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TSU I ・ SU I
tsu chi ・ u tsu
Glyph elements [ Toggle Font ]
Some suggest「wood, tree with bird plumage」and「wood peckers」refers to the sound of a MALLET made by a WOODPECKER, a bird that nests only in standing but dead trees, normally also full of termites, the woodpecker's favorite snack…and shii mushrooms also only grow on the dead, decaying wood, sprouting from the holes pecked by woodpeckers. Woodpecker plumage is outstanding, normally a stunning combination of bright red, jet black, and snowy white (often with brown, green and yellow plumage, too), and the bird creates unmistakable, loud mallet-like hammering and pounding noises by repeatedly pecking on standing and most often hollow trees in search of insects. Pounding on a long, hollow wooden tube will create a huge ruckus, heard a long distance in a quiet forest, and the bright plumage is easily spotted on a standing dead tree. The shape of the right element itself is similar to a merging of「bipedal」(birds and humans walk upright on two legs without using a tail) and a pictograph of ribs and spine, also meaning VERTEBRAE, as is a standing dead SHII tree with only remnants of broken branches protruding horizontally from the trunk, again resembling a SPINE. The WOODPECKER uses its entire SPINE to forcefully peck like a MALLET into SHII trees.
External source definitions …excluding politically incorrect concepts and other meanings deemed offensive today; may include extended definitions, euphemisms, and mnemonics)
Chinese: spine; a hammer
Japanese EDRDG: oak, mallet
Unihan extended: hammer, mallet; vertebra
Used within names (nanori)
しい
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: 41 entries
Chinese usage: 20 entries
Used in glyphs (or, see also): 22 entries
Related glyphs [ Toggle font ]
- Glyph.06090
- Strokes: 12
- jlpt-N2 grade_08
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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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