Saturday 26 November 2011

SHIKKU HEAT



No prizes for guessing what sort of weather Sydney was having up to a day or so ago and mabye again next week? Let's say I'm tempting to make some revolting puns out of the SinoJapanese ON reading of this character! The seal form shows threads of water dripping.

Thursday 17 November 2011

Slender Gold


Slender Gold is the name of a Chinese Calligraphy style.
The painting and the calligraphy in Slender gold style are by the Song Emperor Hui Zong.

Note the beautiful balance of thick and thin strokes.

If only Hui zong had been as great a statesman and ruler as he was artist!

I wonder if any typographers have used Slender Gold as the basis for a font design yet?

Friday 11 November 2011

Once was a Rainbow


Once was a Rainbow. Yes this Character means rainbow. Modern Asian languages that use Chinese characters generally use variant sof hong/  hung 2 (Unicode 8679) but the older form is this character (Unicode 9713) NI 2 . In SinoJapanese its GEI and also niji. The oldest pronouciation was probably * nghi or ngei as the Cantonese is ngai or ai 4. Hakka is nai. Min nan ge. Korean changes this to yey and Vietnamese to nghi. Like many other classicla older forms its become neglected in favor of characters with less strokes easier to remember and write.

If you look at the seal script its tempting  to think the original sign was read as a rainbow or any multicolored haze or cloud in the sky, the other meaning of the word, being  the child of the sky or rain.

Sunday 6 November 2011

Gou vs Wang

#unihan #chinese #network #wang #gou 


I have often why no one has tried to revive the usage of GOU as a separate character?

GOU U5193 Radical 13 8 strokes is an very old word that originally might something like network framework of connected things, rafters, canals. The original sound was something like *kaung or gau? as the Cantonese is gau, SinoJapanese, Koo, and Hakka and Viet kieu.

Simpler forms win out over complexity regardless of meaning in ideogrammic scripts!


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