千字文 / The Thousand Character Classic, part 9

雲騰致雨
yún téng zhì yŭ

"Mounting clouds bring rain."

I'm starting to notice a potential pattern among the topics addressed by the 千字文. So far (which isn't very far- today's four characters make for a total of 36 out of 1000 unique characters), readers have been treated to statements about time and nature, both terrestrial and celestial. Some of these read like simple facts: 天地玄黃, for example. (Though, as previously noted, the "yellow" earth is specific to the part of China where the Thousand Character Classic was probably compiled.) Others, like 律呂調陽, relate to philosophy, which still influences daily life in China. Given the number of characters presented in the book, I imagine the variety of topics will expand, but even at this point the armature upon which the book's value as a primer hangs is visible. Not only are you learning characters, you're learning facts about, and concepts of, the world.

Today's characters fall into this pattern. Paar translates 騰 as "ascend," but among Kroll's definitions I also found "pile up" and "accumulate." On a visual level these work much better, because one can watch clouds amass overhead and bring rain, whereas the creation of clouds (via "ascension" in the water cycle) is less immediate. 致 is used as a sort of catch-all for "cause" or "bring about," as seen in Paar's transliteration, "clouds ascend, cause rain."

More first-millennium education soon. Later, folks!


微臣
史大偉

千字文 / The Thousand Character Classic, part 8

Today's four characters irk me.

律吕調陽
lü4 lü3 tiáo yáng

"Yang and Yin pitch-pipes harmonize together."


First things first. I've gotten good at typing Portuguese diacritical marks, and I'm learning how to type the tone marks for 漢語拼音 Hanyu pinyin , the most common romanization system these days, but I have no clue how to add tone marks over letters like ü. That's why there are numbers next to the pinyin above. Expect this in the future, unless I get around to figuring out the double-diacritical issue.

Second, I don't like my translation of this, and I don't like Paar's, either: "The two sets of tones bring the Yang in harmony with the Yin". One of the alternate English translations he offers is just barely okay: "Music harmonizes the two principles of nature." My problem with all of these is that the first two characters, 律吕, denote two sets of pitch-pipes, the former six of which are yang 陽 and the latter six of which are yin 陰. I don't know shit about musical theory or structure, which makes the division of musical tones into yin and yang (roughly speaking, feminine/masculine, positive/negative, etc.- y'all know the symbol; this is more or less what it represents) even more meaningless to me.

But that's not what really annoys me. The final character is 陽 yang, and to me, if the pitch-pipes being discussed are going to harmonize, then 陰 yin needs to be present as well, but it's not. The yin-yang implied by 律呂 doesn't feel completed, via the verb 調, in 陽 alone. This is the first time I've seen this in the 千字文, and it probably won't be the last. My guess is that one day I'll run across a grammatical or semantic explanation for phrases such as this and all will be made clear, or as clear as classical Chinese gets (which is a somewhat unfair statement, because sometimes you can look at an old Chinese phrase and its meaning falls into place not just immediately, but beautifully).

律 appears in the modern Chinese word 律師, or "lawyer," which has stuck with me for years- when I learned it, I was dating a lawyer, and now I'm married to her.

Speaking of the 太太, I'm off to cook dinner for her. Later, folks!


微臣
史大偉

千字文 / The Thousand Character Classic, part 7

Today's 千字文 characters, like several of their predecessors, deal with time.

閏餘成歲
rùn yú chéng suì

"The extra intercalary month completes the year."

The Chinese traditionally used the lunar calendar, the twelve months of which don't add up to the solar year now in use. In order to make up for this, Paar tells us they added "an extra or intercalary month every 2 or 3 years (22 extra months per 60 yrs., or about 7 per 19 yrs.)" 閏 is also used for intercalary days, though I don't know how those were assigned.

歲, according to A Student's Dictionary of Classical and Medieval Chinese is a year, measured by the movement of Jupiter. It's the character for Jupiter itself, too, but these days Jupiter is usually 木星. 木 is also used for Jupiter in classical Chinese, as one of the five visible planets and part of the 五行 wu xing system. What I typically associate 歲 with is asking someone's age: 你幾歲? I seem to remember that phrasing being only used for kids, though.

The way the characters 餘 and 歲 are written in Paar's Ch'ien Tzu Wen aren't standard, or at least don't look the same as the versions that appear when I type them here or look them up on my phone. This isn't that uncommon, but it can be confusing, and I'm never quite sure which is the preferred version.

