First opened Saturday, July 21, 2018
せめて
せめて
- head-high (atamadaka): falls after mora 1
How to read it: a line over a kana means the voice is high there, and ↓ marks where it drops. A kana with no line is low. With no ↓ the pitch stays high to the end and does not drop even on a following particle (が, は).
at least
Taken apart
We don't have the data for this section. Wiktionary has no Etymology section for this reading, and a split made without one would be a guess.
In a sentence
せめて謝ってくれてもいいのに。
He might at least apologize.
一日にせめて二回は歯を磨くべきだ。
You should brush your teeth at least twice a day.
Sentences are from Tatoeba (CC BY 2.0 FR), picked by fixed rules from a dated export and shown unchanged. Nobody has reviewed them one by one.
What Wiktionary says
We don't have the data for this section. The pinned Wiktionary dump has no Etymology section for this reading, so nothing is said about where the word comes from.
What the labels mean
- 和語 Native Japanese
- Words that were already Japanese before Chinese vocabulary arrived — usually written with kun'yomi and often short.