Quote:
Originally Posted by Level5
Hey, may be it'll be a strange question, but... Can you explain why 沱白 is read as "shirohebi"? In our Monogatari fangroup we have a discussion about your spoilers and one guy is trying to say that there shoul be a mistake in that kind of translations, cause 沱 translates like "tearful" or "flow" (yeah, he doesn't know japanese and using translators for this kind of stuff, but he's like "I'm 100% sure in this").
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Yeah, I thought the same, but in Japanese the meaning and the pronunciation is essentially a convention.
The real kanji for snake is 蛇. The left part is 虫, which in Japanese now means insect, but at the time it was the pictograph of a hooded snake (insects and snakes were thought to belong to the same group). The right part of the kanji is a Chinese original character which was originally a pictograph of a snake too, so basically this kanji is snake + snake. With 沱 you have the radical of water + snake, so you get water snake.
It's an invention by Nisio, but it sort of makes sense.
What's puzzling is the way the kanji are written in the reverse order (it should read hebishiro instead of shirohebi), but apparently the Japanese anciently wrote things like that.