002_What's Canjeez?
Canjeez is a word I use to dodge academic outrage.
Anyone who has studied Japanese or Chinese will notice a surprising similarity between the characters that I call Canjeez and kanji, the brilliant encodings of reality invented in China thousands of years ago.
I’m going to describe Canjeez in ways that would make scholars of kanji tear their hair out, and so I need to stress that what I will be writing about are not kanji but Canjeez.
Although each Canjeez portrayed in these posts will be recognizable as a real kanji, many of my explanations about them will be non-standard to say the least. No identification with any actual kanji scholarship is intended or should be inferred!
The first Canjeez to which I’d like to draw your attention (once again) is 木. This is tree. I think about this Canjeez more than any other. You’ll find out why not far down the road.
Here’s another Canjeez: 林. That means woods. If you were to encounter just two trees standing next to each other in the real world, you wouldn’t call them woods. This two-tree Canjeez is in fact being used to convey the idea of “multiple trees”.
Which brings us to 森. That means forest. Lots of trees.
It all seems pretty logical, doesn’t it? But stay! Through the swirling mists of time we travel back to bubbly ’80s Tokyo, where we note that my younger self, a callow, shallow fellow, is also thinking: “This kanji stuff is all pretty logical.” To which the older, wiser, altogether-more-superior me responds with a curt: “Ha!”
Nevertheless, I urge you to pay no heed to the intimidating glyphs lurking menacingly in the shadows. For now, just note this: 林 and 森 demonstrate that Canjeez can be used as bits in other Canjeez. I don’t want to waste your time with technical details, but I do also need to point out that Canjeez may have:
left bits
right bits
top bits and
bottom bits
A bottom bit may also have a left bit and a right bit of its own. We may well come across a left bit with a part that sweeps under the right bit. Or a top bit with a part that sweeps down to the left of some other bits. And I haven’t mentioned bits that box in other bits. Or…
But here’s the key point: You can combine bits of Canjeez in various ways to make more Canjeez, and make new meanings.
If we had a completely different one-bit Canjeez for every abstract and concrete phenomenon in the world around us, it would be impossible to remember all the Canjeez. So combining bits (jargon: “bonding”) is an important feature of Canjeez.
I could walk you through a veritable 森 of Canjeez. But in these posts we will focus on a select few. I don’t expect to mention more than about 35-50 Canjeez. Two thousand, tops.
Most of the time, I will be zooming in on a much smaller selection. Just the ones we need to understand life, the universe, and everything.
Cloudy with a chance of dragons. The following 84-stroke glyph was created in Japan and no one seems to know exactly what it means. It shows a bed of three flying dragons with a topping of three clouds. Or you can see it as three clouds with a substack (sic!) of three flying dragons. As if this Canjeez wasn’t bewildering enough, it even has a variant version. Personally I think the one shown below is more elegant than Variant 2, which you can see here.