Floor

The Chinese character for "floor," pronounced yuka in Japanese.

Those of you who knew me in college will recall my insistence on getting rid of my bedframe and sleeping on a futon on the floor for a couple of years.  This was inspired by my stint in Japan with the Duke's Men--traditionally, the Japanese would sleep this way, and I thought it gave me some measure of ascetic street cred.

A brief digression about Japanese counters.  Basically, when you give a quantity in Japanese, you need to use the corresponding counter, which differs according to the quantity's category and shape.  For example, flat objects (such as blankets, shirts, sheets of paper, etc.) take the counter mai, while long, straight objects (such as pens, trees, and--strangely--telephone calls) take the counter hon.  Besides the shape counters are many idiosyncratic ones as well.  Some of the less obvious categories include special counters for pills or capsules (jō, 錠), for gods (hashira, 柱), and for shrimp (bi, 尾).  The kicker is that these counters often mean something different when in isolation and so are used metaphorically (hashira means 'pillar'), synecdochically (bi means 'tail'), or straight-up randomly (jō means 'padlock'!).

Anyway, I recently learned that the character above, 床, is used not only to mean floor--when it is pronounced yuka--but also as the counter for beds (as in a hospital)--when it is pronounced toko.  I thought it might be of the Straight-Up Random category that I have proposed, until I realized that it must derive from the fact that traditional Japanese beds were on the floor.  This also demystified the etymology of the formal word for waking up (起床), in which the character is pronounced yet a third way, shō.  Cool, no?