学童

Friday 27 January 2023

I came across a warning sign (see the picture) which had the (for me) new word 学童. The meaning is completely clear from the context, but I was not 100% certain about its pronunciation. Nevertheless I guessed its pronunciation correctly. Looking up its meaning confirmed what the context had already made clear: 小学校に通って学ぶ児童. Funnily this definition also has also a word with 童, 児童. Go deeper! Well, 児童 is defined as: 年少の人間。子供 ... and a bunch more specific definitions for 児童.

I asked OpenAI: What is the etymology of the word 年少?

The word 年少 (niánshào) is composed of two characters: 年 (nián) meaning “year” and 少 (shào) meaning “few”. Together, they form the phrase “few years”, which is used to refer to someone’s youth or young age.

Yeah, sure. So 少 is used as a predicate?

Japanese would be straightforward: 年数が少ない.

I can’t get DeepL or TG to give me something like 年数が少ない in Chinese. I did get 他没有多少年 (tā méiyǒu duōshào nián) which has 多少 before 年 or 一些年 (yīxiē nián), also the wrong order. Maybe in Classical Chinese?

益之相禹也，歷年少，施澤於民未久。That Yi assisted Yu only for a few years, and had not long conferred benefits on the people.

Coming back to 童, how did I know its reading was ドウ? I thought of the word 鐘 “bell” en deduced from that トウ, but when I checked that later, its Sino-Japanese reading turned out to be ショウ, not ドウ, so I was right because I was wrong! What’s going on?

Something like the following must have happened. 童 is mostly a reliable phonetic, and it’s even the same phonetic as 重 as in 動. I must have seen it in other composite graphs or compound words. While 鐘 (most frequently read with its Japanese reading かね) came to my mind firstly, my brain (had) wrongly (sloppily) attributed that graph with the more common Sino-Japanese ドウ that 童 has. Probably I had encountered a word like 児童 earlier, but while my brain did remembered the on-yomi, it for some reason found it easier to recall 鐘. (What a mess.)