We've been looking at strange Chinese characters:<\/p>\n
\"Really weird sinographs<\/a>\" (5\/10\/18)<\/p>\n \"Really weird sinographs, part 2<\/a>\" (5\/11\/18)<\/p>\n For a sinograph to be weird, it doesn't need to have 30, 40, 50, or more strokes.\u00a0 In fact, characters with such large numbers of strokes might be quite normal and regular in terms of their construction.\u00a0 What makes a character bizarre is when its parts are thrown together in unexpected ways.\u00a0 On the other hand, characters with only a very small number of strokes might be quite odd.\u00a0 Two of my favorites are the pair \u5b51\u5b53, which are pronounced ji\u00e9ju\u00e9 in Modern Standard Mandarin and together mean \"w(r)iggler; mosquito larva\". When I first encountered <\/span>\u5b51\u5b53 half a century ago, I burst out laughing.\u00a0 Both halves looked as though they were the very common three-stroke character z\u01d0<\/span> \u5b50 (\"child; son; master; seed\"), but written by a drunkard who couldn't get the arms of the child straight, with ji\u00e9 <\/span>\u5b51 <\/span>sagging down on one side and ju\u00e9 <\/span>\u5b53 sagging down on the other side.<\/span><\/p>\n Both <\/span>\u5b51 and \u5b53 are classified under Kangxi radical #39, and both are said to have zero additional strokes.<\/span>\u00a0 Under the same radical and also with zero strokes, there is <\/span>\u5b52, complete with its own Unicode number.\u00a0 Guess what?\u00a0 It's pronounced <\/span>ju\u00e9 and allegedly means \"mosquito larva\", so it's the same thing as <\/span>\u5b53, yet different.\u00a0 Who needs it?\u00a0 Furthermore, I doubt that it has ever in history been used in a sentence by itself to mean \"mosquito larva\".\u00a0 (I'll explain more about that in a moment.)<\/span><\/p>\n If there's a pathetic, useless <\/span>\u5b52 for quaint <\/span>\u5b53, surely <\/span>\u5b51 ought to have a corresponding partner.\u00a0 Well, it does — sort of, but not quite.\u00a0 There's (U+2193C), which you might not be able to see in your browser.\u00a0 It looks just like <\/span>\u5b51, except that the slightly upward slanting horizontal stroke doesn't cross through the vertical axis.\u00a0 Instead, it just stops dead when it hits the vertical axis, so it's not exactly correspondent to <\/span>\u5b52, where the horizontal stroke on the right side also stops dead when it hits the vertical axis, but is level.\u00a0 Nonetheless, we may say that<\/span> (U+2193C) for <\/span>\u5b51 is <\/span>analogous to <\/span>\u5b52 for <\/span>\u5b53 without being exactly correspondent.\u00a0 (N.B.:\u00a0 As it appears in Unihan, the horizontal stroke of <\/span>(U+2193C) is level, but elsewhere [as in zdic<\/a>], it slants upward.) I asked several highly literate native speakers of Mandarin if they were familiar with the characters \u5b51 and \u5b53, their pronunciations ji\u00e9 and ju\u00e9, their meanings separately and together, <\/span>as well as the meaning of the spoken Mandarin word \"<\/span>ji\u00e9ju\u00e9\", and drew a blank on all of these.\u00a0 When I asked them how they would say \"mosquito larva\" in Mandarin, they said something like \"<\/span>w\u00e9nzi y\u00f2uch\u00f3ng <\/span>\u868a\u5b50\u5e7c\u87f2\"<\/span><\/span>, which means exactly that:\u00a0 \"mosquito larva\".\u00a0 When I told them that's what <\/span> ji\u00e9ju\u00e9 <\/span>\u5b51\u5b53 means, they said that they think it must be an ancient, arcane term.