Login
Welcome! Introduction
Glyphs missing from your font set may appear strange, or not at all. We recommend enabling East Asian language support.
KA N
ko u no to ri
Glyph elements [ Toggle Font ]
A bird with long「crested」head feathers, a HERON, that feeds by thrusting its head and a very narrow, pincer-like bill from side to side as it hunts, perhaps as if it has a「mouth on both sides, left and right.」Herons normally look at prey under water from the left and right before attacking it in order to calculate its position in the water by compensating for the light refraction differences between air and water.「Bitterns are thickset herons…. Their most distinctive feature is the [male's courtship] song in spring—a loud, very deep 'boom' which can be heard for about 5 km from the bird.」
[ https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Eurasian_Bittern 2012-12-29 ] and perhaps the two「orifice」elements suggest this distinguishing courtship feature as booms from multiple birds.
Note that herons fly with their long neck pulled in and not extended. A crane flies with neck extended, and the various glyphs reflect this, respectively.
A heron holds its wings out to form an umbrella-like canopy under which it hunts. Chinese sources also define this glyph as referring to SMALL CAPACITY…the shape of the heron's bill is well adapted as pincers to grasp prey but has a small capacity if used for drinking.
Elements as「underaged prepubescent girl with two small orifices in a mating display」may also fit the bill as referring to SMALL CAPACITY.
A「rowdy sexual predator」will also have only a SMALL CAPACITY to do those deeds, and might be silenced after such an accusation from co-conspirators, and so on.
Modern definitions (that generally disregard history) …excluding politically incorrect concepts and other meanings deemed offensive today; may list only pigeonholed definitions, euphemisms, or meaningless mnemonics)
Chinese: (archaic) stork; heron
Unihan extended: a heron; small cup
EDRDG: heron; small cup
Always keep in mind that these glyphs were originally created by groups of clever old men as vulgar riddles and analogies for their own entertainment
(see 籒 for that)
and represented Chinese society many thousands of years ago, and not as a written or spoken language.
If these glyphs had been intended for language use, the sages could not have possibly designed a worse system.
Is it truly possible that all these glyphs started out as off-color jokes and puzzles? Yes! It is!
Sex had no shame in ancient China. Why would it? And now, there is a cover-up.
No one is suggesting these glyphs depict contemporary life in China, Japan, or anywhere else.
This site describes glyph meanings, not people.
These glyphs however, describe many and various things, including people, long before there were any notions of becoming politically incorrect.
The question to be answered is, should these glyphs continue being used, by anyone, anywhere, for expressing language?
(More...)
Despite how bad the human world is today, do you actually believe that the so-called good old days were any better? Or they could only have been worse?
By the way, with a limited number of the same elements used by the sages again and again to form these glyphs,
you should expect to find the same explanations again and again, as tedious as that may become, and as an inherent trait of any dictionary.
This site explains the dual meanings of glyphs most often ignored by other sources that provide you with only the sanctioned definition, generally.
Primal elements
Used in glyphs (or, see also): 17 entries
Related glyphs [ Toggle font ]
Similar glyphs with related meanings: 21 entries
- Glyph.11427
- Strokes: 18
- old_forms
Agree? Disagree? Express your opinion by posting a comment.
This publication has included material from the MDBG free online English to Chinese dictionary files in accordance with the license provisions of the Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike 3.0 License.
This publication has included material from the JMdict (EDICT, etc.) dictionary files in accordance with the license provisions of the Electronic Dictionaries Research Group.
This publication has included material from the Unicode Character Database. Copyright © 1991-2016 Unicode, Inc. All rights reserved. Distributed under these Terms of Use.