9 ms·

I liked the beginning and expected the next word after "mouth" to look almost the same, with a subtle change, which would be a logical extension. But it was qui

I liked the beginning and expected the next word after "mouth" to look almost the same, with a subtle change, which would be a logical extension. But it was quite a jump from a simple square (口) to god-knows-what (食). Also, why 食 is translated as "Eclipse" in Google?

asimjalis 10y ago
Maybe because in the eclipse the moon eats the sun.
- siong1987 10y ago
  you are right: http://dictionary.hantrainerpro.com/chinese-english/translation-yueshi_lunareclip.htm http://dictionary.hantrainerpro.com/chinese-english/translat...
  - andolanra 10y ago
    The link you provided has no information as to whether that's a correct etymology or not, only that 月食 yuèshí is made up of characters 月 yuè 'moon' and 食 shí 'eat'. There are numerous other explanations for why those two characters could be used: for example, perhaps 食 used to have a different meaning which dropped out of common usage, or maybe 月食 used to be written with different characters and people switched to the easier-to-write 食 from a more complicated character, or any of a number of other reasons. I don't know which of these is true, if any of them is. But your link doesn't have enough etymological information to indicate one way or another, either!
- haimez 10y ago
  Thus proving that symbolic meaning applied at the glyph level is too cumbersome to be practical because it requires pure memorization of all possible combinations of glyphs and conjugations thereof.
  - sdrothrock 10y ago
    Thus proving that the alphabet is too cumbersome to be practical because it requires the pure memorization of all possible combinations of letters, with the lengths of such combinations becoming longer and longer as words are added to vocabulary.
    - madeofpalk 10y ago
      Eh. It's a "leaky abstraction". Makes things easier, until it doesn't. Much lik3 "I before E, except after C"
      - sdrothrock 10y ago
        The primary problem with people who don't know Japanese or Chinese arguing against kanji/hanji is that they use very loose comparisons that they think are 1:1. For example, when you write "inconceivable," you're not regurgitating every single letter in a line from memory. You probably remember the prefix "in," "conceive," and you know "able." You probably also know the common patterns "cei" or "eive" or "con," so the word "inconceivable" really isn't as complex as the initial length makes it look, as long as you know the blocks. Kanji/hanzi are the same way -- they look complex and inscrutable to the uneducated eye, but they're all made of common building blocks that make it easier to remember them. After all, human memory works roughly the same way all the world around; people wouldn't be able to memorize thousands of 20-stroke character if they were all completely patternless. The vocabulary utilizing kanji/hanzi works the same way. Someone could look at "inconceivable" and say "well shit, that doesn't make sense! It's long, you'd have to memorize so many letters, and the letters themselves have so many bits! Plus it has 'in' in it, which makes no sense because 'in' commonly means 'inside of something', and 'con' usually means 'to swindle someone'! This alphabet thing is completely useless." It's absurd, reductionist, and a bit offensive.
        Margh 10y ago
        A child/foreigner can point at "inconceivable" and ask: 'what does "in-con-ceiv-able" mean?' as opposed to 'what does "..." mean' A japanese beginner will see 照り焼き and say "uhhhh.. ri..." compare this with seeing テリヤキ
- userbinator 10y ago
  ...and in the Eclipse, the Oracle eats the 日. (https://en.wiktionary.org/wiki/%E5%8F%A3#Etymology https://en.wiktionary.org/wiki/%E5%8F%A3#Etymology and https://en.wiktionary.org/wiki/%E6%97%A5#Etymology https://en.wiktionary.org/wiki/%E6%97%A5#Etymology if you didn't get the admittedly horrible pun.)
gizmo686 10y ago
That is not wrong, but weird to give as a first definition. The word "食" can mean either food or eclipse. In both cases it is read the same way; so I assume this happened because they did not have a symbol for eclipse so decided to use a homophone. http://jisho.org/search/%E9%A3%9F http://jisho.org/search/%E9%A3%9F
- cynix 10y ago
  I thought the original character for eclipse is 蝕, but people got lazy and started using a more common character with the same pronunciation.
deleted 10y ago
[deleted]
zorceta 10y ago
