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 !

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.