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Comment by losvedir | Hacker News Reader

Unrelated aside, but:

> Fun fact: “Akari” means light in Japanese, both as illumination and as lightness.

Wow! I love it when two languages have matching homonyms. I always wonder "what does it mean ?". Like, in English "second" to mean the unit of time and the place after "first" feels like two distinct usages. But it's the same in Spanish ("segundo"), which points to a deeper connection (and isn't so unsurprising given the shared roots of the languages): the unit of time is called that because it's the second subdivision of an hour.

The two usages of "light" in English are so distinct I'm quite surprised it's like this in the entirely unrelated Japanese language. Is this just a big coincidence, or does anyone know any deeper reasons here?

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Unfortunately that "fun fact" is completely wrong (as other people have already pointed out, but with less conviction).

Is it though? I though akarui and karui were quite distinct, but I guess they kinda sound similar?

I'm just a beginner armed with jisho dot org, but it does seem like they're entirely different words?

https://jisho.org/word/%E6%98%8E%E3%82%8B%E3%81%84 / https://jisho.org/word/%E6%98%8E%E3%81%8B%E3%82%8A (adjective vs noun but clearly just the same word in different form)

https://jisho.org/word/%E8%BB%BD%E3%81%84 (light weight)

Okay, if three of us agree, it is definitely wrong.

That was my thought path as well. The closest to a noun that came to mind would be karusa. I’m far from an expert in the language, so I’d be happy to be proven wrong.

I don't know if this has been mentioned already, but I like arigato in japanese being similar to the portuguese similar sounding word, obrigado.

For the benefit of other readers, this is (to my deep chagrin) just a coincidence. Some other fun false friends (i.e. w/ no actual etymological connection), some sillier than others:

- そう sō, "so"

- 名前 namae, "name"

- 乱暴 rambō, "violence"

- 被る kaburu, "cover"

- 孫 son, "descendant"

- 銭 sen, "one hundredth of a yen" (sounds similar to "cent")

- 買 (meaning "buy") can be read as bai

- はず hazu, "has to"

- 鈴 rin, "bell" (sounds similar to "ring")

- おい oi, "oi"

- 陰気 inki, "gloomy" (sounds similar to "inky")

And just for fun, one from Old Japanese:

- 女 womina, "woman"

The first example is not really a coincidence: a second is defined by being the second subvision of an hour.

So that example fails to support any reason for akari matching light in English. But for the sake of argument here is another one: じゃり (giari, read as "ja-ri") in Japanese means gravel and in my dialect almost the same sound (giarin, "ja-ri-n") also mean gravel. Go figure.

That was exactly my intended point (and my comment does mention the hour subdivision). There are a lot of meaningless coincidental homonyms, but these tend to not be homonyms in other languages. E.g. I dunno "left" in English would be "izquierda" or "dejó". Or conversely, "vino" in Spanish would be "wine" or "came". The fact that "second" and "segundo" have homonyms in their respective languages is a clue that the unit of time and the ordinal word are the same is not a coincidence. And when you look into it it's for the reason that you state. The homonym pairs indicates an etymological relationship between the two concepts.

So I was wondering if the same applied here. My initial reaction is that "light" meaning "illuminated" and "light" meaning "not heavy" is that this is just one of those coincidences, since I can't see how that one word relates the two concepts. But given that Japanese also does the same, it makes me wonder if maybe there is some sort of relationship. Maybe it was a common belief historically that the sun was not very heavy or something like that. Or maybe not and it's just a rare double coincidence!

  >rare double coincidence

Seems like this is only one coincidence, right? Two homophones happen to coincide.

At least some of these cases occur because the two concepts are related by metaphor, and cultures behind each language independently followed the same path of metaphorical expansion.

It may be more like two nearby meanings getting translated into the same English word than an independent Japanese version of the exact same homonym

I'm not sure that it's true, sadly—my dictionary, at least, only gives the illumination-related definition for akari.

Wait until you look up the many ways 分 (usually bun in compounds, but used to spell the verb wakaru) is used. (There are also more complex variants of the kanji that emphasize various nuances.)

The wakaru meaning is pretty good too, like understanding something means to break it down?

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