Crazy characters
« previous post | next post »
Taken outside a hotel in Shenzhen:
I told karts deffle, who supplied the photograph, that I would work on deciphering these crazy characters, but he said that some LL readers might like to figure out the puzzles by themselves, so I may have left a few of them unanswered below. Also, I may not have all of them in the right order, and I may have misread a few of the constituent characters of the composite characters. Very tiring to figure all of these out!
mǎshàngyǒufú mǎshàngkāixīn yīmǎdāngxiān mǎdàochénggōng mǎlìshízú yīmǎpíngchuān chēshuǐmǎlóng mǎshàngfācái mǎshàngbàofù mǎlìquánkāi mǎshàngkuàilè mǎniándàjí tiānmǎxíngkōng
馬上有福
馬上開心
一馬當先
馬到成功
馬力十足
一馬平川
車水馬龍
馬上發財
馬上暴富
馬力全開
馬上快樂.
馬年大吉
天馬行空
金馬呈祥
萬馬奔騰
馬上中獎
馬踏春風
金馬送喜
I think I got most of them, and I'm only going to translate the first seven, because the sixth and the seventh were the hardest for me, and I wanted to spare readers suffering from them. Moreover, after you do half a dozen of them, you get the idea..
"May you be blessed immediately."
"May you immediately be happy."
"May you take the lead."
"Achieve immediate success."
"Full of horsepower."
"A wide stretch of flat country."
"The bustling scene of traffic or people flowing through endlessly."
If you spot any interesting ones that i neglected, please don't hesitate to point them out in the comments.
N.B.: This is a Spring Festival Couplet (chūnlián 春聯), complete with:
First Line (Upper Scroll / Shànglián 上联): Placed on the right side of the door. It usually ends with an oblique (third or fourth) tone.
Second Line (Lower Scroll / Xiàlián 下联): Placed on the left side of the door. It often ends with a level (first or second) tone.
Horizontal Scroll (Héngpī 横批): A four-character phrase placed above the door frame that summarizes the theme of the couplet.
Key Features:
Antithetical Structure: The two lines must have the same number of characters and mirror each other in grammar (noun with noun, verb with verb).
Doufang (Dǒufāng 斗方): A square paper, often with the character "fú 福" ("fortune), typically placed upside down on the door or in the middle during Lunar New Year because the word for "upside down" (dào 倒) is a homophone for "to arrive" (dào 到). Therefore, an upside-down 福 (fú dàole 福倒了) sounds like "good fortune has arrived" (fú dàole 福到了), symbolizing luck coming into the home.
Tone Pairing: Traditionally, the last character of the upper scroll is oblique, while the lower is a level tone.
Note: In modern practice, the right-to-left order (starting with the first line on the right) is traditional, but some modern, horizontally-read couplets may follow left-to-right.
While this eccentric Spring Festival Couplet (chūnlián 春聯) has all the formal parts required of one, it cannot subscribe to the tonal and grammatical criteria because each of its sinographs is composed of four constituent characters, i.e., it is quadrisyllabic. The entire chūnlián 春聯 is composed of 18 quadrisyllabic sinographs, hence it has 72 syllables. The four syllables within a given quadrisyllabic sinograph do not follow a set grammatical or tonal pattern or order.
Selected readings
- "English New Year's couplet" (2/8/19)
- "Lunar New Year's greetings, part 2" (2/17/24)
- "Weird characters" (7/7/13)
- "Really weird sinographs, part 2" (5/11/18)
[Thanks to Jing Hu, Zhaofei Chen, Yijie Zhang]