Li Shu on a painting

I went to a recent book fair a charity sake of used books and found a copy of late 1980s copies of Chinese Literature a magazine you used to see in some libraries or leftwing bookshops. 

I used to buy an issue now n then if I was in the city from one particular ship now closed because I also visited for the chinese art materials and the translations of chinese poetry 

No not Wills Quills at Chatswood but a store down in Sydneys version of Chinatown 

Anyway the mnagazine had an article on a 20th century chinese painter and tbis one i m age caught my eye because it featured the Li Shu script variant of Chinese characters.

The illustration was printed on a rather shiny paper so the image is not perfect.

Hers another image showing most of the painting as illustrated in the magazine. 

I t didnt say whether he used paper or silk.

Huang Qiu Yuan is the painter and the Chinese literature issue was Spring 1987

Sorry if I havnt posted for a while but I want to have something special to share 

Next time probably Haiku again! 

STUDY - XUE

 BEST wishes and blessings for those about to do HSC or other exams !

The Four Seasons

 I'm just bumping and reposting an older work in the hope someone will comment on it? 

#kanji #hanzi #technozi #typography #inkscape

Do you think the colors gradients filters and textures I added reflect the character of the four seasons?

Subvert the Sage Three

 Don't forget to check my JVartndesign Patreon for more Subvert the Sage art you can download !

Subvert the Sage !!!

 Chinese has a character and word RU meaning Confucian scholar or sage.

It seems to me terribly unfair it is no word or character for a learned wise female scholar!

SO I did some cut and paste with nu and the xu part of ru 

creating this 

This of course is not an "Official" character but who knows if enough people start using it ...

Since its International Womans Day this month I'll be doing more new versions on this to share on my Patreon and DeviantArt

Watch for updates !

Ai Haze updating a dew old draft versions

SHU and Nezumi - A story of small animals

#yearoftherat #nezumi #radical208 # kanji #hanzi 

SHU and Nezumi - A story of small animals 

Radical 208 translated as Rat or Mouse is also used to refer to several other species of rodents and insectivores too hence my use of the rainbow filter to reflect this diversity.

This may tell us something about cultural change in ancient China when writing systems were first developed and also that despite legends that Hanzi have changed over the centuries.

Just as some words written with radical 153 also appear written with the dog radical so likewise some animals with names written using SHU also appear with dog used instead.

There are 2 main reasons I can think of for this

Firstly the Dog radical has LESS Strokes - easier to memorize and write

Secondly a change of attitudes towards animals.
With growing urbanization small mammals that might compete with farmers seen as a group of pests.

Squirrels have a Chinese name meaning pine rat songshu

Voles are field rats tianshu

Shrews which are insect are qu with shu as the radical for their character.

Diao (pine) martens have dual forms

Weasels lingyou or qingyou called itachi in Japanese retain their own kanji

Oddly Moles have a hanzi of their own but in SinoJapanese the word is written with 2 kanji.

What do all these have in common apart form being small mammals?

They would mostly be seen as plant eating nuisances or food or fur sources by early farmers.

Squirrel fur can be used for brushes and winter hats.

Voles water or field do look like rats or mice if you only spot them briefly.

Pine martens are small predators also used for fur.

Weasels will try to raid poultry pens.

Moles digging runs can disrupt the planting and plowing of wheat and cereal crops and gardens.

However my first suggestion is probably the most likely though bearing in mind that Chinese has a semantic classifier system classifying animals as large predators dog and dog like, big cat/ tiger, medium size predators, badgers leopards etc, a third category for other small mammals makes sense?

If you have only seen these names listed under the dog radical do check out the entries under radical 208 in various web and print dictionaries.

Orange Technozi

You may remeber I blogged last year on #orange the fruit and the hanzi used to write the word.

I have a new RED BUBBLE design that I'ld appreciate your support of even if its just a RT or other share

Please consider a visit and do feedback? I want your comments as I'm currently (july 2019) stuck in or rather on bed with a bad ankle sprain ...

FOUR PURPLE HANZI and KANJI

Its Jacaranda time in Sydney but Jacaranda is not an Asian Plant.

Its actually an import from South America and yes it is very gorgeously purple an intense hue either dark or light and yes it looks like purple clouds when the trees are blossoming!

So I'm thinking about PURPLE when I look out my window as there are some magnificent trees nearby.

Also I'm thinking about #hanzi and #kanji

The primary word and character for the color purple in East Asian languages that use Sinitic characters or have loan words is surely

however there are a copy of other words 

and also 

finally Japanese poetry often mentions this plant with purple blossoms 

If you k ow of other words for purple please contribute via the comments box.

Asian Inktober - INK

Its #Inktober and what would East Asian paintng and calligraphy without #INK
So as an educational tie-in the a #technozi on INK

Copyright J. Vaux 2018
You can copy and share for educational purposes though

Tachibana "Orange"

Tachibana Orange

#tachibana #citrus #orange #kitsu #mandarin

Modern #Chinese uses this #hanzi to describe Tangerines and Oranges and Mandarins and probably just small oranges in earlier time? 

In #Japanese though the #kanji is Tachibana a subspecies of Citrus.

However in Vietnam if I can trust my dictionaries the archaic form *gwuit developed a semantic split with one word used to describe the citrus fruit we call kumquats and the other pronunciation for mandarin oranges.

Part of the reason are this is the quest for a small edible sweet orange. 

Citrus growers in China and Japan hybridised varieties to create the range of fruits we have today.

Apparently the native Tachibana "mandarin" / orange was grown for its peel and flowers with the peel and rind used for medicines and the flowers for their scent. 

I will be sharing some poems about the scent of orange blossom in the next posts. 

Summer Heat

Two characters for Summer and Summer Heat

Xia Summer

XIA SUMMER

#xia #summer #hanzi #kanji, #inkscape, #unihan, #technozi,

This is two objects overlapping one a lower layer and slightly larger and the top with filters added.

QING BLUE Technozi

#technozi #hanzi #kanji qing blue

While this is usually read as GREEN in Modern Chinese it also means blue and sometimes means blue black hair or fibre which is why specialists refere to it as meaning the Color of Living Things

I am not absolutely certain about the SinoKorean and Koerean reading.

Bear in mind the final N in MIn dialects can be a nasalized vowel 

The double hh represents an aspiration 

SinoJapanese I type a double oo to show a long vowel in case a reader has an older computer not fully Unicode compliant 

I have given this character a green outline to represent the double meaning.

WOLF TECHNOZI

#wolf #unihan #unicode #technozi #asianlanguages #chinese #japanese #hanzi #kanji

I'll be putting up a special technozi on Patreon with a wolf theme hopefully this weekend !

FOX TECHNOZI

Next Sequence for the Year of the Dog  #FOXES #FOX

Starting with this revised #technozi #hanzi #kanji #hanja #unihan

An FULL COLOR Reward will be posted on my  Patreon based on this character !

Sakura Time

#sakura #ying #cherry #hanzi #kanji #unihan

Cherry blossom time !

AI LUV 2018

#ai #love #valentinesday #hanzi #typography

Some East - West fusion !

I'm reworking an older design. Think I should shrink the V?

Julie Vaux work in progress copyright 2018

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.