Japanese word for --natural--

Factual Questions
1

A tangent to this thread…
http://boards.straightdope.com/sdmb/showthread.php?postid=979872#post979872

I recently read a sci-fi book (fiction) which had a statement that the Japanese “did not have a word for ‘natural’ until about 100 years ago”. The book was set in the near-future (so I assume the ‘100 years’ ago was meant to be right about now or in our recent-past). The implication was that the Japanese viewed technology as a natural thing, and not an artificial aspect of humanity.

Anyway, I was wondering if this statement had any basis in reality.

*If you’re curious, the book was William Gibson’s “Idoru”. Not his best, IMHO. *

2

well, i cant answer if that’s true or not, but there are two adjectives according to my dictionary that Japanese has:

shizen no, which is for general naturalness
umaretsuki no, which is for innate naturalness

Draw your own conclusions.

3

I read Idoru and I don’t recall reading that bit about “nature.” Shizen, shizenteki, I don’t know how modern these words for “nature/natural” are but they don’t seem very recent. Gibson didn’t seem to get many of the facts straight, it doesn’t seem like he’s ever been in Japan.

4

Doobieous, Chas E, any other Japanese scholars, could you please go into the etymology of the words shizen and umaretsuki? It would be really interesting to know what concepts they are derived from.

The Arabic word for nature is .tabî`ah, literally ‘that which is stamped or impressed (with a quality)’, referring to innate tendencies in beings.

The Chinese word for nature, zi ran, implies ‘one’s own quality’ or ‘that which is proper to a thing’.

The Greek word physis, like the words for plants (phyton) and growing (phyein), comes from the Proto-Indo-European root *bheu- meaning ‘be’ (the source of English be).

The Latin word natura is derived from *gen-, implying birth, generation, manifestation.

In Sanskrit, the equivalent of nature is prak.rti–literally, ‘that which is made, produced, put forth’. The Russian word for nature, priroda, shares with Sanskrit the prefix pri- meaning ‘forth’, combined with the word roda derived, like natura, from a root meaning ‘birth’. The Lithuanian word prigimtis (<gimtis ‘production, birth’) shares exactly the same semantic structure as the Sanskrit and Russian words.

The Malay word for nature, semulajadi, is the most interesting of all: it is a compound of Austronesian se- ‘one; wholly, entirely’, plus Dravidian-Sanskrit mula ‘root, origin’, plus Sanskrit jâti ‘birth, coming into being’ (also derived from *gen-). The three elements combine to mean ‘that which wholly comes into being from the Origin’. It is like a metaphysical view of the natural world pouring forth from its origin in the higher planes of being, a feeling of immense purity and freshness, ever green, ever renewed.

You might enjoy C. S. Lewis’s Studies in Words, perhaps the best book he ever wrote. He plunged deep into thorough analysis of English philology. It included a long study on phusis and natura and how their meaning developed.

I would be interested in knowing the origin and derivation of these Japanese words, to fit them into perspective with the other words for nature.

5

Mûla is a Sanskrit word for ‘root’, originally a loanword from Dravidian. (Cf. Tamil mûTu ‘root, cause, origin’; Malayalam mûTu ‘bottom, root, origin’; Kannada mûDu ‘to arise, originate, be produced, be born, come into existence’; mûDi ‘rising [of the sun]’; Gondi mûR ‘beginning’).

The deeper background of these Dravidian words is found in the verbal root mûTu- ‘to cover, shroud, veil, conceal’–for as roots are hidden within the ground, so the ultimate metaphysical origin of things is mysteriously veiled. The Sanskrit extensions of the word mûla include ‘root, basis, foundation, cause, origin, beginning’.

In Malay, mula is used to mean ‘beginning, source, origin’. Compare the syllable -pon in Nippon (the -pan in Japan) : it is written with the Chinese character for ‘root’, a picture of a tree with roots extending below the surface, thus the name of Japan–Land of the Rising Sun, from Chinese jih pen kuo (Pinyin ri ben guo), ‘sun origin country’.

6

I just happen to have my trusty copy of P.G. O’Neill’s Essential Kanji here at my desk. According to him, the word shizen is made up of the kanji for “self” and the kanji for “correct” or “resembling”.

Then there is the word tennen, which can also be translated as “natural”. The pair of kanji for this mean “heaven” or “sky” and “correct” or “resembling” (same kanji as in shizen).

Did Japan’s concept of “natural” only come into being in the last hundred years? Well, I don’t have any antique documents here in my office to check, but I do have several Japanese co-workers who are skeptical of Gibson’s claim. Remember, this is the guy who wrote all his cyberpunk novels without ever having used a computer.

–sublight.

7

That’s what I suspected: the word come from Chinese. Those two kanji are the same that make up the Chinese term for ‘nature’, zi ran.

The word tennen for ‘nature’ is fascinating. It’s like saying that nature comes from Heaven, which fits in well with Shinto reverence for virgin nature, I guess. It’s a bit like the metaphysical dimension in the Malay word semulajadi.

8

Idoru was set sometime in the next decade or so - it’s a semi-sequel to Virtual Light, which is set in 2005.

Gibson is a good author, but he gets his facts and science wrong a lot, and he’s also pretty inconsistent - in Neuromancer he states that a certain family has been living in space for something like 6 generations, yet in one of it’s sequels it refers to WWII happening around a hundred years before.

9

Thanks everyone!
Sounds like it was a bit of Gibson’s poetic license at work.

It was something minor just said in passing…but I was curious about it.

10

Ish: Since I am not a Japanese linguist, i can’t to into deep detail about umaretsuki, but the root means: life, genuine, birth. So, it looks like for umaretsuki, the second meaning is in play. The rest of the word is made up of the hiragana re, tsu, ki

11

Doobieous, thanks for the info. Considering that Latin, Lithuanian, Malay, and Russian all derive the word for nature from the concept of birth, it would make sense that the meaning of birth in Japanese uma- figures into the concept of nature, too. In fact, the meanings of ‘genuine’ and ‘birth’ both feed into our understanding of nature. It’s curious that life is the third meaning, since the beginning of umaretsuki coincidentally resembles the Arabic word `umr meaning ‘life’.