hànzì

She’s getting angrier. She spits fastly little, yellow, words. Only the houndred years old tradition of the trade, a promise of a gleeful, smiling multiplication of the Mao stops her from throwing me out of the store. She keeps trying
She speaks faster and faster, reaching the rythm of marching Teracota Army, noise level of Shanghai streets. She tries supreme explenation. She writes it down.

As it could hellp me.

It’s a language of 50k characters, and only several dozens of the syllables, a language of hundreds of homonymes, mastered by each one of five people in the world. Mum says soon we all will have to.

Pictograms, ideograms, compound characters, pictophonograms, lapses, phonetic borrows. They all together. Only two thousands more and I’ll be able to read newspaper.

Characters make characters, characters make words. Two characters might be one word, or two. One character has a lot of meanings, and lot of characters sounds the same. A context precises everything, or nothing.

My favourites are homonymes.

stepdaughter  继女 jìnǚ
adopted daughter 寄女 jìnǚ
prostitute 妓女 jìnǚ

 

xie xie



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