Seeing clearly: Frame Semantic, Psycholinguistic, and Cross ...

CHAPTER 5. WHAT THE DICTIONARIES SAY 225
Finally let us consider our other non-Indo-European language, Japanese, shown in
Table 5.11 on the following page. In this case we have 66 examples to work from, so that
better generalizations may be possible. The relatively large number of equivalents used in
the Japanese translations is primarily due to variations in politeness, which mayinvolve
the choice of a di erent basic morpheme, di erent in ectional or derivational morphology,
and/or the addition of honori c forms. The situation is further complicated by the presence
of many English idioms and collocations among the examples (shown in the righthand
columns of Table 5.11). The general conclusion is that the basic Japanese equivalent of
see, miru, hasamuch more limited range than see. None of the senses in the Cognitive
division can be expressed by miru, norcanany of the senses in the Visit division, although
mite morau, like the Chinese equivalent, means `to be seen by a doctor', and ome ni kakaru
contains a morpheme meaning `eye'.
The usual way of writing these words, using a combination of Chinese characters
and Japanese syllabics, raises other interesting questions. In all of the translations mit-
sukeru \descry", miwakeru \discern", minuku \have insight into", and mimau \call on",
the rst syllable, mi, is written with the Sino-Japanese character pronounced jian in Man-
darin, meaning `see'; does this re ect accurately the morphology of these words? If so,
can we conclude that mitomeru \notice" does not contain the same morpheme, because
it is written with a di erent character? The question of the extent to which the Chinese
characters adopted by the Japanese for their (fundamentally unrelated) language re ect the
underlying morphology of the Japanese language at that time is fascinating, but delving
into this would take us too far a eld. For the moment, we simply observe that most of
the senses of see other than eye are expressed most of the time with words unrelated to
miru, but that there is also a signi cant minority of translations using words which may
be related to miru.