"character sanity" or 中文 outside-in
bill
December 08, 2007, 04:44 AM posted in General Discussion大家好！Hello everyone. What do I mean by "Chinese outside-in?" Any idea? [PAUSE]
When one learns a language that is not ones maternal language, then one often sees things in that language that the native born speakers miss. Children learn sounds and bind them to actions and objects. For example: 汽车。When I first saw that word I immediately thought about a Stanley Steamer. After all it is a "steam vehicle or cart." The traditional character to me "looks like" an axle with a wheel, or a cart with an axle and two wheels.
In this discussion what a character "looks like" will have significance. Characters really are more often than not syllables. And in Mandarin both the syllables and their combinations have a depth of meaning and beauty.
I recall first coming across 星期 or week. I was blown away. Star+period of time. 星 alone is the birth of the sun, and 期 contains 月。An immense amount of meaning in a single word for week. It's really a small poem, it's elegant as well as scientific.
Must last example was discovered when I was looking at Mandarin words relating to the sea. 高潮 or high tide. Check out tide: The radical is 水， and there is also 月。Again, the knowledge of the moon causing water to move. So, I then stumbled upon 性高潮 or orgasm or climax. This is sex high tide. Wow! Can it be better expressed?
This is the direction of this Forum. Looking at the poetic beauty of Chinese characters.
Do any of you have a favorite you'd like to share?
周末快乐，
Bill
bill
January 04, 2008, 04:02 AMMore talking about talking ...
After "Handsome Boy" and Qing Wen's "You talking about me?" I was wondering about the many ways one can have conversations in Mandarin. The list is very long and I'll stick to just 17 examples some of which have been covered in the CPod lessons:
说 shuo1 To speak / to say / to talk (about) 说明 shuo1ming2 To explain/to illustrate / explanation 说出 shuo1chu1 To speak out/to declare (one's view)
听说 ting1shuo1 To hear told
谈 tan2 To speak / to talk / to discuss / to converse 谈心 tan2xin1 A heart-to-heart chat 谈论 tan2lun2 To discuss / to talk about 谈谈 tan2tan2 To discuss / to have a chat 空谈 kong1tan2 Idle chit-chat
长谈 chang2tan2 A long talk
讨 tao3 Ask for / to demand / to marry 讨论 tao3lun2 To discuss / to talk over 讨饭 tao3fan4 To beg for food
讨论会 tao3lun2hui4 Symposium / discussion forum
聊 liao2 To chat / to have a chat / to kill time 聊天 liao2tian1 To chat / to gossip 聊天室 liao2tian1shi4 Chat room
Some of the above combinations are fun and self-explanatory, and I'm sure you see them:
说明 To speak + to understand == to explain 听说 To hear + to speak == To hear told 谈心 To speak + heart == heart-to-heart chat (is this also a verb?). Can one say, "谈心吧！” I'm not sure but it feels OK. 讨饭 To ask for + food or cooked rice == to beg 讨论会 To discuss or talk over + meeting == Symposium or forum 聊天 To chat or kill time + sky or heaven == to chat or gossip (talk without a limit so to speak)
My Chinese friends often say, "喝一点就聊聊吧！“ Always a good idea (-:
新年快乐！
Bill
bill
December 16, 2007, 07:12 AMHi Bokane,
I've read the book to which you are referring. And in fact in what follows some of what I say comes from that text. I too am very interested in the history of these characters and would appreciate any references you might have. OK. Now for my blurb on 有:
晚上好！现在是十点四十五.
One of the fascinating properties of Chinese is that because its written form is pictorial it retains its original nature when read. We can see the intended meaning of the originators of the language in many of the characters. This is not true for phonetic languages like English or French. For example what does "is" reveal to you when you look at it? Might you guess that "is" comes from the Aryan root as which means "to breathe?" "Be" is from bhu which means to grow.
On the other hand, what about 有? What do you see when you read 有? Look at it and let your imagination play.
A formal definition of 有 tells us: Right hand 又 (phonetic altered to left hand) grasping the abundance of the moon 月 － to have, possess, exist, be present.
To have something is to grasp the abundance of the moon!! 有 as it stands alone is a small poem. One immediately thinks of the moon, its cycles to which our own cycles, the cycles of the earth are intrinsically bound. I personally reflect upon the wisdom of the ancient people that created this amazing language，and the poetry it has inspired in English as well as Chinese.
More on this next time. 我要睡觉 ...
