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4.8: Days

  • Page ID
    89625
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    Notes

    a) It is useful to distinguish simplex characters from compound. The latter contain parts that can themselves be simplex characters: for example, 明 míng ‘bright’ is composed of the two graphs 日 ‘sun’ (or ‘day’) and 月 yuè ‘moon’ (or ‘month’). While more common characters are often simplex, the vast majority are compound. The form of simplex graphs can often be said to be representational and thereby rationalized by non-linguistic reference (eg 日 originated as a representation of the sun, 月 yuè, of the moon). Graphic elements are compounded, however, not to form new representations, but typically, to combine linguistic elements of sound and meaning (cf. Units 2 and 3).

    b) 天 tiān has the root meaning of ‘sky; day’, and it is said to be based on a drawing that represented the sky above the earth. 明 míng, [apparently] composed of the characters for ‘sun’ and ‘moon’, appears in compounds with the meaning ‘bright’, so think of ‘a bright tomorrow’. 今 jīn- and 昨 zuó- are both compound, the latter combining the semantic 日 ‘sun’ with the phonetic 乍 zhà.

    Exercise 3.

    The list of days and dates below [which could be from diary entries] is out of order. Read the entries in numerical order, beginning with the numbers on the left. Though you would normally read the day out as , once you have read it, you can pass it on as information with hào: “Dì-yī, míngtiān wǔyuè shí rì (ie shí hào).”

    七: 今天 四月 二十日
    三: 昨天 九月 十八日
    六: 明天 三月 四日
    二: 昨天 十二月 十七日
    九: 今天 八月 二日
    一: 明天 五月 十日
    四: 今天 九月 二十五日
    五: 明天 十一月 三十日
    八: 昨天 六月 十四日
    十: 今天 二月 九日

     


    This page titled 4.8: Days is shared under a CC BY-NC-SA 4.0 license and was authored, remixed, and/or curated by Julian K. Wheatley (MIT OpenCourseWare) via source content that was edited to the style and standards of the LibreTexts platform.