My father just obtained his 3rd kyu, and with it, a brown belt he's going to
wear until he gets a black one. It's a tradition in our dojo to get a brown
belt embroidered either with a Japanese saying or one's name. He chose the
former and wanted to get a belt embroidered with 「剣は 鋭く気は円く」. However, as he
does not speak Japanese, nor can he read hiragana, he mistook the 「く」for
"line-ending-signs" and submitted the text to be embroidered without them.
It'd be a lot of hassle and/or money to get it corrected; does the
embroidering on the belt make sense as it is?
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2016-08-05T20:35:55.653
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2016-08-06T00:22:45.283
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question
grammar
Does 「剣は 鋭 気は円」 make sense?
Interestingly, the altered one happens to make sense to me as a verse.

The original sentence reads "剣は鋭【するど】く 気は円【まる】く" using kun-yomi, but the
altered one can be read as "剣は鋭【えい】 気は円【えん】" using on-yomi, which basically
has the same meaning as the original one. It may not be very natural as
ordinary Japanese prose, but it's similar to how people have to read
[漢文](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Kanbun), so it looks convincing enough to
me. I don't know it makes sense as a real classic Chinese sentence, though.

Note that you definitely need a small space (or comma) between 鋭 and 気, and no
space elsewhere. Otherwise, it would look like one ungrammatical line
including a strange word "鋭気".
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2016-08-06T00:22:45.283
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answer