Re:A Magician of Chinese Poetry
by contingencies on Saturday December 10, 2016 @01:10PM
(#13146936)
It's untrue that they have no meaning.
(1) There is the fact that a certain character was chosen at the time, which can be full of spite, praise, ignorance, or other human characteristics;
(2) There is the character's significance in context (often personal names, toponyms and other types of names are appraised upon aesthetics - for instance if one character has 'fire' and one has 'water', or one character has 'culture' and one has 'weaponry', the name has 'balance' and suggests a certain sort of culture/inhabitant/personal character.);
(3) There is a relationship to other words and transliterations of a contemporary period or similar geospatial origin;
(4) There is the body of other uses of that character with which a particular audience may or may not be familiar, the difference between distinct audiences itself being a possible motivator for character choice;
(5) There are multiple potential pronunciations for a character (in any given historical period) which may layer meaning by suggesting other words or meanings;
... and so on. I agree that translation is not as trivial to approach naively as suggested by the parent, but to ascribe no meaning to characters used is equally wrong. As just one example, literally half an hour ago I just spent a few minutes investigating the different historical transliterations for a local toponym... at least three (3) different characters were used for the same sound through the last 1000 years, and to me this merely indicates its foreign linguistic origin (probably an Yi language, which is classified in the Lolo-Burmese branch of the Sino-Tibetan language family, being closer to Tibetan than Chinese).
Tangentially, I am involved in a cross-cultural poetry group in the city I live in China (昆明), and our pictures were recently featured in the local paper. Local people started stopping me on the street! After 15 years, living in China still sometimes makes me feel like some kind of rainbow unicorn exotic curio. Also, one of the most famous poets of the Tang Dynasty, Li Bai, was Kyrgyz.
(1) There is the fact that a certain character was chosen at the time, which can be full of spite, praise, ignorance, or other human characteristics;
(2) There is the character's significance in context (often personal names, toponyms and other types of names are appraised upon aesthetics - for instance if one character has 'fire' and one has 'water', or one character has 'culture' and one has 'weaponry', the name has 'balance' and suggests a certain sort of culture/inhabitant/personal character.);
(3) There is a relationship to other words and transliterations of a contemporary period or similar geospatial origin;
(4) There is the body of other uses of that character with which a particular audience may or may not be familiar, the difference between distinct audiences itself being a possible motivator for character choice;
(5) There are multiple potential pronunciations for a character (in any given historical period) which may layer meaning by suggesting other words or meanings;
... and so on. I agree that translation is not as trivial to approach naively as suggested by the parent, but to ascribe no meaning to characters used is equally wrong. As just one example, literally half an hour ago I just spent a few minutes investigating the different historical transliterations for a local toponym... at least three (3) different characters were used for the same sound through the last 1000 years, and to me this merely indicates its foreign linguistic origin (probably an Yi language, which is classified in the Lolo-Burmese branch of the Sino-Tibetan language family, being closer to Tibetan than Chinese).
Tangentially, I am involved in a cross-cultural poetry group in the city I live in China (昆明), and our pictures were recently featured in the local paper. Local people started stopping me on the street! After 15 years, living in China still sometimes makes me feel like some kind of rainbow unicorn exotic curio. Also, one of the most famous poets of the Tang Dynasty, Li Bai, was Kyrgyz.