SHARAWAGGI.

A Wordorigins thread introduced me to an interesting word with a disputed etymology, sharawaggi (with g pronounced like j). The OED does not try to define it, sending the reader instead to the first citation, from 1685: SIR W. TEMPLE Gard. Epicurus Misc. II. ii. (1690) 58 “The Chineses.. have a particular Word to express it [sc. the beauty of studied irregularity]; and where they find it hit their Eye at first sight, they say the Sharawadgi is fine or is admirable.” As you can see, Temple spoke of the word as Chinese, but the OED’s etymologists, while throwing up their hands, cast doubt on that: “Of unknown origin; Chinese scholars agree that it cannot belong to that language. Temple speaks as if he had himself heard it from travellers.” In the latest edition they add: “For a discussion of etymological hypotheses see 1949 Archit. Rev. CVI. 391/2.” I don’t have access to that number of the Architectural review (if anyone does, I’d appreciate hearing from them), but in the Wordorigins thread Douglas Wilson linked to an article, “A Borrowed Vista” by Ciaran Murray (HTML version of a pdf of issue 27 of the Kyoto International Cultural Association newsletter) that provides a very plausible theory:

There have been a number of attempts to fit Chinese characters – kanji – to this word, but none of them sounds close to sharawadgi, and none of them means what Temple meant. However, an English teacher who lived in Japan 70 years ago, a man called E.V. Gatenby, suggested that sharawadgi was a Japanese word. He thought it might be the older form of sorowanai desho – that the two halves of a design did not match. This form was sorowaji.

That’s all he said. He was tracing words of Japanese origin for the Oxford English Dictionary, and he never took the matter any further. When I tried to do so, I immediately ran into trouble. Historians of the Japanese language told me that the form sorowaji died out four hundred years ago. Temple wrote a hundred years later. So how could he have heard a word which was no longer in use?

Now I was like the character in the Arabian Nights who cannot remember the phrase ‘open, sesame’ which will disclose a door in the rock and give him access to a treasure inside. I could sense the treasure inside, but the phrase I had didn’t seem to be working. I puzzled over this for a long time, until at last a friend who taught at Tokyo University introduced me to Professor Kanai Madoka. Professor Kanai was involved in copying the documents of Dejima, which are still kept in the Netherlands, and bringing a set to Japan. And he was the one who supplied my ‘open, sesame’.

Professor Kanai told me that yes, it was true that sorowaji had died out four hundred years ago – but only in standard Japanese. It had stayed alive in the dialect of Kyushu. Now if you try to pronounce sorowaji in kyushu-ben, what do you get? Shorowaji. And if you try to pronounce shorowaji in Dutch, you get what Temple got – sharawaji. And Temple, you remember, was ambassador to Holland.

Now, I have no idea if any of the Japanese is accurate, but if it is, I’d say the etymology is pretty well nailed down (though the Dutch bit seems dubious). And the next time you see an image with a pleasing asymmetry, you can say “Ah, what shawaraggi!”

2009 Addendum. David Paquette of Sharawadji.org writes to tell me that

sharawadji is included in the list of sonic effects proposed by Jean-François Augoyard and Henry Torgue in their book Sonic Experience: A Guide to Everyday Sounds (McGill-Queen’s University Press, 2005). They define it (and I quote) as “An aesthetic effect that characterizes the feeling of plenitude that is sometimes created by the contemplation of a sound motif or a complex soundscape of inexplicable beauty.” They attribute the term to 17th century travelers returning from China, and they also mention Wiliam Temple, as well as an article by Louis Marin, “L’effet sharawadji”, in Traverses no. 4-5, Paris (1979). So the term is now also used to refer to sonic sources – the authors of the book also being architects, I would assume they found the term in their literature and applied it to sound.

Thanks, David!