Friday, 2 October 2020

蛛 | zhū

In Mandarin Chinese, (Pinyin: zhū 🔊) means “spider”. According to Wiktionary, is a phono-semantic compound of semantic (“insect”) and phonetic (zhū), while Lawrence J. Howell writes in his Etymological Dictionary of Han/Chinese Characters that “the conceptual influence lent here by is uncertain”.

There are not too many compounds of . One of them is 蜘蛛 (zhīzhū 🔊) which is another word for spider. In Chinese, the part is not used on its own; in Japanese, Korean and Vietnamese also means “spider”. So does the reduplicated form, 蛛蛛 (zhūzhu). A compound of with “net”, 蛛网 (zhūwǎng), means “spider web”.

In Japanese, 蜘蛛 is pronounced kumo (🔊).

蜘蛛何と
音を何と鳴く
芭蕉
Kumo nan to oto wo nan to naku aki no kaze
With what voice,
And what song would you sing, spider,
In this autumn breeze?
Bashō

(Translated by R.H. Blyth)

More photos related to spiders, calligraphy and sea glass @ Shutterstock.

Wednesday, 16 September 2020

ⵣ | yaz

, aka yaz or aza, is the thirty-second (and penultimate) letter of the basic Neo-Tifinagh alphabet. It represents the sound /z/. One theory traces the origin of to the ancient Phoenician letter 𐤆 (zayin).

is also used as a symbol of Amazigh (ⴰⵎⴰⵣⵉⵖ) identity and, most famously, appears on Berber flag. (Which, incidentally, looks very much like my alternative flag of Fuerteventura A). Sometimes is interpreted as symbolising “free man”.

Rotate it 90° and you’ll get ♓, the symbol of Pisces. Some historical forms of Chinese character “tree” and Cyrillic letter Ж look very much like . Coincidence? I think yaz.

And what about Guanches, you may ask. is another of Canarian souvenir-shop staples, together with “Guanche sun” and spiral. The inscription on the famous Zanata Stone unearthed in 1992 and dated to between the 5th century BC and the 7th century AD, contains three Tifinagh characters including . However, according to Renata Springer Bunk and Irma Mora Aguiar, the experts in Libyco-Berber scripts from Universidad de La Laguna, this inscription is almost certainly a fake. is a fairly recent innovation, dating from the last two centuries, and is a feature of Tuareg alphabets. This letter is not found among the (much older) Canarian alphabets, such as listed in Libyco-Berber Inscriptions Database (El Hierro, Fuerteventura, Gran Canaria, Lanzarote). Moreover, a part of character of Zanata Stone appears to be made with a metal tool, something that Canarian aborigines did not have. Why this bogus Guanche character has got to symbolise indigenous Canarian culture is anyone’s guess.

More photos related to Guanches, letters and sea glass @ Shutterstock.

Friday, 11 September 2020

꩜ | spiral

Just like the eight-pointed “Guanche sun” (or star), the spiral is something that you’re bound to see wherever you go in Canaries. It is also featured prominently in the art of Canarian artists such as Óscar Domínguez, Martín Chirino and Manolo Millares.

Of course, there is nothing specifically “Guanche” about it: the spiral is one of the most universal symbols. We are surrounded by natural and man-made spirals: callas, cinnamon buns, fern shoots, Romanesco buds, seashells, snails, staircases, sushi rolls, vinyl grooves, violin scrolls, waves and wreaths. The spiral is found in many symbols, including @, lauburu, G-clef and F-clef. In Cham, the character is a punctuation mark for the beginning of a section.

Juan Eduardo Cirlot wrote in his Dictionary of Symbols:

Spiral: A schematic image of the evolution of the universe. It is also a classical form symbolizing the orbit of the moon, and a symbol for growth, related to the Golden Number, arising <...> out of the concept of the rotation of the earth. In the Egyptian system of hieroglyphs the spiral — corresponding to the Hebrew vau — denotes cosmic forms in motion, or the relationship between unity and multiplicity. <...> Be that as it may, the spiral is certainly one of the essential motifs of the symbolism of ornamental art all over the world, either in the simple form of a curve curling up from a given point, or in the shape of scrolls, or sigmas, etc.

More photos related to Guanches, spirals, beads and sea glass @ Shutterstock.

Thursday, 27 August 2020

❂ | Guanche sun

Google Guanche+sun, sol+guanche, sol+canario+simbolo etc. etc. and you’re bound to see this symbol. Come to any souvenir shop in Canaries and you’ll see it there.

I am not sure that it is even a solar symbol, maybe it is a star. It is known though that Guanches worshipped a solar deity named Magec.

I couldn’t find much information about this symbol on the web; it looks like most common “Guanche” design is based on the pintadera no. 3080 in El Museo Canario [M.ª del Carmen Cruz de Mercadal, Teresa Delgado Darias, Javier Velasco Vázquez, Pintaderas de El Museo Canario; El Museo Canario, 2013].

This symbol is based on a regular octagram (Schläfli symbol {8/3}) and not on the Star of Lakshmi (Schläfli symbol {8/2}) and its variants, Rub el Hizb and al-Quds star. However, you can clearly see that the eight intersecting lines of the octagram form the Star of Lakshmi which is completely covered by a circle in the “Guanche sun”.

More photos related to Guanches, sun, stars, octagrams and sea glass @ Shutterstock.

Friday, 21 August 2020

🟐 | al-Quds star

The al-Quds star (Arabic نجمة القدس, najmat al-Quds, “star of Jerusalem”) is an eight-pointed star associated, as its name suggests, with Jerusalem. It is said to be inspired by the octagonal ground-plan of the Dome of the Rock shrine in Jerusalem as well as by the Rub el Hizb symbol ۞.

Siddhartha Mukherjee writes in his illuminating article on Humayun’s mausoleum that

the eight-pointed star has also been observed to have existed in various renditions with civilizations and cultures. <...> The Islamic Najmat-al-Quds and its predecessor the Rub-el-Hizb, however, are two unique variations of the eight-pointed star that inherits at its core a set of overlapping squares and a symbol that can be more strongly and clearly traced to similar Roman-Byzantine designs that existed in the east <than to the star of Ishtar>, especially during Christianity’s early phase. Attested by findings in Akhmim, upper Egypt, by archaeologist Albert Kendrick in 1920, which revealed their existence in Christian graves, dating back to between the 2nd and 4th century A.D. — approximately two hundred years before the advent of Islam.

More photos of stars, octagrams and sea glass @ Shutterstock.

Wednesday, 19 August 2020

Star of Lakshmi

If we remove the little circle from Rub el Hizb ۞, we’ll get the Star of Lakshmi, a symbol representing Ashta Lakshmi (Sanskrit अष्टलक्ष्मी, Aṣṭalakṣmi), the eight manifestations of Lakshmi, the Hindu goddess of wealth.

Is the Star of Lakshmi the ancestor of Rub el Hizb? After all, what we call now “Arabic numerals” were invented in India. The Arabs could well have adopted Star of Lakshmi for their purposes too.

Or these two symbols may have emerged independently. To me, the Star of Lakshmi looks the only elegant way to put one square on top of another.

More photos of stars, octagrams and sea glass @ Shutterstock.

Thursday, 13 August 2020

۞ | Rub el Hizb

The Rub el Hizb (Arabic ربع الحزب‎, rubʿ al-ḥizb) is an Islamic symbol consisting of two overlapping squares with a circle in its centre. The symbol is used in the Qur’an to indicate the end of a chapter.

Rub el Hizb and its variation, the al-Quds star, are featured on a number of flags, coats of arms and emblems. Curiously, or maybe not, the modern coat of arms of Uzbekistan looks very much like the old coat of arms of Uzbek SSR, except the place of hammer and sickle is now taken by much larger Huma bird while the Rub El Hizb replaced the red star . Yet the five-pointed star is not gone: the star and crescent now live within the Rub El Hizb.

More photos of stars, octagrams and sea glass @ Shutterstock.

Friday, 7 August 2020

✴ | star of Ishtar

The eight-pointed Star of Inanna or Star of Ishtar (Arabic: نجمة عشتار , najmat eshtar) is a most common symbol of the Sumerian goddess (of sex, war, justice, and political power, in that order) Inanna and her Semitic equivalent Ishtar/Astarte. Because of the association with the planet Venus, the symbol is also known as the Star of Venus.

More photos of stars and sea glass @ Shutterstock.

Monday, 20 July 2020

想 | xiǎng

In Mandarin Chinese, (Pinyin: xiǎng 🔊) stands for “to think”, “to guess”, “to miss”, “to want”, “to wish for”, “would like”, etc. Thus or 我想 (wǒ xiǎng nǐ) may mean “I miss you” or “I think about you”, just as is the case with . However, there are some subtle differences between the two. For instance, one would use 我想你 (rather than 我思你) to say “I miss you” to a person one is romantically attracted to, perhaps in a hope to hear 我也想你, “I miss you too”.

According to Wiktionary, is a phono-semantic compound of semantic , “heart/mind”, and phonetic (xiāng 🔊) which, in its turn, is an ideogrammic compound of our old friend “tree” and “eye”. So — literally “watching the tree”— is translated as “to see for oneself” or “evaluate”; it also could be used as an adverb meaning “mutually”, “reciprocally”, “towards each other”, “one another”, “together” and suchlike. I, or the folk etymologist in me, would like to think (can I say 我想思?) that brings not just phonetics but also this implicit reciprocity into . On the other hand, is more “cerebral” kind of thinking — remember the “fontanel” hypothesis?

The historical forms of show some variation in relative placement of its three components. In contrast to , which reminds me of a Viking longship, looks like an oared two-masted sailing vessel, maybe a lancaran.

Sure enough, and can be combined in one word, 思想 (sīxiǎng 🔊), “thought” or “idea”. Other compounds of include

  • + = 不想 (bùxiǎng): to not want
  • + = 回想 (huíxiǎng): to recall, to remember
  • “deep” + = 冥想 (míngxiǎng): meditation, to meditate
  • + = 想像 (xiǎngxiàng): to imagine, to picture
  • + + 思想 = 中心思想 (zhōngxīn sīxiǎng): central idea

More photos related to thought, hanzi and calligraphy @ Shutterstock.

Monday, 13 July 2020

石 | shí

In Mandarin Chinese, (Pinyin: shí 🔊) means “stone” or “rock”.

Lawrence J. Howell writes in his Etymological Dictionary of Han/Chinese Characters:

A depiction of a rock or stone beneath a cliff, suggesting a substantial pile of rocks/stones. Sterile/barren is by association (← rocky, barren soil), as is rigid (← rigid objects). Unit of volume is a borrowed meaning.

According to Wiktionary, this hanzi is a pictogram of

a stone beneath a cliff (). The cliff was subsequently distorted into . Alternatively, a cave set into the side of a cliff or mountain.

This latter hypothesis can explain why (“mouth” etc.) is a part of .

Some compounds of include

  • + = 火石 (huǒshí): flint
  • + = 玉石 (yùshí): jade stone; (figuratively) good and bad
  • + + = 白云石 (báiyúnshí): dolomite
  • + = 石子 (shízǐ): pebble
  • + = 石工 (shígōng): stonemason, mason
  • + = 石田 (shítián): (literary) uncultivable land; (literary, figuratively) useless thing
  • + = 石油 (shíyóu 🔊) ): petroleum

More photos related to rocks and stones @ Shutterstock.

Thursday, 9 July 2020

蝶 | dié

In Mandarin Chinese, (Pinyin: dié 🔊 or tiě 🔊) is a word for butterfly.

According to Wiktionary, is a phono-semantic compound of semantic (“insect”) and phonetic which, in turn, is a compound of and . The folk etymologist in me wants to see an insect (i.e. butterfly) flying toward a flower or something, but it seems that the part is indeed purely phonetic: too many words with completely different meanings that include the radical are pronounced dié, for example , , , , ... On the other hand, Lawrence J. Howell in his Etymological Dictionary of Han/Chinese Characters adds a bit more semantics:

is a depiction of three leaves growing from the top of a tree, suggesting slight objects (thin, flat leaves) piled on each other.

And so,

<...> (thin/flat/slight) + insect → (thin-winged) butterfly.

There are not too many compounds of . One of them is 蝴蝶 (húdié 🔊) which is another word for butterfly; the part is not used on its own.

In Japanese, is pronounced chō (🔊). 蝶々さん, Chōchō-san, better known in the West as Cio-Cio-san, is the name of the protagonist of Puccini’s Madama Butterfly, where suffix san is a honorific and 蝶蝶, or 蝶々, chōchō, is just a reduplication of . It still means “butterfly”.

This beautiful haiku by Issa starts and ends with :

が來て
つれて行きけり
庭の
一茶
Chō ga kite tsurete yuki keri niwa no chō
A butterfly came,
And flew off
With a butterfly in the garden.
Issa

(Translated by R.H. Blyth)

More photos related to butterflies and calligraphy @ Shutterstock.

Wednesday, 24 June 2020

蛋 | dàn

In Mandarin Chinese, (Pinyin: dàn 🔊) is a noun for “egg” and, by extention, for any egg-shaped object, such as testicle.

Juan Eduardo Cirlot wrote in his Dictionary of Symbols:

A great many prehistoric tombs in Russia and Sweden have revealed clay eggs which had been left there as emblems of immortality. In the language of Egyptian hieroglyphs, the determinative sign of the egg represents potentiality, the seed of generation, the mystery of life. This meaning persisted among the alchemists, who added explicitly the idea that it was the container for matter and for thought. In this way was the transition effected from the concept of the egg to the Egg of the World, a cosmic symbol which can be found in most symbolic traditions — Indian, Druidic, etc. The vault of space came to be known as an Egg, and this Egg consisted of seven enfolding layers — betokening the seven heavens or spheres of the Greeks. The Chinese believe that the first man had sprung from an egg dropped by Tien from heaven to float upon the primordial waters. The Easter egg is an emblem of immortality which conveys the essence of these beliefs. The golden egg from which Brahma burst forth is equivalent to the Pythagorean circle with a central point (or hole). But it was in Egypt that this symbol most frequently appeared. Egyptian naturalism — the natural curiosity of the Egyptians about the phenomena of life — must have been stimulated by the realization that a secret animal-growth comes about inside the closed shell, whence they derived the idea, by analogy, that hidden things (the occult, or what appears to be non-existent) may actively exist. In the Egyptian Ritual, the universe is termed the ‘egg conceived in the hour of the Great One of the dual force’. The god Ra is displayed resplendent in his egg. An illustration on a papyrus, in the Œdipus Ægyptiacus of Kircher, shows the image of an egg floating above a mummy, signifying hope of life hereafter. The winged globe and the beetle pushing its ball along have similar implications.

Wiktionary says that is a phono-semantic compound of phonetic (yán 🔊, abbreviated to ) and semantic . By now you got used to the fact that the radical can be found in the name of almost every creature that is neither a bird nor a barnyard animal, so why not an egg then. Still, given its cosmological importance, one may wonder why the Chinese did not use a more egg-like symbol for it, say or .

Compounds of include

More photos related to eggs, hanzi and calligraphy @ Shutterstock.

Friday, 12 June 2020

鸟 | niǎo

In Mandarin Chinese, (Pinyin: niǎo 🔊) is a noun for “bird”. You may remember seeing this character as a part of , “chicken”.

Wiktionary says that this word was

originally pronounced with a /t-/ initial <...> In many dialects, it changed to a /n-/ initial to avoid homophony with the vulgar word (diǎo, “penis”), which may ultimately have developed from the sense “bird”. Birds/fowl are characteristically associated with Chinese slangs for genitalia...

is a simplified form of the traditional character which, according to Lawrence J. Howell’s Etymological Dictionary of Han/Chinese Characters, “is a depiction of a bird with a long, curved and rising tail”. Historical forms of this character show great diversity, depicting birds in a variety of positions and orientations, but most of them look to the left.

Compounds of include

In Japanese, is pronounced tori (🔊). Naturally, birds inhabit many a haiku.


道づれにして
枯野かな
千那
Tori ichiwa michizure ni shite kareno kana
A solitary bird
For my companion
Upon the withered moor.
Senna

かたちに影の
腹合せ
眞原
Mizutori ya katachi ni kage no haraawase
The breast
Of the water-fowl
Meets its reflection.
Mahara
來る
音うれしさよ
板びさし
蕪村
Kotori kuru oto ureshisa yo itabisashi
The sounds of small birds
On the pent-roof, —
What a pleasure!
Buson

(All haiku translated by R.H. Blyth)

More photos related to birds and sea glass @ Shutterstock.

Monday, 8 June 2020

🕉 | Auṃ

Auṃ, or Oṃ (🔊), , is the sacred syllable and mantra in Hinduism and Buddhism. According to Wikipedia, Oṃ refers to

Atman (soul, self within) and Brahman (ultimate reality, entirety of the universe, truth, divine, supreme spirit, cosmic principles, knowledge)

as well as to “cosmic sound”, “affirmation to something divine”, “the whole Veda”, “the universe beyond the sun”, or that which is “mysterious and inexhaustible”, or “the infinite language, the infinite knowledge”, or that “with which one is liberated”, or “essence of breath, life, everything that exists”. Although the symbol looks a bit like number 30, I am pretty sure that its true numerical value is 42.

Given this amazing breadth of meaning, the term appears to be of limited usefulness. In the West, the symbol is mostly associated with Hindu temples, Yoga centres and New Agey tattoos.

The symbol is a ligature in Devanagari, combining characters ओ (au) and ँ (). Its expanded version is ओम्. Auṃ is represented as ওঁ in Bengali, ಓಂ in Kannada, ഓം in Malayalam, ଓଁ or ଓ‍ଁ in Odia, in Tamil, and ఓం in Telugu. In traditional Chinese, it is written as (Pinyin: ǎn).

More photos related to symbols and sea glass @ Shutterstock.

Monday, 1 June 2020

牠 | tā

In traditional Mandarin Chinese, (Pinyin: 🔊) is a third-person singular pronoun for animals. So it’s a different “it” from “it”.

, just like and , is a phono-semantic compound, in this case of semantic , a radical form of “ox”, “cow” etc., and phonetic .

is not found in simplified Chinese. Instead, the same is used for all non-human objects, animate or not.

More photos related to animals, hanzi and calligraphy @ Shutterstock.

Saturday, 30 May 2020

它 | tā

‘This, ladies and gentlemen, is the proverbial “it”.’

In Mandarin Chinese, (Pinyin: 🔊) is a third-person singular pronoun for inanimate objects; in simplified Chinese, it’s also a third-person singular pronoun for animals. In any case, in English it’s translated as “it”.

According to Wiktionary, its original meaning was “a snake”, which, as we know, now is taken over by :

The character was later borrowed for the then-homophonous third-person pronoun (“he/she/it”). Today () is used for male or gender-unspecified “he” and () for “she”.

More photos related to hanzi and calligraphy @ Shutterstock.

Tuesday, 26 May 2020

手 | shǒu

In Mandarin Chinese, (Pinyin: shǒu 🔊) means “hand”. It also has a number of derived meanings such as “handy”, “portable”, “handwritten”, or used as a suffix to create names of specialists or experts in something.

Lawrence J. Howell writes in his Etymological Dictionary of Han/Chinese Characters:

A depiction of a hand showing the five fingers in a curved, gripping position. Extended meanings include arm; paw; foreleg; a handle; helper; a means; technique; (in board games) a move; a type; a direction; and handwriting.

Ponte Ryūrui notes:

Although the modern form of the character may be somewhat misleading (6 fingers), the “hand” radical still resembles the ancient pictographs. <...> The upper stroke in standard script is the result of aesthetical modification made to the first stroke in the cursive hand which imitates the “middle finger”.

Compounds of include

  • + = 手工 (shǒugōng 🔊): handwork; manually
  • + = 水手 (shuǐshǒu 🔊): saylor
  • + = 一手 (yīshǒu): single-handedly; proficiency, skill
  • + = 好手 (hǎoshǒu): expert, professional
  • + = 生手 (shēngshǒu): novice, new to a job
  • + = 国手 (guóshǒu): national champion, grand master
  • + = 出手 (chūshǒu): to sell (goods); to spend (money)
  • + = 入手 (rùshǒu): to start with, to begin with; to buy, to obtain

In Japanese, can be pronounced as te 🔊, as in 空手 karate 🔊, or shu, as in 選手 senshu 🔊 “player”.

に戻る
鷹の眼に
大魯
Te ni modoru taka no manako ni irihi kana
The sun,
In the eye of the falcon
That returned to my hand.
Tairo

Japanese has different logic (from that of Chinese), and in some compounds of you may hear neither te nor shu. For instance, 上手 “skillful” or “good at” is pronounced jōzu but 下手 “unskilled” or “bad at” is pronounced heta:

世の
なくさへも
一茶
Yo no naka wa naku mushi sae mo jōzu heta
Even among insects, in this world,
Some are good at singing,
Some bad.
Issa

(All haiku translated by R.H. Blyth)

More photos related to hands, beads, hanzi and calligraphy @ Shutterstock.

Saturday, 23 May 2020

思 | sī

In Mandarin Chinese, (Pinyin: 🔊) has several meanings related to our mental activity. It could be a verb for “to think”, “to miss”, “to yearn for”, “to hope”, “to wish”, “to lament” or “to grieve for”; or a noun for “thought”, “idea”, “feeling” or “mood”. So or 我思 (wǒ sī nǐ) may mean “I miss you” or “I think about you”. Thus Cartesian Cogito, ergo sum, translated to Chinese as 我思故我在, acquires a wonderful polysemy: not just “I think therefore I am” but also “I hope therefore I am”, “I yearn therefore I am” and even “I grieve therefore I am” — all are aspects of human existence.

As you can see, is made of “field” on top of , “heart/mind”. But why “field”? According to Wiktionary, the original form of this character was , a phono-semantic, or maybe also ideogrammic, compound of “fontanel” and “heart”. Then was “corrupted” into the unrelated . The Uncle Hanzi’s page shows that this “corruption” was no more than a 45° rotation of the “cross in a box”; there’s much more variation in the shape of the “heart”.

Lawrence J. Howell writes in his Etymological Dictionary of Han/Chinese Characters:

The relevant oracle bone form of this character shows that the top element was originally not field but a depiction of a profusion of fine bones in fontanels, open spaces in an infant’s skull over which the skull bones eventually fuse <...> adds heart/emotions → finely detailed thoughts → think; consider; believebe sunk in thought.
Etymology aside, I prefer to think of as a ship with a square sail and oars, because to think is to sail.

Compounds of include

  • + = 三思 (sānsī): to think twice (literally, “think thrice”)
  • + = 不思 (bùsī): to not take into consideration
  • + = 思春 (sīchūn): to have thoughts of love
  • + = 思力 (sīlì): power of thought, intellect
  • + “country”, “village” = 思乡 (sīxiāng): to be homesick
In Japanese, (omu) seems to only have one meaning, “to think”.

柿に
奈良の旅籠の
の顔
子規
Kaki ni omou Nara no hatago no gejo no kao
The persimmons make me think
Of the face of a servant
At an inn of Nara.
々に
菊にはん
はれん
子規
Nen nen ni kiku ni omowan omowaren
Every year
Thinking of the chrysanthemums,
Being thought of by them.
Shiki

(All haiku translated by R.H. Blyth)

More photos related to thought, hanzi and calligraphy @ Shutterstock.