In the level 1 Japanese Language Proficiency Test (the highest), there’s a whole section dedicated to telling homophones appart. “Four” and “death” aren’t so bad because you’d never mistake one for another in context, but imagine pairs like “shiritsu” which can mean, depending on how you write it, “private” or “municipal”. “Kaki” means either “parsimmon” or “oyster”, both foodstuffs.
The great on-line Goo dictionary returns 35 hits for “shi”. Some of those are obscure, but some other common words that sound the same as “death” are: poem, lyric, municipality… Most of the others are not used as-is, they’re either grammatical particles, or tacked on to other words to alter their meaning.
In Japanese, 4 is definitely to be avoided, because it is prounounced the same way as the ideogram for “death” which is “shi.” Also 9 is to be avoided because it is prounounced the same as the ideogram for “suffering” which is “kyu”. Both of these also sound like numerous other innocuous words.
As noted before Japanese doesn’t have a lot of phonic diversity, which results in loads and loads of homophones. This problem is neatly and simply resolved by using a writing system with several thousand ideograms borrowed from Chinese.
So there are many, many odd coincidences of words that are differentiated only by the ideograms used to write them. The Japanese seem to have a fondness for numerology as related to these characters… otherwise coincidences are ignored or made into really bad puns.
Since Japanese characters are borrowed from Chinese, that is why you could see the same coincidence in such dissimilar languages.
You can’t make anything meaningful with just “shi” in Japanese but there are a lot of tongue twisters that use homonyms. One of the most famous ones goes:
Niwa ni wa ni-wa niwatori ga iru (There are two chickens in the garden):
Niwa: garden
Ni wa: in the
Ni-wa: two
niwatori: chicken
There’s also: Kisha no kisha ga kisha de kisha shita (Your company’s reporter went back to work by train.)
Kisha #1: polite word for “your company”
Kisha #2: reporter, journalist
Kisha #3: steam train
Kisha #4: return to work from a business trip
And: Sumomo mo momo mo momo no uchi (Plums and peaches are among peaches.)
Sumomo: plum
Mo: also
Momo: peach
Some apartment buildings in HK have no 4th, 13th, and 14th floors. Recently, went to a kiddies’ birthday party where the host lived in Block 3B - there being no Block 4.
When I worked at a brokerage firm, I did some maintenence on the account number generator. There was special code for aisian branches to skip over accounts with 4’s in them.
An old power station, now demolished, here in Hong Kong had five chimneys, only four of which worked, for this reason. The fifth, dummy chimney was built to avoid having just the unlucky four.
But how often do you see brand names with “DIE!” in them?
It’s about as prevelant as 13 superstitions in the US, I’d guess, although 4’s tend to come up more frequently in daily life. It gets used occasionally in horror movies (some such as Gakkou no kaidan, have the freaky stuff start happening at 4:44 in the morning).
When I was in the hospital last year, they had a fourth floor, but it wasn’t for patients. On the patient wards, they went right ahead and used 4’s, 9’s and 13’s.
I first learned about the 4=death story from my Japanese teacher. Her telephone number was 4219, which could be read as “shi ni iku,” “go to your death” or “go die.” Definitely made it easy to remember!
For some reason this thread reminds me of the schtick in an old “Get Smart” episode, pitting Agent 86 against an evil Chinese criminal mastermind with a steel claw for a hand:
"No!!!, No!!! Not the “craw”,…THE “CRRRAAAWWWWW”!!!
I also learned it with the sumomo first - because the real trick is knowing how many mo’s in a row to use, and if the sumomo is in the middle that kind of defeats that!
As mentioned above “sei” in Cantonese means 4 or die/dead/death, but the tones are a bit different (for “4” the tone goes up slightly). By comparison, the number 8, “baat”, is very lucky because it sort of sounds like the word for wealth/rich, which is “faat”. Obviously these are not the same sounds, but the tone is identical.
I’ve heard a theory that people with Western names are allocated phone numbers with 4s because they won’t complain. My number at work, where I’m the sole non-Chinese, would appear to bear this out - but maybe I’m just being paranoid.
The whole thing is ridiculous - but lucrative for vehicle licensing depts/phone companies that auction lucky numbers.
This grotesque building officially has 88 floors (it’s actually a few less, but they jigged it to make it 88) and its address is “8 Finance Street”, even though there is no 1-7 or 9-etc) on that road.
