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. 

Royal wives and concubines - FEI

Fei is a word often translated as Princess but bear in mind it refers to someone who is bound in a relationship to another aristocrat. I rather suspect the radical tang form started with an aspirate p or it was something like that sound in Fuji that occassionally gets transliterated as a H so you see Huzi instead of Fuji in some texts.

Welcome to TechnoZi!

 Are you interested in Han Zi also known as Hanji or Hanja, the set of characters used to write a variety of dialects and languages throughout East and South East Asia and elsewhere around the world?

Chinese, Vietnamese, Cantonese, Japanese, Hokkien, Korean.

Whether you do traditional calligraphy, are learning an Asian language, or do typography in Asian scripts on a computer, I hope you'll join me as I share some of my  researches and experiments.

I am not fully fluent in Chinese or Japanese but that's probably my studies get diverted into pleasurable  minor paths of exploration as I research the meanings of words trying to translate ancient poems.

I also like to use Unihan and SVG to generate characters and then modify them with the computer!

Some times I scan characters and change the BG and add plug-ins and  filters.

This blog will apppear roughly about once a week!