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SHI
Glyph elements [ Toggle Font ]
Drawn formerly with the right element as a「sitting person with no-longer-integrated feet (匕 so popular in dynastic China)」perhaps because pigs lay around often when in domesticated captivity, or perhaps because the animal's cloven, divided-in-the-middle feet uncannily resemble the bound and no-longer-integrated feet of a concubine…or, because the original meaning referred to an OBESE CONCUBINE as an animal kept in a pen for serving into rectum, a habit of male swine that is well-known among their keepers. Recent font modernizations have begun to draw this element as「loose, demented, warped, flappy no-longer-integrated foot」instead of「sitting all the time with no-longer-integrated feet」that reduces the stroke count by one.
External source definitions …excluding politically incorrect concepts and other meanings deemed offensive today; may include extended definitions, euphemisms, and mnemonics)
Chinese: hog; swine
Japanese EDRDG: pig, hog
Unihan extended: a pig, boar
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: 5 entries
Chinese usage: 4 entries
Used in glyphs (or, see also): 112 entries
Related glyphs [ Toggle font ]
Similar glyphs with related meanings: 42 entries
- Glyph.00205
- Strokes: 07 ～ 06
- elements
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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.
