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What are whiskers?
The first question you might ask is, “What are whiskers?” They’re fuzzy sensory organs that extend from the cat’s upper lip and act as a kind of radar system. Cats have whiskers on both sides of their faces, but certain breeds (mainly longhaired cats) only have them on one side. Whiskers help the cats sense things in their immediate environment-things they can’t see or detect by smell because they’re too far away or hidden behind something else.
Whiskers help the cats sense things in their immediate environment-things they can’t see or detect by smell because they’re too far away or hidden behind something else.Cats have whiskers on both sides of their faces, but certain breeds (mainly longhaired cats) only have them on one side. The answer to this question can be found in the Japanese history. The traditional, or old-fashioned way of reading a kanji (Chinese character) is called onyomi and it’s very similar to phonetics. As an example, ‘N’ could represent the sound /n/, which would correspond with either “Na” or “Ni.” In other words, there are multiple ways to pronounce the word even though they’re visually identical so sometimes two people may say the same thing but each has their own intention for saying it. It’s like when you see something in English and not know how to pronounce it until someone tells you what it sounds like. For instance: I’m eating cake – keying kite? This is really important when it comes to Naruto’s whiskers because they could be pronounced in Japanese as “Hitsuji,” which means ‘goat,‘ or “Hyōshi,” which means ‘fang.’
So the question becomes:
why does Naruto have goat whiskers? Or, why does he have fangs? The answer can probably still be found by looking at traditional onyomi but I think that there might also be a more modern way of reading kanji. This newer method is called kun-reading and while this lettering system isn’t used in Japan anymore, most people know how to read them now if they’re coming from countries like China or South Korea.
