Sunday, January 16, 2022

千字文 / The Thousand Character Classic, part 23

 推位讓國

 tuī wèi ràng guó

 "abdicate the throne and give up the country"

 

Once again there's an unspoken grammatical element, namely an indication of who's abdicating, which means this can be read as "those who abdicate the throne and give up the country." My copy of the 千字文 has this in the past tense, which is another of those things you have to figure out from context, since there are no particles here indicating time. So who was it that abdicated and gave up the country? We'll find out in the next line. Prepare for more references to people by names by which they're not best known! 

推 is most commonly seen these days on the doors of restaurants and other businesses in China, along with its opposite, 拉. They mean "push" and "pull," respectively. 位 here means "seat" or "position of influence," hence "throne," but it's also a polite way for counting people. Instead of 兩個人, two people, you can say 兩位人.


微臣
史大偉



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