David's Avatar

[Randy W]

ok... to keep Randy reading without interruption, I've changed my Avatar to something even his wife might ask him to now pause for a longing look; Fu - luck.

 

When i was in Nanjing visiting Jesse, I bought a 'Bai Fu' tea pot; there were one hundred characters of Fu written on it.

 

What I show in my avatar now is a sequence from Oracle bone > Bronze Inscription > Seal Character > Traditional Character for Fu.

 

Lest anybody want to point out the left part as meaning (alter) and the right part as phonetic alone (pot); consider that the earliest characters tended to only show the right character and that once there was a compound representation, it was common to also represent them inflected as well, shown below (not uncommon among early characters); Note alter is on right:

 

Oracle Bone:

http://www.chineseetymology.org/CharacterImages/Oracle/J00000/j00200/j00277.gif

 

Bronze:

http://www.chineseetymology.org/CharacterImages/Bronze/B00000/b00100/b00199.gif

 

Seal:

http://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/thumb/e/eb/Seal2.jpg/220px-Seal2.jpg

 

 

Something that may interest you, David - from Wikipedia

Some Chinese linguists have suggested that the Yulin dialect of Cantonese is the best surviving example of what ancient spoken Chinese would have sounded like based on rhyme patterns in Tang dynasty poetry.

 

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Yulin,_Guangxi

[david_dawei]

Something that may interest you, David - from Wikipedia

Some Chinese linguists have suggested that the Yulin dialect of Cantonese is the best surviving example of what ancient spoken Chinese would have sounded like based on rhyme patterns in Tang dynasty poetry.

 

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Yulin,_Guangxi

I might of seen a better connection had they felt a direct connection between guangdong hua and ancient characters since the former (cantonese) has nine tones and apparently the ancient characters rhythm in a way they don't anymore. That would account for unknown patterns in ancient rhythm.

 

I know a lot of Tang poems but I cannot say to have heard the original rhythm. I've not heard of the connection between Tang rhythm and ancient spoken patterns, so it's an interesting indirect connection and thought.

 

thanks for sharing.