> You are potentially biased by native speaker instinct. What you understand just fine is only what you think it means.
You could apply that argument to my interpretation of anything in any language. All this time I thought F=ma was about physics when it's really a drawing of a Samurai.
The interpretation that you substitute mine with is not only conceited, but relies on false assumptions drawn from an imperfect understanding of a completely different language.
> 望 for example has the sign for moon up-right, and emperor down-low, if I recal correctly. The latter also means tenno in Japanese and has some relation to sky (or the forbidden city in Peking)
The radical 王 you refer to does not mean emperor, but king by itself. The phrase commonly translated as "emperor" is in fact 皇帝, which is a combination of the titles of 皇 and 帝 similar to the title of "Rex Imperator" in Europe. The japanese phrase Tennō does not mean "emperor", it means sky (or celestial) emperor. It is the combination of 天(Ten, meaning sky) and 皇(Nō, one of the afforementioned titles that is commonly translated as emperor). Neither the word or character for emperor has any relation to the sky by themselves and no reasonable person would think of the word emperor from seeing the word from gaze because they share a radical.
> In fact the poem might be an intralingual rosetta stone for learners of the writing.
Given that the poem was written centuries before any language other than Chinese used the Chinese script, your analysis doesn't make sense. It seems to me that you just want to shoehorn your very limited understanding of Japanese into this discussion.
> Neither the word or character for emperor has any relation to the sky by themselves
The wiktionary entry does mention such a hypothesis. My reasoning is rather inspired by parallel evidence in I do-European deus "god, sky father", dies "day", etc; and a similar parallel in Egyptian with Afro-Asiatic roots that I do not quite remember right now.
> and no reasonable person would think of the word emperor from seeing the word from gaze because they share a radical.
That's why I thought it needed to be pointed out.
By the way, I ment a rosetta stone linking speach to writing given an oral side channel; If it rhymes or makes a neat mnemonic then the side channel would be error tolerant; if not, I guess, tradition is either not error tolerant, or the speach becomes corrupted. The signs change, too, surely, but paper is patient.
I am shoehorning alright. Lyrical tradition is one of the corner stone of our culture. I can only hear you saying it's just words, and in effect, I'm not even opposed to that notion.
You could apply that argument to my interpretation of anything in any language. All this time I thought F=ma was about physics when it's really a drawing of a Samurai.
The interpretation that you substitute mine with is not only conceited, but relies on false assumptions drawn from an imperfect understanding of a completely different language.
> 望 for example has the sign for moon up-right, and emperor down-low, if I recal correctly. The latter also means tenno in Japanese and has some relation to sky (or the forbidden city in Peking)
The radical 王 you refer to does not mean emperor, but king by itself. The phrase commonly translated as "emperor" is in fact 皇帝, which is a combination of the titles of 皇 and 帝 similar to the title of "Rex Imperator" in Europe. The japanese phrase Tennō does not mean "emperor", it means sky (or celestial) emperor. It is the combination of 天(Ten, meaning sky) and 皇(Nō, one of the afforementioned titles that is commonly translated as emperor). Neither the word or character for emperor has any relation to the sky by themselves and no reasonable person would think of the word emperor from seeing the word from gaze because they share a radical.
> In fact the poem might be an intralingual rosetta stone for learners of the writing.
Given that the poem was written centuries before any language other than Chinese used the Chinese script, your analysis doesn't make sense. It seems to me that you just want to shoehorn your very limited understanding of Japanese into this discussion.