Strange Southern Tigers

 STRANGE SOUTHERN TIGERS

Its the year of the Water Tiger so lets look at the character used to write the word and the word itself.

So why did I know this post strange southern tigers

Experts know or can made a reasonable hypothesis that while a tiger is called HU in Modern Chinese it probably had an older form of ho or hwo 

Tiger is Ho or Hwo in SinoKorean Ko in SinoJapanese and Vietnamese has SinoViet Ho but also Khai 

Cantonese and Hakka have fu 

Thai has khla Burmese kya but older inscriptions have the word as kla and Khmer has klaa 

WE know form changes in other languages an a becoming o is not unusual but while Burmese is a SinoTibetan language Thai has a much looser connection and Khmer and Vietnamese are AustroAsiatic.

So what do the similarities mean?

Let us guess that once upon a time some thousands of years ago there was a word perhaps #khaal or khlaa or kla used to name tigers. Some later languages dropped the L others changed kh to k and then h 

(Historical linguistics yes this is meant to be a very simple explanation for beginners hence the lack of special symbols - I'm trying to "sketch" a general outline) 

So this means three possibilities 

 there was a proto language proceeding SinoTibetan and AustroAsiatic spoken across China and SEasia 

or the speakers of ProtoAustrasiatic and ProtoSinoTibetan lived in communities close enough together to allow regular trading despite the mountainous terrain. 

or that southwards migration of certain groups begun earlier than currently thought and that Austroasiatic languages were spoken in Southern China until a much later date than currently thought

or all three possibilities are linked 

All that possibilities suggested by one word?

possibilities ...

What kind of animal?

WHAT KIND OF ANIMAL IS RADICAL 153?

Copyright Julie Vaux 2015

Truly People I've seen so many different definitions given?

The one constant factor seems to be its use in characters describing small felid or mustelid or viverid predators though some of those species get written with characters using a dog component.

There's probably going to be a PhD thesis granted for some linguist tracing this character in ancient texts and sorting out why and when so many animals ended up having their names  being written with the dog radical instead!

 

What's Green? A Color Test

When you look at the graphic below which color do you think of? Blue or Green? I was looking at how a green blue slip fired at the #bisque stage and started thinking about green and the problem of deciding when a character translates a blue or green.

Let's take the best known character / word / adjective  as the first example since this seems to be one that any #Asian language #SinoJapanese #SinoKorean #sinoVietnamese or #Sinitic dialect  that uses #hanzi derived characters or has loan words from Chinese  (also known as #kanji or #hanja) uses

Copyright Julie Vaux 2015 

and just to complicate things one site said Blue in Korean is paran and Green chorasaek but only gave the Hangul and the one Korean speaker I know said
green is chorak ?  Thank You "K.." for letting me run a quick response test!

If you choose to comment please mention if you were viewing on a mobile or larger screen in case that makes a difference to color perception especially given my use of a  two color gradient fill as part of the test?