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
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