I like ants. I also like Chinese. And so I was very happy to discover the Chinese word for ant, pronounced mah-ee:
I show here the traditional Chinese (as opposed to simplified) because I think it looks fancier. I like this word because it is rich in meaning, and revels much truth about our sisters in the wild. The first character (pinyin ma, third tone) contains two parts. On the left is chong, the generic character for insect. And, as my uncle pointed out to me, it kind of looks like one:
The second part is ma, the character for horse. This reflects well the power of ants, as well as their innate hard-working attitude (that’s why I always say how much antpower my car gets).
The second character (pinyin yi, third tone) again has chong, because an ant is twice the insect a ladybug could ever hope to be. The character on the right, however, rings with the truest meaning of all. This character, yi, means justice, or righteousness. Amen! It turns out that the Chinese preempted the Proverb, “Go to the ant, you sluggard; consider its ways and be wise!”
Very interesting insight grasshopper. Brings me back to my days of 日本語
你下次能用中文写博客吗?哈哈
我觉得我不知道够中文,可是我越来越好!
Not to rain on the fun with hanzi parade, but the right-side radicals were pretty clearly chosen for their phonetics not semantics. “It’s a bug whose name sounds like, ‘Horsejustice.’ I know, let’s use the bug radical plus horse radical, then bug plus justice. Genius!”
The tendency for everyone, Chinese, Western, or other, is to read hanzi as if the semantic parts were really important, but honestly most of the time you should just ignore semantics and concentrate on phonetics.
Carl,
Greetings! Did you know that your name is Scandinavian and means “free man”, “man”, or, with Greek roots, “lord”? Anyways, I understand that meaning, intended or otherwise, is often not the focus of learning a word in a language or using a name for identification. But it is certainly still fun to consider them – the Chinese enjoy it, as you mentioned, so you could say this post is in line with Chinese tradition! I certainly hope you don’t see this post as a scholarly exposition on the etymology of Chinese words, or as a “really important” discovery I’ve made about a 3,000+ year-old written language.
My Chinese teacher liked it.
FF
Yeah, sorry. It’s the internet, and the internet is about nitpicking on things. My bad. I guess I’m just overly sensitive to seeing people make arguments about the “hidden meanings” of Chinese characters in open hostility to the obvious phonetic meanings of the characters. When I look at your post again, it seems like you kept on the right side of the line, so I really shouldn’t have said anything.
I see what you mean. I hope that my response wasn’t too, as my brother would put it, “snarky”, although, also like him, I find it hard to resist.
Also, I plan on continuing a string of “Monday Meanings in Mandarin”, and next week the one I have planned is, I think, more of an actual interpretation of the intended meaning of the word. But to see what I mean, you’ll have to check back next week….
FF
[…] Mandarin Meanings Posted on February 14, 2011 by formicidaefantasy| Leave a comment Using last week as a precedent, I’ve decided to write every Monday about my interpretation of an […]
Actually, I think the left ‘part’ of each character acts as a sort of prefix conveying the general meaning or category of the character (an ant is an insect/worm/crawly thing), and the right part of each character are the pronunciation component, and have nothing really to do with the meaning itself.
Sorry, I know someone already commented on that issue now…I do like your analysis, it’s just that sometimes analyses are a bit of a stretch, and that was my impression from your post. Otherwise, I do admire the thought behind all of it and don’t mean to be overly critical. Basically, what Carl just said.
JasonC.,
No offense taken! Apparently I should be a bit more clear about the humorous nature of these sort of posts. Having taken nearly 4 semesters of Chinese (not as much as some, but more than others) I am of course aware that the right side of characters nearly always just indicates pronunciation! My more recent post is more of a real translation, I think.
FF
lolz
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