Bill
bokane
December 16, 2007, 04:24 PMHi, Bill --
I hope I don't come off as too much of a spoilsport, but Fenollosa, while he had some interesting ideas and was instrumental in inspiring Ezra Pound to believe he could read Chinese, is just not very reliable in most cases. George Kennedy, a more serious contemporary of Fenollosa, wrote a long piece taking him to task for his inaccuracies -- I strongly recommend it. (There's a copy online - the first result at http://www.google.com/search?q=%22Ernest+Fenollosa%2C+Ezra+Pound%2C+Chinese%22 .) Fenollosa's ways of describing characters are really charming, and even sometimes correct in the extreme minority of cases where the characters are truly pictographic, but the real story behind characters is usually very different.
Take 有, for example. As you mention, it was a picture of a hand -- originally written in oracle bone script as something like this: http://www.internationalscientific.org/CharacterImages/Lst/L30000/l35200/L35247.gif. "Moon" has little to do with the composition of the character; the original form had a picture of a piece of meat 肉, which in many graphs was simplified to resemble 月 -- as in e.g. 肠 or 脸 or the many other characters where it acts as a radical meaning "flesh." You can see this particularly in some of the bronze script forms of the character, which are mostly some sort of variation on this: http://www.internationalscientific.org/CharacterImages/Bronze/B10000/b10400/b10473.gif.
In one sense, I suppose that this explanation is a bit of a let-down -- Fenollosa's imaginings of Chinese characters can be beautiful, and can work very well as a mnemonic aid when it comes to learning the characters. I think that the more accurate history of 有 has got its own charms too: the character 友 from 朋友, for example, was originally two hands joined in friendship (http://www.internationalscientific.org/CharacterImages/Bronze/B00000/b04100/b04107.gif) -- and still is, if you consider the character's component parts of
bokane
December 16, 2007, 04:40 PMHi, Bill --
I hope I don't come off as too much of a spoilsport, but Fenollosa, while he had some interesting ideas and was instrumental in inspiring Ezra Pound, is just not reliable in most cases. George Kennedy, a more serious contemporary of Fenollosa, wrote a long piece taking him to task for his inaccuracies -- I strongly recommend it. (There's a copy online - Google "Ernest Fenollosa, Ezra Pound, Chinese.") Fenollosa's ways of describing characters are charming, and even sometimes correct in the extreme minority of cases where the characters are truly pictographic, but the real story behind characters is usually very different.
Take 有, for example. As you mention, it was a picture of a hand -- originally written in oracle bone script as something like http://www.internationalscientific.org/CharacterImages/Lst/L30000/l35200/L35247.gif. "Moon" has little to do with 有; the original form had a picture of a piece of meat 肉, which here and in many graphs was simplified to resemble 月 -- as in 肠 or 脸 or the many other characters where it acts as a radical meaning "flesh." You can see this particularly in some of the bronze script forms, which are mostly some sort of variation on: http://www.internationalscientific.org/CharacterImages/Bronze/B10000/b10400/b10473.gif.
I suppose that this explanation may be a bit of a let-down -- Fenollosa's imaginings of Chinese characters can be beautiful, and can work very well as a mnemonic aid when it comes to learning the characters. But the more accurate history of 有 has its own charms too: the character 友 from 朋友, for example, was originally two hands joined in friendship (http://www.internationalscientific.org/CharacterImages/Bronze/B00000/b04100/b04107.gif) -- and still is, if you consider the character's component parts of
bokane
December 16, 2007, 04:41 PMHi, Bill --
I hope I don't come off as too much of a spoilsport, but Fenollosa, while he had some interesting ideas and was instrumental in inspiring Ezra Pound, is just not reliable in most cases. George Kennedy, a more serious contemporary of Fenollosa, wrote a long piece taking him to task for his inaccuracies -- I strongly recommend it. (There's a copy online - Google "Ernest Fenollosa, Ezra Pound, Chinese.") Fenollosa's ways of describing characters are charming, and even sometimes correct in the extreme minority of cases where the characters are truly pictographic, but the real story behind characters is usually very different.
Take 有, for example. As you mention, it was a picture of a hand -- originally written in oracle bone script as something like http://www.internationalscientific.org/CharacterImages/Lst/L30000/l35200/L35247.gif. "Moon" has little to do with 有; the original form had a picture of a piece of meat 肉, which here and in many graphs was simplified to resemble 月 -- as in 肠 or 脸 or the many other characters where it acts as a radical meaning "flesh." You can see this particularly in some of the bronze script forms, which are mostly some sort of variation on: http://www.internationalscientific.org/CharacterImages/Bronze/B10000/b10400/b10473.gif.
bokane
December 16, 2007, 04:42 PM(cont'd)
I suppose that this explanation may be a bit of a let-down -- Fenollosa's imaginings of Chinese characters can be beautiful, and can work very well as a mnemonic aid when it comes to learning the characters. But the more accurate history of 有 has its own charms too: the character 友 from 朋友, for example, was originally two hands joined in friendship (http://www.internationalscientific.org/CharacterImages/Bronze/B00000/b04100/b04107.gif) -- and still is, if you consider the character's component parts of
bokane
December 16, 2007, 04:48 PMGah! Sorry for the multiple comments -- HTML didn't work and the comment was too long, and now it's not letting me delete the failed attempts for some reason. So now I come off as not only a spoilsport but a repetitive spoilsport!
bill
December 16, 2007, 05:15 PMHi bokane,
You raise interesting points. What interests me about Fenollosa is not so much his interpretation of the characters as an historical linguist but rather his asking us to look more closely at the Chinese character and its origins.
