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Salts are essential for animal life due to their ionization chemical properties, but toxic for nearly all land plants and bacteria. Without some salt animals will die, but ingesting too much will also kill most animals, and both situations may account for「ground, lying prostrate with mouth over dish」as in ingesting an amount within proper limits or you will find yourself laid out on the ground.
SALTS were used to cleanse, dry, and disinfect the flesh seam created by bending over the sole of each foot into a hairpin shape, and it requires little if any imagination to understand how this condition also applies to all the given meanings. Concubines and service providers used salts in the deep skin slits of their bound feet (鹵), a likely source of the English expression meaning to accept the bad along with the good but have some skepticism and reservations,「take it with a grain of salt.」Only a single grain of salt remaining in the flesh seam of a no-longer-integrated foot would cause discomfort to a client. Salts in the deep skin slits of bound feet accomplish two things at once: dry the skin, and disinfect any wounds or straggling bacteria deposited there by dignitaries.
Cattle given unlimited access to large salt licks have been known to ingest quantities sufficient to kill the animals, likely by causing a heart attack due to sodium, potassium or other ion imbalances. Another original glyph was「warning to maintain distance from the saline brain fluids on dinner plate」(鹽). Preserving food with salt is effective because salt kills the bacteria that normally would digest the food:「While people have used canning and artificial refrigeration to preserve food for the last hundred years or so, salt has been the best-known food preservative, especially for meat, for many thousands of years. A very ancient saltworks operation has been discovered at the Poiana Slatinei archaeological site next to a salt spring in Lunca, Neamţ County, Romania. Evidence indicates that Neolithic people of the Precucuteni Culture were boiling the salt-laden spring water through the process of briquetage to extract the salt as far back as 6050 BC. The salt extracted from this operation may have had a direct correlation to the rapid growth of this society's population soon after its initial production began. The harvest of salt from the surface of Xiechi Lake near Yuncheng in Shanxi, China dates back to at least 6000 BC, making it one of the oldest verifiable saltworks」
[ https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Salt 2012-09-09 ]…and that occurred 8,000 years ago or so.
External source definitions …excluding politically incorrect concepts and other meanings deemed offensive today; may include extended definitions, euphemisms, and mnemonics)
Chinese: Japanese variant of 鹽|盐
Japanese EDRDG: salt
Unihan extended: salt
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: 296 entries
Related glyphs [ Toggle font ]
盐Similar glyphs with related meanings: 32 entries
- Glyph.06897
- Strokes: 13
- jlpt-N3 grade_04
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