When a Japanese friend emailed me that he likes to stay up all night, it blew me away on two accounts. First, I can’t imagine wanting to stay up till dawn. I did plenty of that in college, and I’m not eager to revisit the experience. Second, look how he said “throughout the night”:

夜中中 (yonakajū)

Two instances of 中 in a row, each with different readings! Let’s break this down to see what’s going on here:

夜 (YA, yo, yoru) means “night.”
中 (CHŪ, naka) means “in, inside, middle.”

Yonaka combines two kun-yomi (yo and naka) to mean “deep in the night.” (When read as yonaka, 夜中 also means “midnight, but let’s set that aside.)

In 夜中中, the final 中 is a suffix meaning “throughout.” Two notable things about this suffix:

1. It makes the whole compound mean “all night.”

2. As a suffix, 中 has two possible yomi: -CHŪ and -JŪ. In yonakajū, clearly the latter applies.

In any case, I can’t think of another compound in which a suffix creates back-to-back instances of the same kanji. Can you?!

Of course, we see repetition in many expressions, including 中中, alternatively written as 中々 or なかなか. All these iterations say nakanaka and mean “very” (among other definitions). And although such words are great in their own right, they’re a far cry from 夜中中.

Needing a “Fix”

In a recent blog, we saw how the suffix 後 yields the compact expression 食後 (shokugo: after a meal) in place of the wordier equivalent: 食事の後で (shokuji no ato de). I’m convinced that using and recognizing more suffixes and prefixes (collectively called affixes) can improve one’s Japanese by leaps and bounds.

On Japanese Terms
for These “Fixes” …

When it comes to affixes, a “relatively small investment of time can yield surprisingly large dividends” in terms of comprehension, says author Timothy J. Vance in Building Word Power in Japanese: Using Kanji Prefixes and Suffixes. His book provides detailed information about various affixes, as well as copious example sentences.

But you can also find some of that knowledge here! In future blogs, I hope to focus on certain affixes. Not the whole time, though, because then we’d miss other fascinating ways in which characters behave. For instance, check out these cool compounds:

中庭 (nakaniwa: courtyard)     inside + garden

A courtyard is a garden tucked inside a house or between buildings.

中二階 (chūnikai: mezzanine)     middle + two + story

A mezzanine is a partial story between two main floors. This breakdown brings to mind the great sight gag in Being John Malkovich, in which people had no end of trouble as they walked down the corridor of Floor 7½, a severely truncated level wedged between Floors 7 and 8.

空中線 (kūchūsen: antenna)     air + in + line

An antenna is a line in the air. Nowadays, Japanese people just say アンテナ (antena). Too bad. I much prefer the older term.

Kinetic Kanji

The yomi and meaning of a character can change when it’s serving as an affix versus when it’s “off duty.” In the latter case, the kanji still contributes something vital to the compound, but it doesn’t have the specialized meaning that it has when functioning as an affix. Compare the columns in this table, for example:

For Breakdowns of Kanji in the Table …

Did you notice how 専門 changed with the addition of -家 versus -化? And how about what -化 did to 車両 in 車両化? Did you recognize the 庭 of 中庭 (which we saw above as nakaniwa: courtyard) when it resurfaced in 家庭 with the new yomi TEI? There’s so much kinetic energy—so much life!—tucked into this relatively short list! I could stare at it for ages, watching meanings and yomi shift kaleidoscopically.

In fact, there’s so much going on here that we might as well wait till next week to return to the suffix that sparked this whole discussion: 中. It’s summertime, and we’ve worked hard enough! For now, let’s just relax with a Verbal Logic Quiz that will ease us back into thoughts about 中.

For the Verbal Logic Quiz …