Lai and Natural sounds and ...Chinese Oboes?

I was going thru the dictionary researching details for the next blog and found this character.

Intrigued I checked it out on a few more web lexicons and different hanzi kanji dicitonaries.

AFTER I finished the svg / png I worked out that the lexicons that state the LAI was a pipe with three reeds may have typos. I now suspect three reed is a mistyping for FREE REED.

I don't know what the modern equivalent of a LAI pipe is but its something like a woodwind  with a reed insert at the mouthpiece like the OBOE ? 

There is a Laotian instrument called a KHENE and the word used to describe its modes of sound is LAI.

A loan from  Chinese perhaps?

If anoyone has a picture of a LAI or knows what the modern equivalent is please SHARE!?

GAO

This is GAO. I did this for a friend but thought I'ld share it here too!

Gao means high or tall and some scholars think the seal script form shows a tower or multistorey pavilion.

It's a character simple elegant and easy to remember and also interesting from a historical linguistics viewpoint since its one of those words with cognates in several languages that seem to derive from a Eurasiatic protolanguage. Yes Gao once spelt KAO may be related to HIGH and height.

How well a lot of Western and Germanic and Englsih words that start with H come from words that were centuries or millenia ago pronounced with an initial K. K tends to soften to a H.

A similar phonological change is why some Chinese words like HAN ZI are KANJI in SinoJapanese.

Orchid Sequence four

Orchid  Sequence Four 

Orchid Sequence 3

Orchid Sequence 3

LAN 2 Unihan 862d or f91f bold Cantonese laaan 4  Minnan lan 5 hakka Lan 2 Other dialects lang laz noz nan


SJ RAN fujibaka
SK Lan
SV also Lan


The phonetic for this character has a meaning of blocked gate, fence, or doorscreen, which suggests to me that the Chinese have been growing these as garden or house plants for a very long time.

Orchid Sequence Two

Orchid Sequence Two

 Lan the "Orchid" is a favorite subject for Chinese painters however what the Chinese call LAN or "ORCHID" is usually Cymbidium goeringia or ensifolium or Bletilla Striata which is also called baiji lan.

bletilla striata plant

Just to complicate things Magnolias are "Jade Orchids" in Chinese and in Japanese the word RAN derived from LAN  is used in compounds like Yaburan to refer to Liriope muscari .

Then there's a plant called the Jian or Min Orchid and the Grass orchid .

More soon.

ORCHID SEQUENCE ONE

LAN will be the topic of the next few Technozi blogs.

LAN usually gets translated as ORCHID but the plant the Chinese are usually referring to are cymbidiums like the one above .

The word is used by itself and in compounds to refer to a variety of flowers ranging from from cymbidiums to tropical orchids irises and even magnolias which are called jade orchids!

Here's$ variants of  the character !

I've taken images form several sources and combined them to show you left to right
first the traditional regular script form then a xing shu and below left right you have the cursive form and beside it seal script.

More on Lan orchids and Cymbidiums next time so follow this blog!

Frost from SVG to finished JPG a Technozi

I've mentioned my Technozi art work a few times and here's some examples of the progress

First I look up the Unihan number and then use that in Inkscape to create a black character I can edit.

You use Control U and enter the unihan to generate the character.

Shuang Frost

Now you can change the color or size or add filters in Inkscape or export it as png into Gimp and use other filters. I've elongated this to suggest seal script styles and applied a filter that I think will enhance the final edit in Gimp.

Finally I use Gimp plug ins and filters to create this effect 

I'm very partial to using the Textured filter but there are many others you can experiment with.