千字文 / The Thousand Character Classic, part 10

露結爲霜
lù jié wéi shuāng

"Dew crystallizes and becomes frost."


I'm not nearly as clever as I thought I was, but I'm certainly as lazy as I know myself to be. If I'd bothered to read any of the brief introductory material to Paar's edition of the Thousand Character Classic, I'd have seen that it includes a brief summary of the primer, broken down into themes; the first of which is "Heaven, Earth, and Man." Oh well. At least I didn't think I'd discovered something heretofore unknown about a text that's been in use for roughly 1500 years.

Anyway, today's characters continue to deal with nature. 露 skilfully encapsulates the semantic and phonetic aspects embedded in many Chinese characters: the upper part is 雨, "rain" or "precipitation," while the lower is 路, "road," but it's the pronunciation, not the meaning, that this element lends to the entire character. I think I've mentioned before, and I'm sure I'll mention again, that knowing the semantic and phonetic content of both elements is no guarantee of parsing the whole character's meaning, even if in some cases one can do so in reverse.

結 in the second tone, as it's used here, usually means "knot" or "bind," but this can be extended in a broad sense, hence "crystallize." 爲, in addition to being a common and polyvalent character, is also written a couple different ways: 为 in its simplified form, and the traditional variant 為, which I particularly like. My Firefox pop-up Chinese dictionary, the life-savingPerapera, notes that other modern meanings for 霜 include "frosting" and "skin cream." As a result, we have a humorous alternative reading of this entry's 千字文: "Syrup binds and becomes frosting."

We've reached 40/1000 characters! 加油， 看官們!


微臣
史大偉