After all he wrote this essay in 1908 and Chinese has evolved since then rendering a few of his examples obsolete.
I do know about the 肉 in 有 but didn't think it was necessary for what I was saying. Still, the right hand grasping a piece of meat says a lot about "having" doesn't it. I think it is closer to reality and still agree with the idea that pictogram based languages can have a deeper poetic essence than phonetic languages because they carry with them in an obvious way their linguistic DNA.
And all of us have been struck by the pure beauty of a Chinese characters as an art form. While calligraphy is elegant, there is no comparison.
Actually, your explanations are not a let down at all. Life and ideas are dynamic and in full evolution. And, I do like the 朋友 example very much.
Also, Fenollosa's discussion of "copulas" or linking verbs is quite insightful. I like bare bones language for poetry, and his analogies linking nature to early sentence forms brings to mind an excellent small anthology of modern poetry. If you read French, then you'll really enjoy it: "Tout le monde se resemble." I just looked for my copy and can't find it. Web searches don't yield much because the phrase is too common, and the book is obscure.
There is a very simple poem in the book: "Dans la cour plantains cinq." In the court yard banana trees five. The idea of this poem is to write as we really think. One enters a court yard, sees banana trees and THEN counts them. The usual sentence would be, "There are five banana trees in the court yard," or something close. The latter completely loses the real experience as we experience it, as it happens in nature.
This is what Fenollosa was writing about and I think saw in the Chinese character ... that's my take.
I'll definitely check your references. One can definitely see the RIGHT and LEFT hand in 友。
是早上。这个下午几个朋友要来我们家。我们要吃晚饭喝一点酒 (-:
多谢，
Bill
bill
December 16, 2007, 05:35 PMPS> I'll track down my little book if you are interested. Our home is being renovated, and we've packed many books. I usually kept this one at my bedside. Speaking of bedside books, I've another one that is super if you read French: “Tu Fu, une mouette entre ciel et terre," Editor Mondarren, and the poems were translated from the Chinese by CHENG Wing Fun and Hervé Collet. Each poem is shown in its original Chinese and beside it is a French translation. The title is, "Tu Fu, a seagull between heaven and earth." As you must be aware, 天 和 地 are strong themes in Chinese poetry.
The title is really quite touching, and comes from a poem that is entitled: Evening voyage describing my feeling. The final lines are roughly translated as (From Chinese to French to English):
The moon agitates in the large river that flows by my poems will they end up making me famous? An official poste because old and sick I from now on renonce, wandering wandering what do I resemble? Between heaven and earth, on the sand, a seagull
The French much more beautiful than the English. I personally think French is a fantastic language for writing, and of course Chinese even better .. I'm sure many people will disagree. The nature of the beings we are is rather charming in this sense. Disagreement yields a "bonne guerre," or good war. Nobody dies and knowledge evolves.
Bill
bokane
December 16, 2007, 12:25 AMHey, Bill --
This looks like it could be a great discussion! Pound's ideas on characters were shaped very much by the work of Ernest Fenollosa, who had an essay called "The Chinese Written Character as a Medium for Poetry." A lot of Fenollosa's ideas about characters have been discredited as philology, but as a way of both appreciating and remembering characters, I think there's probably still quite a lot to offer.
One really fun thing is to look at the origins of characters. Take 星 as an example, since you mentioned it: In some of the earliest forms of the character, it was written as 晶, a character that was later borrowed to mean "shine" or "sparkle," and then later acquired the derived meaning of "crystal." After that, 晶 had the character 生 added to give a hint as to how it was to be pronounced -- the characters sounded the same, or similar, back then. For a while, particularly during the bronze script period of the writing system, the character was written as 曐 - three 日 suns plus a 生 -- but during the seal script period, this was simplified to the current form 星.
I'm a sucker for looking at the histories of characters -- its more than a little bit nerdy, I know, but often one character will have so many stories and associations behind it that it can suck you in. One of my all-time favorite characters is 鬻, a 22-stroke behemoth of a character with a great story behind it. I've written about it before on my blog, but I'm not sure what the etiquette is here when it comes to linking.
bill
December 16, 2007, 05:47 PMIf you read French, this is useful. If not, then forget it I guess. I typoed "ressemble" in the title:
TITRE: TOUT LE MONDE SE RESSEMBLE ; UNE ANTHOLOGIE DE POESIE CONTEMPORAINE
AUTEUR: HOCQUARD EMMANUEL
IT would be very cool to translate the book into Chinese!
bokane
December 17, 2007, 12:01 AMA fellow Du Fu fan!
