Sunday, November 17, 2019

Amazing Chinese Characters (252) Meat - 肉

The shell bone script of character Meat is

which is a Knife


and a vertical line in Knife, something is cut by knife, which is Meat.


The big seal script of Meat is

two lines in knife, more meat.

The small seal script of the character is


similar to its big seal script.

But it is almost same as the small seal script of Moon


It is difficult to distinguish the small seal script Meat from that of Moon.

Next the clerical script for the character is
the knife is a door-like shape, different from clerical script of Knife, or a little bit similarity.

inside there are two 人(Human), top part is extending out. Here 人 should mean something related to body or meat.

which is similar to character Inside (Post 249),


which is only one 人 inside.

Let's see the clerical script of Moon,

significant different from Meat.

The Pinyin for character Meat - 肉 is Rou4.

I have to point out that the similarity of the two characters has great influence on related characters. Most radical 月s do not mean Moon, but Meat or Body Organ or Body related. For example

 肝 - liver;  肥 - fat; 肺 - lung; 肌 - muscle, etc.

We call the radical 月 to be Meat-Moon radical (肉月旁), because it means Meat but it is written as Moon.

Fortunately, the confusions have not caused much problem. People have got used to. The reason may be because people just memorized the characters, don't know and care the original meaning of any character. Is it good or bad?

1 comment:

  1. All my students have studying difficulty can learn Chinese now.
    thank you very much

    ReplyDelete