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Giraffe form harem herds when mating as do deer. Giraffe are ruminants and related to deer species, remarkable for both their large height and size as the tallest living land animal species, and for long legs that spread when copulating as depicted in the glyph's elements:
「In countries ranging from Japan, China and Mongolia, through India and Iran and into Greece and Austria, as well as Africa, more than 10 fossil genera have been discovered telling us that by the Miocene epoch (6-23 million years ago) early deer-like giraffids were yet to develop the long neck synonymous with today's giraffe. They were however already tall animals and their heads were adorned with large ossicones (horns made of ossified cartilage, covered in skin or fur), which in later species began to evolve into the more familiar unbranched ossicones of the modern day giraffids.」
[ https://giraffeconservation.org/giraffe_facts.php?pgid=51 2016-01-20 ]
External source definitions …excluding politically incorrect concepts and other meanings deemed offensive today; may include extended definitions, euphemisms, and mnemonics)
Chinese: female unicorn; see 麒麟
Japanese EDRDG: Chinese unicorn, genius, giraffe, bright, shining
Unihan extended: female of Chinese unicorn
Always keep in mind that these glyphs most likely were originally designed by groups of clever old men as vulgar riddles for their own entertainment
(see 籒 for that),
representing Chinese society many thousands of years ago, but intended NOT as a written or spoken language when created.
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, and often with multiple correct answers to each riddle, the same as is true today.
Sex had no shame in ancient China.
Why would it?
But, have there been necessary rewrites and altered explanations of the original elemental meanings over the centuries?
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 seemingly bad our human existence is today, do you actually believe that the so-called good old days were any better?
Or could they 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 lexicon.
This site explains multiple meanings of glyphs ignored or censored by other sources, generally as being too embarrassing to admit today.
Primal elements
Japanese vocabulary: 9 entries
Chinese usage: 27 entries
Related glyphs [ Toggle font ]
Similar glyphs with related meanings: 28 entries
- Glyph.13139
- Strokes: 23 ~ 24
- jlpt-N2 grade_09
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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.