<\/span><\/p>\n It's not surprising that literate readers of Modern Chinese texts, even those who have a relatively high degree of proficiency in Literary Sinitic \/ Classical Chinese, would not be familiar with ji\u00e9ju\u00e9 <\/span>\u5b51\u5b53<\/span> since \u5b51 is ranked no. 4691 in a frequency list of 9,933 \"common\" characters<\/a> (total number of characters in the corpus: 193,504,018), while \u5b53 is no. 6370.\u00a0 In a further discussion of the shapes, meanings, and usages of these two characters below, we will see why \u5b51 has a much higher ranking than \u5b53.<\/span><\/p>\n The oldest occurrence of ji\u00e9ju\u00e9 \u5b51\u5b53 that I can find is in an annotation by the Eastern Jin period scholar Guo Pu \u90ed\u749e (276-324) on the \u011ary\u01ce \u723e\u96c5 (Approaching Elegance) (3rd c. BC), the earliest surviving lexicon (perhaps more accurately referred to as a synonymicon) for Chinese, which is especially strong on terms for flora and fauna.\u00a0 Guo Pu's commentaries are a gold mine of local and vernacular terms in the living language of his time.\u00a0 Ji\u00e9ju\u00e9 \u5b51\u5b53 is undoubtedly one such non-literary term, which would account for its minimal transmission across nearly two millennia to the present day.<\/p>\n My intuition is that, like many early disyllabic terms referring to animals, especially insects, the ji\u00e9 \u5b51and ju\u00e9 \u5b53 of \u5b51\u5b53 ji\u00e9ju\u00e9 originally did not mean anything individually.\u00a0 In other words, I think that \u5b51\u5b53 was a disyllabic morpheme.<\/p>\n I further surmise that \u5b51\u5b53 may be the dimidiation of a single word with complex phonology (consonant cluster, etc.), and that it may have a non-Sinitic origin.<\/p>\n Finally, I suspect that the sinographs \u5b51 and \u5b53 were devised via deformation of z\u01d0 \u5b50 (\"child; son; seed\").<\/p>\n What might the original word lying behind Mandarin ji\u00e9ju\u00e9 \u5b51\u5b53 have sounded like?<\/p>\n The Cantonese pronunciation of these two sinographs would be kit3 kyut3.\u00a0 The Middle Sinitic reconstruction by Zhengzhang Shangfang is \/k\u02e0i\u1d07t\u031a\u00a0 k\u0268o\u014bX<\/sup>\/, and his Old Sinitic reconstruction is <\/span>\/*ked\u00a0 k\u02b7o\u014b\u0294|k\u02b7ad\/.\u00a0 It may be noted that the expected MSM reflex of Middle Sinitic <\/span>k\u0268o\u014bX<\/sup><\/span> would be ji\u01d2ng, yielding ji\u00e9ji\u01d2ng instead of the ji\u00e9ju\u00e9 in current use.\u00a0 (Source<\/a> of reconstructions)<\/p>\n Jonathan Smith suggests an association with the Minnan writing\u00a0\u8eca\u86c6 for \"mosquito larva\".\u00a0 The two characters literally mean \"car maggot\".\u00a0 The first character is evidently being used transcriptionally.<\/p>\n Source<\/a><\/p>\n I welcome suggestions from readers about how the Middle Sinitic and Old Sinitic reconstructions might have sounded undimidiatedly and how they may relate to the Minnan pronunciations.<\/p>\n Incidentally, the Cantonese, Minnan, Middle Sinitic, and Old Sinitic for\u00a0z\u01d0<\/span> \u5b50 (\"child; son; seed; master\") are respectively zi2, ch\u00fa \/ ch\u00edr \/ ch\u00ed, \/t\u0361s\u0268X\/, \/*[ts]\u0259\u0294\/, \/*ts\u0259\u0294\/ [Baxter-Sagart]<\/span><\/p>\n Now on to a brief investigation of what \u5b51 and \u5b53 may have meant, if anything, outside of their incorporation in the lexeme <\/span>ji\u00e9ju\u00e9 \u5b51\u5b53 (<\/span>\"w[r]iggler; mosquito larva\").<\/span><\/p>\n It may seem curious that <\/span>ji\u00e9 \u5b51 is listed in Paul Kroll's A Student's Dictionary of Classical and Medieval Chinese<\/i> (Leiden:\u00a0 Brill, 2015), p. 208a, but <\/span>ju\u00e9 \u5b53 is not. Not only is <\/span>ji\u00e9 \u5b51 listed, it receives elaborate treatment:<\/span><\/p>\n 1. by oneself, singly, alone.