Comment by 1-more
4 years ago
Oooh that sounds fascinating. Any examples of that that spring to mind? Is the pronunciation (or a reasonable representation thereof) already recorded in the Unicode standard or is that also a bit of free-jazz?
4 years ago
Oooh that sounds fascinating. Any examples of that that spring to mind? Is the pronunciation (or a reasonable representation thereof) already recorded in the Unicode standard or is that also a bit of free-jazz?
An old one but possibly the earliest and most prominent of obsolete Chinese characters being imbued with new (Internet-based) meanings: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Jiong
There's also 奭 https://en.wiktionary.org/wiki/%E5%A5%AD which is occasionally used as a censorship workaround to mock one of Xi Jinping's gaffes in an early 2000's TV interview where he bluffed about being able to carry two hundred "catty" (~100kg)'s worth of wheat on rural mountain roads. The character is composed of two 百 ("hundred") and one 人 ("human/person/people") which is a pitoral euphemism to that line he said on TV. I can't find any sources about this one that's in English so please bear with my half-assed explanation.
Both cases are fascinating, thank you!! Side note: of course 奭 is pronounced shi. I only know a bare minimum about Chinese but when in doubt: it's pronounced "shi" (with some license regarding tone). https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lion-Eating_Poet_in_the_Stone_...
I don’t recall specific examples, but as of today, there are quite a lot of Cantonese “words” that don’t have a commonly accepted corresponding character. There’s an unofficial list of word-pronunciation-character mappings, probably this list (https://docs.google.com/spreadsheets/d/1W8Ca3U0YfN-LtZxT1otV...). Some of the character mappings have historical precedent, but a few are probably just adopted in the way I mentioned. It’s quite fascinating even to me (as a native speaker) that some common spoken words have absolutely no standard (or even non standard) way to write down as text.
The unihan database records pronunciations as well but I don’t think anyone takes it seriously. I’m not aware of any software that “prescribes” specific meaning or pronunciations to characters, so basically if you want you can pick a character and assign it a meaning and convince everyone else to use it. For languages that don’t have a fully standardized writing system , it’s something you can do and people have done it. (There’s also a bunch of people trying to convince people to not use the defacto standardized characters in favor of archaic ones that they claim are more “authentic”… but that’s a story for another day
The character usually has a radical component which hints at the pronunciation. They or ordered by radical in the standard. So you would go spelunking for a little-used character in the part of the standard which has characters close in meaning or pronunciation to what you are looking for
Or you just make something up. If you’re coining a new character, you probably don’t care about whether the pronunciation is already known.