Favourite Chinese character?

You are a genius!

Let’s do some cheerleading!

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You guys inventing new characters–how about trying your hand at translating “Jabberwocky”?

Just came across a character I didn’t know. Kind of cool.

Capture

If you don’t know it, can you guess it’s meaning?

Hint, you can see it when looking at old houses.

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A tree, a rain type thingamajig and three mouths.

Is it some kind of traditional roof?

Ok just Google image searched and they are saying it means microwave oven in Japanese

𠀃𠙵𠮛𠮝

Don’t know what any of them means or sounds like.

The exit signs. They looks like men being chased by potatoes.

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Cool character. I can only remember having come across the variant 欞 in the wild

I like the character 美. As an Australian, I can really see where the ancient Chinese were coming from when they chose the components “big” and “sheep” to express the concept of beauty. :sheep::heart_eyes:
(Actually, the character apparently originally depicted a shaman in a fancy hat)

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Where did the hat go? The hat was what topped it off :face_with_raised_eyebrow:

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I came to the same conclusion as Liam_Og.

So … no idea :slight_smile:

EDIT: Does it represent some sort of overhang or shelter from the rain, wherein one might (for example) BBQ a few prawns?

My favourite is 家. A pig under a roof. That’s just perfection.

I just googled this and was somewhat disappointed …

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It’s very childish but a good reason for me. Mine is 操. Why? Initially I was looking at the word in the dictionary because I was young and thought it was funny to know a bad word (I know it isn’t always, but I didn’t know that then). I saw, for the first time, the tab on Pleco that explains the parts of the character and I just imagined a hand shaking a tree pissing off the birds. As a result, I learned something from this character and it was the first character I could recognize that was somewhat complicated.

kung fu panda

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At the risk of attempting to teach any grandmothers out there to suck eggs, Chinese compound characters like this one have a semantic and a phonetic component. If you had never come across this character before, from the semantic component on the left you could surmise that it might have something to do with trees or wood. From the phonetic component on the right, you could guess that the character is probably pronounced ling2. While it’s fun to image what’s going on with that rain and those mouths on the right, they are simply a phonetic component and don’t tell you anything about the meaning of the character.

For people learning to read Chinese, the phonetic component is generally the most useful. Another example is the more common word that means the same as 窗櫺:窗格子. If you were familiar with, for instance, the character 各in 各人, you could guess that格was pronounced “ge” (although you wouldn’t be able to guess the tone)

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OK, here is the answer. Nothing nasty or surprising. I just found that the radicals are all somewhat related to the thing.

櫺 (líng) - carved or patterned window railings

image

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If you like the character 櫺,then you’ll probably love the character 麢 (once again you could probably guess that it’s pronounced ling2). This is the definition from the Erya, China’s oldest extant dictionary from the third century BC:
「麢,大羊。」 :sheep::drooling_face:

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That ling means ‘complex pictogram based writing system’? Am I right? Or some thing on a plain with rain and that’s sounds like one of those fancy window things?

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I see a deer, rain, and three balls…

image

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This ling2 (麢)is a variant of 羚 (ling2) meaning gazelle/antelope (although based on that definition from the Erya, way back in the day it seems to have meant simply big sheep). The top part is the “meaning” radical, in this case “deer”, and the bottom “drops of rain” radical is used as the purely phonetic component.

You can probably guess both the general meaning and the pronunciation of this character: 醽. The great Tang poet Li He has a famous line “醁醽今夕酒,緗帙去時書”

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My guess would be a drink that rhymes with the large sheep/ window thing/microwave according to Enya.

However I just asked the misses and she said that character means, ‘are you on that stupid site again? translate it yourself!’ which seems quite amazing that one character can contain multiple sentences worth of meaning.

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I think I found a pic of you preparing for a sesh on “that site” by first drinking a bathtubful of top shelf Sino-Celtic 醽醁(ling2 lu4):

image

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