Shi Jing, The Book of Odes: Lessons from the states, Odes Of Bei

[x_los]

This is a longer chapter than the previous two, and people are still catching up with the last two chapters/acclimating to the format. Thus we'll only do one chapter this week.

I'm going to post this week's poem translations in the body of the discussion to make commenting a bit easier. 

Get your 'odes of bae' jokes out early, before the rush.

Comments

Re: 30. 終風 - Zhong Feng

[superborb]

So the majority of Chinese characters are semantic-phonetic compounds or pictophonetic compounds: the semantic component (the radical) indications something about its meaning, while the phonetic component gives a clue about its pronunciation (sometimes due to sound changes, the phonetic component is 0% useful, but it's usually like, rhyming or vaguely related).

If we take the examples of 曀 (yi4, obscure, sun hidden by clouds) -- the radical means sun, and the phonetic component sounds like yi1 (though it's not really used anymore; it mostly exists as a fancy way to write "one" for financial stuff); 嚏 (ti4, sneeze) -- the radical means mouth, and the phonetic component is zhi4, which I guess rhymes.

Anyway, if you take two words that have the same phonetic component, there's a reasonable chance they sound similar?

Re: 30. 終風 - Zhong Feng

[aeriallon]

This is blowing my tiny mind. I should say that I'm an American poet who is enrolled in beginning Chinese but I clearly know nothing about orthography or how the semantic and phonetic interact. This information is like water on my dusty dry brain and I'm so so grateful for your generosity with this knowledge. <3

PS x_los THIS IS WHY I'M HERE