Subverting the Sage

SUBVERTING THE SAGE

Last post I discussed #RU a word used in modern #Chinese to describe #sages and #scholars, particularly #Confucian ones. The word seems to have originally indicated some kind of weather diviner and the change of meaning to scholar means sense when you consider how oracle bone script was used for divination and so required specialists to inscribe the characters.

However the modern form oh yeah someone may say REN includes People in general but ...

Here's RU in its modern form

REN + XU which has YU over ER

Now the next image is my creation. There is currently to my knowledge no such character in Chinese, Japanese Korean or either form of SinoVietnamese. I wish there was so I did some cut and paste and created this.

I'll be making this available on various platform sand I'll also do some colored and textured versions to place on DeviantArt and Patreon.

I'll post the links soon. 

The Strange Sage

#ru #sage #confucianism #hanzi #chineselanguage

Have you ever considered how strange the character for (Confucian) Sage ? Scholar is ?

Here's the modern Form

So terribly masculine Man Radical 9 plus the Weather / Rain radical over R. 126 jokingly known as the beard but functioning as a connective usually combined with other words.

Now the right hand elements of this character is the word XU in modern Pinyin which has several meanings.

Lets look at a couple of older forms ...

and a closeup of that bottom right element  ER 

People say this represents a bearded chin but I keep thinking of water flowing from a spring . Why?

Now bear in mind this is a very OLD word and its meaning could have changed over the centuries.

Lets look at the elements as ideograms rather than phonetics.

Man / person plus weather / rain plus connective/ causal conjunction

Person  needs / instructs / relationship of weather ?

Some kind of priest or weather watcher or a scribe responsible for recording and watching the weather to predict drought flood cycles? 

Remember Chinese has one of the worlds oldest writing systems.

Another Temple word