That's all for now. 再見！


微臣
史大偉

千字文 / The Thousand Character Classic, part 6

Today's line of the Thousand Character Classic reads:

秋收冬藏
qiū shōu dōng cáng

"Autumn harvest, winter storage."

Alternately, "harvest in autumn, hoard in winter."

I want to focus on the final character, 藏. It's used, with a different pronunciation, in 西藏, Xizang, the Chinese name for Tibet. Taken literally, the characters can mean "Western storehouse," which sounds like a reference to Tibet's long Buddhist history, since 藏 can also mean "Buddhist scripture" (e.g., the Chinese Tripitaka, or collection of Buddhist sutras, is 大藏經). Hence Tibet as "the western depository of Buddhist sutras."

But nope, the etymology is totally different. According to Endymion Wilkinson's monumental Chinese History: A New Manual, the Mongols divided Tibet into three areas: Tsang, U, and Ngari, and "the Zang in Xizang comes from Tsang (short for gTsangbu meaning river), the valley of the upper Yarlung river."

Incidentally, the Dalai Lama's title comes from the Mongolian language, and means "ocean lama."

There's a lesson for anyone studying Chinese- just because something sounds logical (or worse, logical and cool) doesn't mean it's at all accurate.

Later, folks!


微臣
史大偉

千字文 / The Thousand Character Classic, part 5

Today's characters are:

寒來暑往
hán lái shŭ wăng

"Winter cold comes, summer heat goes."


Not a whole lot to this line, really. Together, 往來 can mean "come and go," as both verbs imply movement, and we've already seen that Chinese is fond of using paired nouns or antonyms to create a new word. Actually, "word" isn't quite right; "concept" is more like it. I haven't found 寒 and 暑 used together in such a manner, but their counterparts, 冬 and 夏, are, at least in modern Chinese, where they mean, unsurprisingly, "winter and summer." 春秋, or "spring and autumn," is the more famous seasonal pair: the "Spring and Autumn Annals" supposedly written by 孔子 Confucius about the state of 魯 Lu is the first thing that comes to mind. The phrase is also, as Kroll puts it, a "synecdoche for a year."

寒 and 暑, while signifying winter and summer, can represent their effects (i.e., cold and heat) alone, so another reading of this line is "cold and heat come and go." Either way, the emphasis on cycles and transience is something I've always appreciated about Chinese thought.

再見，看官.


微臣
史大偉

千字文 / The Thousand Character Classic, part 4

The fourth line of the 千字文 reads:

辰宿列張
chén xiŭ liè zhāng

"The stars are aligned, the lunar mansions arranged."

One of the many ways the Chinese traditionally used to tell time was the 地支, or "earthly branches." 辰 is the fifth earthly branch (out of a cycle of twelve, a number that made it useful for tracking months as well as hours). In this instance the character stands in for celestial bodies as a whole, per Kroll, which I've rendered as "stars".

宿 is more commonly pronounced sù, where it can mean "to stay the night," "lodging", or even "the previous day/year." In its alternate pronunciation it's used for "constellation" or "lunar mansion."

列 is used fairly straightforwardly here. 張 is something I don't recall ever using as a verb; it's much more familiar to me as a measure word for flat things, such as sheets of paper, or as one of China's most common family names.

The sidereal nature of this line allows for an alternate, if somewhat incomplete, reading, which as an H.P. Lovecraft fan came to mind almost immediately: "the stars are right." Of course, now I'm wondering what a sinicized Cthulhu mythos (the Chinese transliteration of "Cthulhu" is 克蘇魯, by the way) would look like. The Internet being what it is, I'm sure a cursory search engine query would yield several hours' worth of results, but do I have time for that right now? Eh, who am I kidding- of course I do.

Later, dudes.

微臣
史大偉

千字文 / The Thousand Character Classic, part 3

日月盈昃

rì yuè yíng zè

"The sun and moon wax and wane."

The third quartet of characters in the 千字文 was tricky to understand. 日 and 月 are "sun" and "moon", or "day" and "month". 盈 implies fullness, plenitude, and abundance, and 昃 signifies the period after noon, or, as both Kroll and the 遠東漢英大辭典 (Far East Chinese-English Dictionary) like to put it, when the sun is in the west. Paar calls it "the declining afternoon sun", and the key word here is "declining".

