-Wataru and the Weather

The -wataru suffix can also help you talk about the weather.

晴れ渡る (harewataru: to clear up; be refreshed)
     to clear up + to spread

いやあ、見事に晴れ渡った秋の日になったね。これが台風一過というやつかね。
Iyā, migoto ni harewatatta aki no hi ni natta ne. Kore ga taifū ikka to iu yatsu ka ne.
What a glorious fall day. This is what they mean by the lovely weather you get after a storm.

見事に (migoto ni: splendidly, magnificently, beautifully, admirably)     to look at + thing

Interesting compound—”looking at a thing” is splendid! Wonder what the story is there!

秋 (aki: autumn)

This appears in the next sentence, too. I won’t define it again.

日 (hi: day)
台風一過 (taifū ikka: clear weather after a typhoon has passed)
     typhoon + wind + one + to pass through

The compound 台風 (taifū) means “typhoon,” while 一過 (ikka) means “passing over.”

澄み渡る (sumiwataru: to be perfectly clear)     clear + to spread

秋の空は澄み渡っている。
Aki no sora wa sumiwatatte iru.
The autumn sky is clear and serene.

空 (sora: sky)

There’s certainly a lot of water in 澄み渡る; the “water” radical appears twice. The 澄 kanji originally referred to clear water. Later it came to mean “clear” in general. I was hoping that beans (豆) would somehow factor into the etymology, but no. Henshall says that 登 means “to climb” here. Well, more precisely he says that it acts phonetically here to express “transparent, clear,” perhaps also contributing the sense of “upstream.”

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