Long Ao, Feng Zhu, Song Lingshou;
People roll up the good spring.
Xinyuan Taoist left subordinate and book.
Year of the Dragon, let's talk about the Dragon
Author:Jiang Weiqun.
The Year of the Dragon is approaching, and the characters composed of three traditional dragon characters have been searched and become a topic. This Chinese character, which has as many as 48 paintings, is estimated to become the image "endorsement" of the zodiac year in the year of the dragon in 2024.
The Chinese characters are very interesting, and the traditional Chinese characters for dragons are 16 strokes. Xu Shen of the Eastern Han Dynasty collected a total of 9,353 characters in his Shuowen Jie Zi, and another 1,163 "heavy texts" (i.e., variant characters), of which 540 characters were taken as radicals. The dragon character is one of the radicals, and it and the traditional Chinese turtle and 龠 have become the three characters with the most radical strokes in Chinese characters.
The evolution and composition of Chinese characters is a matter of thousands of years, and the scholar Tang Lan said in "Chinese Philology": "There are three kinds of ancient scripts in the world, first, the cuneiform script of the Sumalians and the Babylonians; 2. Pictorial writing of Egypt; 3. Chinese characters. These characters have one thing in common: the pictures have evolved into words, and the oracle bone inscription of the dragon character has a long dragon body in the shape of a dragon.
Chinese characters are gradually perfected and superimposed in real life, and then new Chinese characters are formed and new meanings appear. Such as the fresh character, which is composed of two words, fish and sheep, the writing of the golden text is the upper and lower structure of the sheep on the top and the fish on the bottom, and the left and right structure of the small seal is changed to "fish and sheep". Originally, this "fresh" was the name of a kind of fish, and later generations borrowed the name of the fish to become fresh.
This is not counted, in order to express the extreme freshness, it was added as "three fish", that is, the eagle, which became a variant of fresh. Fun, right?
On the same word, the increment is from one to two, again and again, and again, and the original monomer word is strengthened at once. For example, the word thunder is composed of three thunders to form a word and four thunders to form a word, and the meaning of the word is thunder. This character composed of four thunder characters has a total of 52 strokes, which is almost the largest single character stroke of Chinese characters.
In the Chinese characters for animals, like dragons, there are also many superimposed characters, such as 羴 and 犇. Another example is the horse, the two horse characters are juxtaposed, that is, 騳, which means the appearance of the horse running; There are also three horses combined into one word, one horse character above and two horse characters below, and the meaning of the word in "Shuowen Jie Zi" is all horses.
Dragon is a very important word in Chinese characters, although dragon as a radical has not been derived from many words, "Kangxi Dictionary" dragon only 26 words, "Chinese Dictionary" dragon only 8 words, but the dragon word composition of nearly 500 entries, amazing, right?
Both dragon and tiger have two juxtaposed characters: two traditional Chinese dragon characters are juxtaposed, written as "龖"; If the two words tiger are juxtaposed, that is, the word 虤, as a tiger angry talk. "Kangxi Dictionary" and "Chinese Dictionary" both include these two words, both of which have the meaning of shock and anger, which is the same.
The Chinese Dictionary is known as the dictionary with the most Chinese characters in China, which only includes the word 龖, but there is no 龘. The Kangxi Dictionary gives a special example of a word under the word 龘, that is, "龙行龘龘", which translates into modern language to mean that the flying dragon walks in the sky.
The dragon is a symbol of the emperor, but also a beautiful metaphor for talented people, such as Zhuge Liang is called Wolong, so people like to use the dragon word in the name, and all kinds of utensils also love the dragon word of the crown. In the zodiac, there is a saying that the Year of the Ox and the Horse is good for farming, and there is also a saying that the Year of the Dragon and the Year of the Tiger is a big year. Finally, I want to say that a very rare Chinese character, which has been dormant for thousands of years and has been excavated, is prevalent in contemporary times, and it is worth talking about and thinking about.
At the end of the article, I wish you all good luck in the Year of the Dragon.
Published on February 7, 2024 (Tonight Supplement).