Grass, Mud, Horse...

[Guest ShaQuaNew]

I asked a couple of my female colleagues whether they had heard about this, and after looking at it, they both blushed and said, "Yes, it's very popular to say that." Just goes to show, that even in China, the kids have ways of communicating with each other...

 

http://edition.cnn.com/video/#/video/world...grass.horse.cnn

[Corbin]

I asked a couple of my female colleagues whether they had heard about this, and after looking at it, they both blushed and said, "Yes, it's very popular to say that." Just goes to show, that even in China, the kids have ways of communicating with each other...

 

http://edition.cnn.com/video/#/video/world...grass.horse.cnn

This kind of communication goes back to the early Christian days even. Ever wonder where the fish symbol for Christians came from? It was a way for a Christian to say they were without saying it to the Romans. They would put it buy their door to let other Christians know that it was a safe house to stay at and that they would be with other Christian followers. The Romans thought it was just fishermen's homes.

[david_dawei]

and in china, it goes back to ancient times...

 

First, there are 'phonetic loan' characters which were used to get the same sound.

 

Second, because of the 'prohibited' character issue; An emperor's name (character) could not be used in written material... so other loan characters were often used instead. If an ancient text already had the character in it, sometimes the texts were 'modernized' with a replacement. This is one way they date some ancient texts.

Edited March 21, 2009 by DavidZixuan (see edit history)