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
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