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In Part 3 of the unagi road trip series (a recent beginner’s lesson in the main part of JapanesePod101.com), the PDF contains this great sentence:
君の秘密を皆に話してしまったよ。
Kimi no himitsu o mina ni hanashite shimatta yo.
I have revealed your secret to everyone.
Another Way to Betray Someone’s Trust …
When would you ever say something like this? And with what tone? Perhaps you utter it in a state of complete disgrace, just before ending your life. You’ve got the sword in hand (since you’re a Japanophile and want an old-timey, Japanese method of suicide). You hang your head and quietly say, “Kimi no himitsu o mina ni hanashite shimatta yo,” then fall on the sword. (Your use of shimatta would express regret, but at that point, no one would be parsing the grammar.)
Or maybe you’d say this sentence just before walking out on someone: “Hey, guess what. I’ve taken all the money out of our account. I’ve taken your Metallica CDs. The cat’s coming with me. And oh, by the way, I’ve revealed your secret to everyone.” (In that case, shimatta would express the thorough way in which you’ve hurt and humiliated your ex. Again, no one would be analyzing grammar at that moment, but it’s always wise to know just what you’re expressing….)
Hours after I encountered this thought-provoking sentence, I learned the word 密度 (mitsudo: density, dense + degree). I was trying to tell my language exchange partner that, as I recently learned, Singapore has the world’s second highest population density of all independent countries. (It’s second after Monaco!) My partner taught me this word:
人口密度 (jinkōmitsudo: population density)
population (1st 2 chars.) + density (last 2 chars.)The first two kanji, 人口, break down as follows:
person + number of people (i.e., number of mouths to feed).
Then he gave me the wording for what I wanted to say:
シンガポールは世界で二番目に人口密度の高い国です。
Shingapōru wa sekai de nibanme ni jinkōmitsudo no takai kuni desu.
Singapore is the second most densely populated country in the world.
Aha, I thought: 密 again! Why do the words for “density” and “secret” share a kanji? Here they are again:
密度 (mitsudo: density) dense + degree
秘密 (himitsu: secret) to keep secret + secret
Well, as it turns out, 密 (MITSU, hiso(ka)) has three fairly different meanings:
1) Close, dense, thick, compact, tight
2) Minuteness, carefulness
3) Secret, private, illegal, stealthy
I love how “secret” in the third definition quickly gives way to “illegal.” There’s human nature for you!
You might wonder, as I did, how this character evolved to contain such disparate meanings. You’ll find Henshall’s analysis of this at the next link.
And you may have noticed that 必 pops up in both sides of 秘密. Well, even if you didn’t notice, you can find out more about that at the next link.
We’ll explore the various meanings of 密 later. Now for today’s Verbal Logic Quiz!
