:bravo: That’s a doosie! Thank you, thank you! I’ll be here all week! 
[quote]The proper character is either
煞
or
剎
. The latter character is pronounced as either sha1 or cha4 (as in cha4na4 剎那), but the Windows IME seem to place the character under sha4. [/quote]
The HYDZD p.141c, btw, lists 剎 with a primary pronunciation of cha4, and says the earliest extant example is from Sanskrit texts; apparently it was an abbreviated appellation for ksetra, ‘the field’; and also (or later?) meant 幡柱 fan1zhu4 (not sure what this is – a temple’s columns? A flagpole atop a temple for hanging streamers? :help: ), and also a Buddhist temple itself. It gives only a minor note at the end for the reading ‘sha1, to stop, as in brake’. But characters don’t come from nowhere; I don’t believe they were invented out of the blue for writing Sanskrit transliterations. A graph used in a text transliterating Sanskrit into Chinese would normally be borrowed phonetically from an existing usage. It seems that the HYDZD doesn’t have evidence of the existing usage, but Ｉ WONDER whether it might not have once been an alternate form of 殺, containing the same left-side etymon indicating ‘reap’ or ‘kill’ (this etymon meant ‘kill’ by Shang times, as in 
(=殺牛)), and a later disambiguating semantic on the right (with variant and roughly synonymous choices of 殳 a scythe in hand, vs. 刀 a knife). That’s just guesswork on my part, though, but it seems rather parsimonious an explanation. I’ll have to look into it more.
Oh, 煞 sha1 ‘stop’ is also listed as sha4 ‘demon’ and ‘very’ in my small dictionary at hand here, while 剎 sha1 is as you note crosslisted as cha4 for cha4na4 ‘a very short moment’, so the overlap could be an old one; when I see evidence like this I’m hesitant to call it a ‘mistake’; it could be the regional preservation of an older pronunciation.
(It’s nice to have these discussions over here in Learning Chinese instead of in the Cars forum, no?)
That I’ve not heard; I’m sure my mechanic used sha1che1pi2, so I’ll stick to that on the list rather than confuse folks over in Cars with too many terms.
The pinyin would be useful – I can read all the characters but some are 破音字 like pian1/pian4, for example.
Thanks again for all the help! 
[quote=“Dragonbabe”]
:saywhat:
Did you check your “spelling” before you posted it?!
:roflmao:
Hey, for a person who’s been learning Chinese for more than 13 years! :no-no:
:nyah: [/quote]
:raspberry: :raspberry: :raspberry:
:raspberry:
