chlorinated alphabet
Posted by Pinyin Info on 01 Sep 2006 at 11:34 pm | Tagged as: Chinese, Chinese characters, Japanese, hanja, kanji, tattoos
Tian at Hanzismatter always manages to find good stuff. But this time, with the help of Alan Siegrist, he’s outdone himself. I’ve got tears streaming down my face because I’ve been laughing so hard at the font of random characters and so-called radicals that some people have apparently been mistaking for a phonetic guide to Chinese characters.
My title for this entry is in reference to the character given when the letter Z is typed: 氯. This is lǜ, which means “chlorine.”
Hah.
There was an interesting mention of this in Peter Hessler’s book Oracle Bones (which I would highly recommend). One person he interviewed who had a website related to Chinese and linguistics kept getting requests for a Chinese “alphabet,” and getting angry responses when he tried to explain that there is no such thing. In the end he just madesomething up, and started “selling” characters online. The site is http://www.logoi.com.
hey, I found this place by ramdon but it’s very interesting for me to reading all of these stuff as a native Chinese. It gives me a very different point of view to see my own language. It’s weird. But it’s a good weird!
Well, Chinese is very fascinating when you really get into it. Sorry it’s a little hard to some of you. =P