The combination of "full" and "after noon"/"declining" threw me off, though once I read Paar's translation, it made more sense. 盈 functions as a semantic opposite to 昃, even though the connection wasn't immediately clear to me. The topic, 日月, is what makes the characters comprising the comment, 盈, work together in this context.

I don't think 昃 sees much use these days, which is a shame, as I find it evocative. When broken down and reassembled into two separate characters, 仄日, it can mean "setting sun", which is cool, but not the same thing.

Later, folks.

微臣
史大偉

千字文 / The Thousand Character Classic， part 2

Here are the next four characters of the 千字文.

宇宙洪荒
yŭ zhòu hóng huāng

"The universe is vast and desolate."

In modern Chinese 宇宙 means "universe" or "cosmos", and it was used that way in older forms of Chinese as well. On their own, however, the characters 宇 mean "roof", "eaves", or "firmament", while 宙 can signify "ridgepole", "central beam", or, get this, time itself. This latter definition is used by Paar (as "infinite time"), but not the former two. The image of time being the ridgepole holding up the celestial canopy and thereby forming the universe is pleasing in more ways than one.

洪 evokes vastness, but among its other uses are "flooding" or "overflowing", which makes sense given the character's 水 shuĭ water radical. 荒 can involve neglect, overgrowth with weeds, and desolation, but can also mean "expansive", "unrestrained", or "dissolute". (These meanings can be guessed at from the character's components, though I reckon it's easier the other way around, i.e., once you have an idea of what the character means, you can see some of that meaning in the written components.)

Aside from reinforcing the spatial and destructive aspect of 洪, the other uses of 荒 open up some neat alternative readings of this line. This, of course, is both the blessing and curse of classical Chinese: you could read 宇宙洪荒 as "the cosmos overflows with neglect", for example, and while it might not be the most logical or commonly agreed-upon reading, it wouldn't be unequivocally wrong, either.

Man, I haven't given this much thought to Chinese in a while. I'm enjoying it, and I hope you are too, 看官.

微臣
史大偉

千字文, The Thousand Character Classic

 The other day, while indulging in one of the greatest pastimes known to man, i.e., browsing the shelves of a used bookstore*, I ran across a wonderful 1963 edition of the 千字文, or Thousand Character Classic, edited by Francis W. Paar, that features the original Chinese text in several different scripts along with translations in English, French, German, and Latin. The 千字文 is probably the oldest extant primer for learning Chinese characters, and dates back to the sixth century A.D. There are versions available online, including the very same edition at Hathi Trust.

For my own edification, and hopefully that of anyone reading this, I think I'm going to try and post something about each verse of the 千字文 regularly. This version has a page for every four-character verse, which means 250 posts. We'll see how that pans out.

That said, here's the first four characters of the 千字文, AKA the Qiānzìwén or, in the old and aesthetically appealing but otherwise annoying Wade-Giles romanization system, Ch'ien Tzu Wen, along with some brief commentary by yours truly. Any statements that aren't mine are taken from the Paar edition I'm using as a source, and any other sources are noted accordingly. Let's learn Chinese like it's circa 1000 A.D.!

天地元黃
tiān dì yuán huáng

Well, this is a hell of a way to start. I transcribed the characters directly from this book, and 元, according to Paar and Kraal (in the latter's A Student's Dictionary of Classical and Medieval Chinese), is a "taboo-substitute" for 玄, given the latter character's use in the names of 宋 Sòng and 清 Qīng emperors. I wonder how many more substitutions there'll be where the replacement character's meaning bears no resemblance to that of the character it's replacing.

So, returning the line to its original form, we have:

天地玄黃
tiān dì xuán huáng

Or, literally, "heaven earth dark yellow." Since nobody talks like that, let's say "heaven is dark and the earth is yellow." The earth is yellow in this case because much of the soil of northern China is yellow loess.

Kroll notes that 玄黃 is an analogue to 天地, since 天 is 玄 and 地 is 黄. Dark and yellow=heaven and earth.

One down, 249 to go.

微臣
史大偉


*The Portuguese word for a person or shop that deals in used books, alfarrabista, not only has a wonderful ring to it, but, according to the Dicionário Priberam, has its etymological roots in Al-Farabi, a medieval Muslim philosopher and polymath. I dig that.