How Can a Swimming Fish Be Burned? Unveiling the Journey of Chinese Characters.
Do you like fish?
I like this these creatures not only because I like eating them…oops, not only they live under the water that make them more mysterious but also their looks are all kinds of strange… I mean diverse looks.
In the Shang Dynasty (a China royal dynasty that ruled from 16 to 11 BC), the character of “fish” was “wrote” (depicted) in the shape of a fish — in terms of today’s aesthetics, it looks like a painting by innocent children. What do you think?
Actually, in ancient, people “wrote” characters through some hard tools but definitely not through pencil or ballpoint pen, so that we can see slightly stiff lines in every EARLY EARLY character in bronze tripod or bamboo slip, to write a well-shaped character might be a challenge.
We are already know the shape of the character “魚” (fish), so what happened in its evolution?
Do you see the elegant swaying fish tail? Why the fish tail finally became a fire ( the character “火”, also as known as radical “灬”), did the ocean be burned? Or those ancient people discovered a new species of fish with FIRE TAIL?
No no no, although I wish there was such a special fish, but actually, to simplify text for dissemination seems inevitable.
Imagine this! If you were an engraver who “engrave characters” (or a craftsman who created sacrificial ritual vessels such like bronze tripod), you might have followed the rules to engrave those complex texts initially, but … you know, we all tend to experience burnout, not to mention other factors like the different mediums used for engraving texts, evolutions during dissemination (to other places), or … perhaps someone desired to create a more aesthetically pleasing shape?
We must admit that carving four clear lines is easier than intricately carving a fish tail.
After a long time, the shape “fish” finally became a “魚” text.
In the book “Shuowen Jiezi” (a book to discuss writing and explaining characters), the author Xu Shen (許慎) created “Radical” to classify characters, and “fish” (魚) is also one of a Radical in Chinese characters.
Almost all characters you see with “fish” Radical refer to fish or related to fish, but there are some exceptions, for example, “鯨”, whales. I guess I don’t need explain? Whales are mammals.
If you start to be interested in this Radical, this character, go to find a Chinese dictionary and have a look! “魚”, in tradition case and in Taiwan, we use “ㄩˊ” in “注音符號 (Mandarin Phonetic Symbols, Zhuyin, Bopomofo)” to key the word, and pinyin is “yú”, you can try these both ways to key this character.
By the way, I won’t describe content too complex here, to know Chinese character classification (六書) is interesting for me but it’s really boring to follow the rules. :P
