Last time someone said in the comments, to judge whether an article is good or not, it depends on whether there are words that you don't recognize.
How many people like it? Okay, then satisfy everyone, today there is a lot of pinyin!
Today I will talk about the word "mouth". This word looks simple, you can say, you can cry, you can laugh, you can also eat, drink, and taste all the flavors of the world. But words related to the mouth, you really don't have to read.
The old word "cry" looks sad
The oracle bones, gold scripts, and small seals of the mouth are in the same vein and clear at a glance: it is an open mouth.
The above figures are oracle bones, gold scripts, and small seals
"Mouth" is derived from "觜(zī)", which originally refers to the horn-like ear feather clusters on the heads of some owls, and was also used as a variant of "㭰", meaning bird beak. The beak word usually refers specifically to the mouth of birds and animals, and is sometimes borrowed to refer to the human mouth, such as the idiom "no beak", translated into the vernacular is not allowed to interject others.
The word closely related to the mouth is "kiss", and the Shuowen explains "the edge of the mouth", and the edge of the mouth, that is, the lips, so the lips are called "kissing".
Double dog abuse
Image source: TV series "Long Song Line"
There are also words associated with mouth "crying". Babies are born, the first time they breathe on their own, the air in the lungs is discharged and the laryngeal vocal cords are impacted, and they will make a sound similar to crying, so the ancients made a word "croaking and falling to the ground".
The word croak is now often used as an onomatopoeic word for frog chirping, but its original meaning is "child's cry", and when it means this, it is usually pronounced as "grunt".
There is a cute sentence in the "Book of Poetry, Daya Shengmin": "Hou Ji Que Yi", which refers to the first cry of the newborn that the ancestor of the Zhou Dynasty issued.
The baby's "croak" is actually just instinctive, without any emotional color. The real crying emotions are much more complicated. The oracle of the weeping word reads:
This is a human figure with hands raised to the sky, chest beating, left and right mouths, indicating that the person is fiercely expressing pain. Words related to crying are often written next to the mouth, such as howling and choking.
In the life of a person, the most frequent crying is usually childhood. The ancients divided the cries of young children into many categories: whispering is called "jiū (啾(jiū)", loud crying is "喤 (huáng)", if children cry non-stop, it can be called "咺 (xuǎn)" or "唴 (qiàng)", and also called "喑(yīn)". But we use those words less now.
Children grow up and still cry when they are sad. When someone's life is over, relatives cry and friends come to mourn. Although the word condolence is often used together, the meaning is different: condolence is condolence, the object is the family of the deceased, the hanging is the memorial, and the object is the deceased. "Hanging" is actually a popular style of "弔", oracle bone writing:
Refers to a person carrying an arrow with a silk rope tied to it. Some scholars speculate that the word used to denounce the deceased may be related to ancient funeral customs: relatives and friends who guard the funeral will carry bows and arrows with them to drive away birds and animals and protect the remains.
Don't send "hahaha" to the ancients
There is naturally crying and laughter. The original meaning of the child's "child" is "children's laughter", and the early writing method is actually "cough" - after all, laughter comes from the mouth. The word "cough" is commonly pronounced today as ké, meaning "cough".
In ancient times, the word "cough and spit" was also commonly used to indicate the speech of others, and these two words put together are not a bit like he~ tui?! In fact, this word is the meaning of praise, "Zhuangzi Qiushui" has "the sound of coughing and spitting", Li Bai's poem "Concubine Thin Life" describes the beauty Ajiao, but also "cough spit for nine days, with the wind to produce pearls and jade". So, if you want to praise a person, he~tui! (Mistaken)
Nowadays, the commonly used words that represent laughter include onomatopoeia such as "haha", "hey hey", "hehe", "hehe", etc. But this was not the case in ancient times.
The ha character in ancient Chinese contexts denotes an action of drinking water and has nothing to do with laughter. So if you say "hahaha" to the ancients, he might say to you:
Hey the original meaning of the word is not laughter, but silence, in the "History", Jing Ke was reprimanded, and did not care, "hey and fled", this is not to say that he hey hey smirk, but silently fled.
The word hip is not a laugh, it refers to the sound of grief and sighing, in the "History of Lian Po Lin Xiang Ru Lie", "the King of Qin and the group of courtiers look at each other and laugh", even if they laugh, they are also bitter smiles, without any joy.