Du Fu hasn't really gotten his due in English-language translation, I think. A lot of translators tend to go either for Li Bai, whose work is exhilarating and a lot more individualistic, perhaps making it more to the taste of western poesy. The standard trinity for the High Tang poets is Li Bai, Du Fu, and Wang Wei, with the subsequent explanation that Li's themes are Daoist, Wang's Buddhist, and Du's Confucian. It's not untrue, but I prefer to think of them as masters of emotion, imagery (Wang was also a painter), and language, respectively.
if you're into Du Fu, you must -- must! -- check out "A Little Primer of Tu Fu" by David Hawkes. I think it's probably out of print, but some libraries - particularly university libraries - will have it. Hawkes' renditions of some of Du's poems (including the "between heaven and earth" one -- one of Du's more famous poems, written while he was lamenting over having been passed over for public office) are not poetic, but he goes deep into the literal and then the implied meaning of each character. Hawkes is one of the great minds in western scholarship of Chinese literature, and while he doesn't attempt poetry in his treatment of Du Fu, his translation of "The Story of the Stone" is not to be missed: it's exquisite, erudite, and accurate -- three things that one usually doesn't find in the same place in English translations of Chinese literature.
Vikram Seth also put out a small volume a while back entitled "Three Chinese Poets" with several poems each by Wang, Li and Du. The results are mixed somewhat in my opinion, but there are a couple of poems where he really does a good job.
I don't read French, I'm afraid, except by way of very rusty Spanish and rustier Italian. I'll have to keep an eye out, though -- I'm heading back to the States over Christmas and am eagerly looking forward to raiding some libraries.
bill
December 17, 2007, 04:00 PMHi bokane,
Yes, I've been a fan of 杜甫 and 李白 since the 1970's. I'm quite content with the French translations of 杜甫 since my French is nearly as good as my English. Still, David Hawkes book with its character interpretation is something I'll look for. Many of the poems in the anthology I have in French are not poetic but rather historic.
I've friends from Taiwan who read these poems to me and I was surprised to find in some of them a rhyme scheme and other poetic themes that the translations miss.
Also, I've always been a little skeptical of interpretations of poetry. It's never been clear to me that the poet intended what academics find. One is always safe interpreting dead poets (-: Still, the analysis stands alone as a way to more deeply understand the language of the time.
Time to start my day over here. I've some wiring to do in the new renovation.
I'll also check out the Vikram Seth book. I can get access to the Stanford University Library ... as well as UC Berkeley.
Bill
bokane
December 17, 2007, 04:35 PM_ I can get access to the Stanford University Library ... as well as UC Berkeley._
Yow - I'm jealous. I remember very contentedly killing a lot of time at Green during a summer course at Stanford years ago.
While you're raiding libraries, Stephen Owen also has some good stuff on Tang poetry, though he seems more interested in the historical evolution than the poetics.
bill
December 19, 2007, 01:00 AMI just found the David Hawkes book on Amazon. It was a little expensive, $30.00, but that's OK. I also purchased a book of Han Shan's poetry, “The collected songs of cold mountain," and another Wang Wei on five Tang poets.
这些是我的圣诞礼物。
一路平安，Bon voyage, buen viaje !
Bill
bokane
December 19, 2007, 06:44 AMThanks, Bill. The Hawkes book is expensive, but trust me -- it's very well worth it. Is the Han Shan book the Burton Watson translation, or Bill Porter/Red Pine's?
-Brendan
bill
December 19, 2007, 04:00 PMHi Brendan,
The Han Shan book is the Bill Porter/Red Pine translation.
Bill
bill
December 16, 2007, 05:38 PMPS> Looks like I must use html to get the formatting correct. When they post these messages, they should parse what is written and stick to the original format. Not that difficult. Ah well, makes it a bit of a challenge to read the poem without punctuation for some.
bill
December 13, 2007, 01:28 AM你们怎么样？
Just a note that this forum is quickly heading to Chinese characters as viewed by poets. And, in particular Ezra Pound. I'm hoping this is not too arcane and that it will drum up some interest. The poets to whom I will refer are interested in writing that maxmimizes our perception what is real as subjective as any discussion of reality might be.
Remember what Sidhartha said (roughly), "When I think fire, my head does not burn." Thoughts separate us from reality.
What I want to examine is how Chinese characters as written minimize this separation. My post on this will be very soon.
我现在很忙!
再见，
Bill