New question from another visitor ramou.net .
Question:
Is there a Chinese character meaning song ? Original drawing on what was it based?
What an interesting question! It is that character does exist (see below) and represents just a man trying to make two sounds "A" with the mouth. The right part of the original character (red background) is our man, standing on two legs, with open mouth in profile. The left side shows the two superimposed (add five other "A" and you will hear Gilda in Rigoletto). But before we get to the character song has had many adventures.
Is there a relationship between the drawing of the left and his "A", will say it? Yes and no. Drawing (reproduced below) represents the silhouette of an ax. However, this character is pronounced formerly "A".
In its first version, the character song was written just as the double "A" (picture below). But this character has the same pronunciation as meaning older brother (age in modern Chinese). It did not take long for the original character is kidnapped, so he started to describe as big-brother (that's the only sense that remains today).
It thus finds itself with a character designating two homophones. How to differentiate? This is where the most common process in the formation of Chinese characters, which is to add a key to the initial layout semantics. This is key, as we have already seen, the drawing of a man with his mouth open (see below). This leads to the character at the beginning of this post: something that decides and ge which comes from the mouth of a man.
0 comments:
Post a Comment