The original meaning of the word "ha" is rebuke, and the Shuowen regards it as a variant of "ha": "Ha, big words and anger also." The word is also made oh. But in the Tang Dynasty, there was already a use of hehe to express laughter, and Wei Zhuang's "Bodhisattva Man" in "Encountering wine and hehe, life can be geometric" is to persuade people to drink and have fun in time.
Image source: The Legend of the Demon Cat
Therefore, if you travel back to ancient times and want to chat with people with haha, hehe, and hee-hee, I'm afraid it won't work, only hehe can try.
The chicken is called "Oh Oh" and the chicken is "Oh Wow"
In ancient style novels, there are often depictions of women "hissing", which refers to birds, such as the "Book of Poetry" "Hissing its song, asking for its friendship", and the Song Dynasty Mei Yaochen's "Wind Insect Day Bird Sound Hissing". The sound of birdsong is used in people, but it describes the delicate and delicate voice of a woman, such as the "song and laughter" in the Song poem. "Boo-boo" is OK, but you must not "boo-boo".
There are many onomatopoeia words in the mouth, and the calls of different birds will be represented by different words, such as the call of the partridge (yellow oriole) is 喈喈 (jiē), the hiss, the magpie chirp, the warbler 呖呖 (lì), the crane sound is 唳, and the chicken sound is Oh. The sounds of other animals, such as the roar of the beast as "whoosh" and "howl", or the song of a deer as "yo".
Onomatopoeic words not only imitate the sounds of animals, but also imitate the sounds of people calling animals. For example, the sound made by people when training dogs can be called "sǒu", and the "Gong Ji Fu Mastiff" in the "Left Biography" is to give orders to the mastiff dog. The training of dogs also derives the meaning of instigation and propulsion.
The Shuowen also contains the character 喌 (喌(zhōu)," which is the onomatopoeic character for farmers calling chickens. The Cautionary Tale writes that the woman called out in a voice of "喌, 喌, 喌," and then "the flock of chickens arrived." To this day, in some rural areas, farmers still call this way when they feed their chickens.
The ancients told you to eat less
The mouth can not only make sounds, but also eat and drink. Interestingly, the word "eating and drinking" that means eating and drinking is somewhat related to vocal speech: the original meaning of "eating" is not smooth speech, that is, "stuttering", following Liu Bang to fight the world's Zhou Chang, according to the Book of Han, "eating for people", that is, stuttering.
Eating, which means eating, is simplified from the traditional character "喫". "Drinking" also has the meaning of sound and diet, which can refer to shouting loudly and drinking fluids.
The action of eating and drinking is also subdivided: taking food in the mouth to taste the taste is called "chewing", grinding with teeth is called "chewing", if there is a sucking action, it is "sucking" and "sucking". The ancients drank alcohol, but also paid attention to different ways depending on the occasion, sometimes needed "cuì (cuì)", that is, to drink, sometimes only "哜 (jì)", that is, to suck the teeth, shallow taste and stop. In modern times, drinking wine also has a new way of expression:
Eating and drinking naturally has to feel the taste of food. "Taste" is a simple shape-sound word, with oral expression and unseen sound. The Tao Te Ching says that "the five tastes make people happy", which means that eating too much of various tastes will make people lose their sense of taste.
Sometimes, there is neither sound nor food in the mouth, but just a breath, which can be expressed as "blowing". Blowing Word Oracle Writing:
The left is a humanoid with an open mouth, and the right is a mouth, emphasizing exhaling with the mouth. Its synonyms are also "噫", and the Shuowen explains that "full of food and rest", which is to add the exhalation of the premise of "full". The Zhuangzi Qiwu Theory says: "A large piece of qi, its name is the wind." ”
In this way, the wind is actually nature burping, so isn't the sandstorm nature spitting?
Review of past issues
at? Come and see the birds
The rain on the day Qi Guiren was killed was actually called ___
grass
Why don't you like to be called "woman"? I understand you
Traditional characters, simplified characters, who is more noble than whom?
Everyday superstitions? Of course, it depends on Chinese characters (mistakenly)
Dumb Kite? Stupid Huatang? What church?
The ancients wore clothes really wild, a serious ass!
<h1 toutiao-origin="h2" > every word I'm going to say today will make you smell different</h1>
Written by | Zaiyu
WeChat Editor | Xie Shuang
This article was originally published in the May 2019 issue of Naturalist magazine