether it killed Huang Di or if Huang Di killed IT. I'm pretty sure it's the latter, though, judging on the structure of the earlier sentences; the pattern seems to be subject verb object similar to English. Which could still leave it as an implied subject like Japanese so frequently does, but 之 appears to mean "it", in which case... "Huang Di kill it" seems logical. It'd help if I knew what the 一二レ markings meant, though.

.......... *is such a linguistics geek* AHEM. Anyway!

I was AWED by it. Especially since I was in the basement of the libraries in the compacts surrounded by musty old Japanese reference books. XD I kind of want it just because it's so awesome and filled with knowledge, but aside from it being enormously expensive, where would I KEEP it? Clearly I must wait until I am a billionaire and own a house with an enormous library-sized room for books.

[tammaiya.livejournal.com]

Huh, interesting. I thought it might be something like that, but couldn't for the life of me work it out. I'll have to look it up sometime.