<\/span><\/p>\n \u00a0\u00a0\u00a0 a. rdup., sole and solitary; also, unique and unmatched, standing out alone; (med.) also, exacting, fastidious and finicky.<\/span><\/p>\n 2. leftover, remainder.<\/span><\/p>\n 3. \u2609 \u621f <\/span>J\u01d0 1, guisarme, halberd. <\/span><\/p>\n The Shu\u014dw\u00e9n Ji\u011bz\u00ec<\/i> <\/a>\u8aaa\u6587\u89e3\u5b57 (Explanation of Characters) (100 AD), the Bible<\/span> of traditional Chinese character studies, states that ji\u00e9 \u5b51 means \"lacking a right arm\" and <\/span>ju\u00e9 \u5b53 means \"lacking a left arm\".\u00a0 I'm dubious.\u00a0 Such overly convenient definitions are all too common in the <\/span>Shu\u014dw\u00e9n<\/i> and in other early lexicographical works for disyllabic morphemes, e.g., q\u00edl\u00edn \u9e92\u9e9f (\"kirin<\/a>\" — allegedly the male and female of this mythical species [I am going to write a major post on this term later on]), f\u00e8nghu\u00e1ng \u9cf3\u51f0 (\"phoenix<\/a>\" — also allegedly the male and female of this mythical species), p\u00edp\u00e1 \u7435\u7436 (\"lute; al-'ud; barbat<\/a>\" — supposedly the upstroke and downstroke used in playing this stringed instrument).<\/p>\n H\u00e0ny\u01d4 d\u00e0 c\u00eddi\u01cen<\/i> \u6f22\u8a9e\u5927\u8a5e\u5178 (The Unabridged Dictionary of Sinitic), 4.175b-177a gives 17 disyllabic word and 1 quadrisyllabic phrase entries beginning with ji\u00e9 \u5b51, most of which can be explained by the meanings in Kroll's Student's Dictionary<\/i> (see the Appendix for additional details)\u00a0 There are no word or phrase entries for <\/span>ju\u00e9 \u5b53 in <\/span>H\u00e0ny\u01d4 d\u00e0 c\u00eddi\u01cen, 4.177a.\u00a0 Some sources say that ju\u00e9 \u5b53 can mean \"short\".<\/span><\/p>\n To conclude, I would like to introduce LL readers to a major lexicographical <\/span>undertaking that they likely never heard of, namely, the Harvard-Yenching Institute Chinese-English Dictionary Project<\/i>.\u00a0 This was to be a mega-dictionary on historical principles.\u00a0 So far as I know, only two fascicles were ever published:\u00a0 39.0.1 (Cambridge, Massachusetts:\u00a0 Harvard University Press, 1953) and 39.0.2-3 <\/span>(Cambridge, Massachusetts:\u00a0 Harvard University Press, 1954) — at least those are the only two fascicles I was able to obtain.\u00a0 I used to joke that, if they ever really did finish this dictionary on the scale of fasc. 39.0.1 and 39.0.2-3, it would have occupied the whole inner reading room of the Harvard-Yenching Library.<\/span><\/p>\n Not to prolong the suspense unduly, 39.0.1 is on <\/span>z\u01d0 \u5b50 (\"child; son; seed\").\u00a0 It has 68 double-columned pages of all known terms and phrases beginning with z\u01d0 \u5b50 (\"child; son; seed\"), plus a 27 page bibliography.\u00a0 This, of course, was in the days before computers, and there wasn't even a typewriter or printing press available to Harvard-Yenching Institute that could handle Chinese characters, so all the thousands upon thousands of sinographs were painstakingly written in by hand (pen and ink).<\/p>\n And 39.0.2-3?\u00a0 It is on none other than ji\u00e9 \u5b51 and <\/span>ju\u00e9 \u5b53!\u00a0 And, believe you me, the coverage is exhaustive.\u00a0 19 double-columned pages, of which 16 are devoted to <\/span>ji\u00e9 \u5b51 and the remainder to <\/span>ju\u00e9 \u5b53, plus a 6 page supplementary bibliography. The treatment in 39.0.2-3 covers graphic variants, phonological variants, and semantic diversities.<\/span><\/p>\n Appendix of paleographical and inscriptional evidence<\/b><\/p>\n (by Matt Anderson)<\/p>\n Your ideas about \u5b51\u5b53 are basically the same as the ones I\u2019ve had. I looked into it a little bit more just now, and the situation is a little messier than I expected (and it\u2019s possible that all instances of \u5b51 aren\u2019t all directly related to each other), but I think there\u2019s good reason to believe that your intuition is at least fundamentally correct.<\/p>\n I can\u2019t find much palaeographical evidence. The only clear example I\u2019ve found is the \u5b53\u7236\u4e59\u7235, a mid-Western Zhou vessel so named because it is inscribed with the graphs \u5b53\u7236\u4e59. So not much to go on there, and not clearly related to any future uses of \u5b51 and \u5b53. Note, too, that it\u2019s ju\u00e9 and not ji\u00e9\u2014otherwise, essentially every use I\u2019ve found of \u5b53 is combined with \u5b51 (or is from a dictionary or something).<\/p>\n There are also seals that references books say include \u5b51 and \u5b53 like Xihui 0468 (\u738b\u5b53) and Xihui 2999 ([\u5182+\u8cac]\u5b51), but in both of those cases, the graphs in question aren\u2019t really \u5b51 and \u5b53 but instead [\u7592+\u5b53] and [\u7592+\u5b51], respectively.<\/p>\n I then looked through the early uses included in Hanyu da cidian. Here\u2019s what I found, in rough chronological order (word followed by rough definition followed by source):<\/p>\n 1. \u5b51\u5b51 outstanding, prominent (\u8a69\u7d93) So what does that leave us? I think the inscriptional evidence mentioned above could easily be unrelated, so I\u2019ll ignore it. Otherwise, \u5b51 is used in reduplicated form to mean \u2018outstanding\u2019 in the Odes, so that sounds like a likely sound borrowing. The Shuo wen definitions can be ignored\u2014Xu Shen needs to define each half of a bisyllabic compound, but there\u2019s no evidence for either of those meanings existing otherwise (at least not until Xu Shen created them). (2) and (5) seem to be the same basic meaning\u2014but the \u907a of \u5b51\u907a already has that meaning on its own\u2014the \u5b51 prefix in the Odes could be used for sound, or it could be related to the (southern?) term that Yang Xiong mentions in the Fangyan with the same meaning\u2026 Or the Fangyan meaning could derive from the Odes usage. (8) could also be related. (4) and (5) also seem possibly related\u2014but the \u5b51 of \u5b51\u7136 could easily be being used for sound alone, with the later Han uses deriving from the Guo yu. That leaves (3), about which I have no idea.<\/p>\n And also (9) of course. My guess (and it\u2019s only a guess), based on the above, is that \u5b51 was used for its sound value and nothing else\u2014from the Shijing through the Han and beyond. When characters were needed to write ji\u00e9ju\u00e9 \u2018mosquito larvae\u2019 (which certainly seems likely to be a borrowing from a non-Sinitic language), whoever created the form just grabbed \u5b51 and added a reversed \u5b51 (\u5b53) to make a phonologically and graphically appropriate written form of mosquito larvae.<\/p>\n But there\u2019s a lot of guesswork going on there.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":" We've been looking at strange Chinese characters: \"Really weird sinographs\" (5\/10\/18) \"Really weird sinographs, part 2\" (5\/11\/18) For a sinograph to be weird, it doesn't need to have 30, 40, 50, or more strokes.\u00a0 In fact, characters with such large numbers of strokes might be quite normal and regular in terms of their construction.\u00a0 What […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":13,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"_exactmetrics_skip_tracking":false,"_exactmetrics_sitenote_active":false,"_exactmetrics_sitenote_note":"","_exactmetrics_sitenote_category":0,"jetpack_post_was_ever_published":false,"_jetpack_newsletter_access":"","_jetpack_dont_email_post_to_subs":false,"_jetpack_newsletter_tier_id":0,"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paywalled_content":false,"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paid_content":false,"footnotes":""},"categories":[194,284,223,275,18],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-38237","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-borrowing","category-epigraphy","category-language-and-biology","category-philology","category-writing-systems"],"jetpack_featured_media_url":"","jetpack_sharing_enabled":true,"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/languagelog.ldc.upenn.edu\/nll\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/38237","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/languagelog.ldc.upenn.edu\/nll\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/languagelog.ldc.upenn.edu\/nll\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/languagelog.ldc.upenn.edu\/nll\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/users\/13"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/languagelog.ldc.upenn.edu\/nll\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=38237"}],"version-history":[{"count":5,"href":"https:\/\/languagelog.ldc.upenn.edu\/nll\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/38237\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":38261,"href":"https:\/\/languagelog.ldc.upenn.edu\/nll\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/38237\/revisions\/38261"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/languagelog.ldc.upenn.edu\/nll\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=38237"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/languagelog.ldc.upenn.edu\/nll\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=38237"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/languagelog.ldc.upenn.edu\/nll\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=38237"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}
\n<\/span> <\/p>\n
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\n2. \u5b51\u907a leftover, trace (\u8a69\u7d93)
\n3. \u5b51 a kind of halberd (\u5de6\u50b3; this is also supposedly defined in the \u65b9\u8a00, but I can only find references saying that it\u2019s in there, not the passage itself in the Fangyan)
\n4. \u5b51\u7136 all, whole (\u570b\u8a9e)
\n5. \u5b51 surplus, remainder (\u65b9\u8a00, the full passage reads \u201c\u5b51\u3001\u85ce\uff0c\u9918\u4e5f\u3002\u5468\u912d\u4e4b\u9593\u66f0\u85ce\uff0c\u6216\u66f0\u5b51\u3002\u9752\u5f90\u695a\u4e4b\u9593\u66f0\u5b51\u3002\u81ea\u95dc\u800c\u897f\u79e6\u6649\u4e4b\u9593\u708a\u85aa\u4e0d\u76e1\u66f0\u85ce\u3002\u201d So that suggests at least something of a southern connection)
\n6. \u5b51\/\u5b53 no right\/left arm (\u8aaa\u6587\u89e3\u5b57)
\n7. \u5b51 single, alone (used by Han writers like \u5f35\u8861 and \u5b54\u878d)
\n8. \u5b51\u76fe small shield for chariot (from \u5b51 \u2018small\u2019? this otherwise doesn\u2019t seem to be attested early) (\u91cb\u540d)
\n9. \u5b51\u5b53 (the earliest appearance I can find of this term is in Guo Pu\u2019s annotation of the Erya\u2014the immediately preceding (and presumably earlier) text says that \u5b51\u5b51 (ji\u00e9ji\u00e9, not ji\u00e9ju\u00e9) is another word for yu\u0101n \u870e and xu\u0101n \u8809 \u2018mosquito larvae\u2019)<\/p>\n