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Welcome! Introduction
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RE I
yo wa i ・ to shi
Glyph elements [ Toggle Font ]
Elements as「teeth ordered」do not make much sense, but some have suggested apparently meaning to verify the number of teeth visible within a person's mouth and thereby assess the age of the person: YOUTH, MIDDLE-AGED, OLD AGE…only a general approximation—but what good was that? why not simply look at them?
Recall that not long ago the average human lifespan at birth was only approximately 30 years, and at the time of cave folks, the study of dentistry was still a nascent profession, leading more often to the extraction of a decaying, painful tooth using a rock, rather than drilling and filling the ensuing cavity with silver-mercury amalgam or ceramic bond, so perhaps the method of approximating age by counting teeth was not unrealistic. With no oral hygiene, most folks today might be toothless by age 30. Back then, a 30-year-old woman with no visible means of support and unable to walk, with no teeth to boot, was likely able to find suitable employment almost immediately, and be「ordered to cease movement for jism splats in cavities while assuming lordosis position.」
External source definitions …excluding politically incorrect concepts and other meanings deemed offensive today; may include extended definitions, euphemisms, and mnemonics)
Chinese: age; length of experience, membership etc
Japanese EDRDG: age
Unihan extended: age; years
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
Chinese usage: 31 entries
Related glyphs [ Toggle font ]
Similar glyphs with related meanings: 27 entries
- Glyph.12394
- Strokes: 20
- old_forms
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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.
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