Microseason: Caterpillars Become Butterflies

SPRING

INSECTS AWAKEN

CATERPILLARS BECOME BUTTERFLIES

15 - 19 March

Caterpillars that have endured the Winter months, emerge as butterflies this time of year. It’s a charming season when flora of all sorts are dressed in the fluttering of butterflies.

The poetic minds of yesteryear referred to butterflies as yumé-midori, dream bird, or yumé-mushi, dream insect. An ode to the ephemeral beauty of butterflies that mirror the ephemerality of ever-evolving seasons.

The word téfu is the classical way of writing chou or butterfly. This discrepancy where phonetics differed from written word was prevalent for a period of time. Written language often changes more slowly than spoken language. This phenomenon is shared across a multitude of languages across the globe.

In Japanese, this mismatch is largely due to the historical kana usage from the Heian period (794–1185). Over the centuries, pronunciation naturally evolved, whilst the writing system remained more or less the same. By the Edo period (1603–1868), people were already pronouncing words the way we do today, but they still wrote them in the classical way. For example:

• téfu → pronounced "chou" (butterfly)

• kéfu → pronounced "kyou" (today)

• aharé → pronounced "awaré" (today)

• kau → pronounced "kou" (in this way)

• omofu → pronounced "omou" (think/believe)

Shortly after World War II, the Japanese government reformed the writing system to better match modern pronunciation. This is why today we now write chou instead of téfu.

Thus, téfu in old texts is simply the historically written version of butterfly. It is still used today as an intentional means of giving a classical elegance, playfulness, or dreamlike feeling to literature or in the naming of art and design work.

Photo credit: Momoko Nakamura