It's not a very good choice to use "食” to represent "eat" here. In modern Chinese we say "吃", and you can see that "吃" has a square part, which is exactly "口". And "食" also means "food", but "吃" doesn't. Also, since ancient Chinese people thought eclipse was caused by a "dog in the sky" eating the moon, it's reasonable for them to use "食" to describe it. But modern Chinese almost always say "月食", meaning eclipse of the moon, to distinguish from eclipse of the sun, so Google Translate did this wrong. It should translate it to "eat" or "food" first.
- gleenn 10y ago
  It's probably because it's a Japanese website and 食 does make sense to represent 'eat' in Japanese.
  - zorceta 10y ago
    True. And it also makes sense in Chinese despite its "ancient" feel. I just didn't realize it's a Japanese website :/
    - imron 10y ago
      Well, it is called Candy Japan.
- chewxy 10y ago
  When I was younger and took chinese lessons, there was a push to use more "official" chinese. We'd be told that in official use "吃" is a verb used by ghosts (which is to say, it's impolite to use 吃, and "食" was to be used by humans. So... eh YMMV. I personally find that elitist though, but then again, in chinese history there was always a distinction between what the commoner spoke (白话文) and what the intellectual elites wrote (文言文) so I'm not surprised that this mentality has continued on EDIT: I'd also like to add that 食物 is food, which translates literally to "eat" and "thing". Put together it means "edible thing", i.e. food. The original meaning of 食 still means, "eat", not "food". It's a modern contraction that "食" means food
shasheene 10y ago
If anyone is interested in this kind of etymology, academic Kenneth Henshall has written 'A Guide To Remembering Japanese Characters' which contains the etymologies for the ~2000 general use Kanji. Over the millennia of evolution of the characters, some characters have multiple disputed etymologies which are still unresolved by the academics who study the history. For the record, 食 is a pictogram of a small amount of food (the "roof" looking thing) stacked on a heavily stylized pictogram of a kind of table or plate (do an image search for 'takatsuki table'). It's claimed the Japanese word for bean 豆, has an older stylization of the same takatsuki table with a little bit of food at the top. From a learning to read and memorization perspective, most people will probably find doing Look/Cover/Write/Check type drills (either manually or with a spaced repetition flashcard program like Anki) much more effective than using mnemonics based on (sometimes very complex) etymology.
- chewxy 10y ago
  The etymology of 食 is a bit more complex than that. It's ancient chinese that combined an upside down mouth: 亼 (best approximation) and a bowl of rice. This is the 甲骨文 version: http://imgur.com/NRBoG7F http://imgur.com/NRBoG7F. Cute eh? It looks like someone nomnomnoming a bowl of rice. EDIT: found another one: http://imgur.com/BsQsNBb http://imgur.com/BsQsNBb
- Al-Khwarizmi 10y ago
  The method of "Tuttle Learning Chinese Characters" ( https://www.amazon.com/Tuttle-Learning-Chinese-Characters-Revolutionary/dp/080483816X https://www.amazon.com/Tuttle-Learning-Chinese-Characters-Re... ) is working very well for me for memorization. It uses mnemonics, but it only loosely follows real etymologys. It diverges to nonsensical, but memorable stories when this will make things easier to remember. It also has mnemonics to remember tone and pronunciation (for Mandarin Chinese only though).
shiro 10y ago
The original character for eclipse was "蝕". We use 食 now in Japan because of some simplification. (But the symbolism of moon eating sun is there, as you see 蝕 has 食 in it.)
- ekianjo 10y ago
  蝕 was still used with this writing in Berserk, though.

asimjalis 10y ago

Maybe because in the eclipse the moon eats the sun.

siong1987 10y ago
you are right: http://dictionary.hantrainerpro.com/chinese-english/translation-yueshi_lunareclip.htm http://dictionary.hantrainerpro.com/chinese-english/translat...
- andolanra 10y ago
  The link you provided has no information as to whether that's a correct etymology or not, only that 月食 yuèshí is made up of characters 月 yuè 'moon' and 食 shí 'eat'. There are numerous other explanations for why those two characters could be used: for example, perhaps 食 used to have a different meaning which dropped out of common usage, or maybe 月食 used to be written with different characters and people switched to the easier-to-write 食 from a more complicated character, or any of a number of other reasons. I don't know which of these is true, if any of them is. But your link doesn't have enough etymological information to indicate one way or another, either!
haimez 10y ago
Thus proving that symbolic meaning applied at the glyph level is too cumbersome to be practical because it requires pure memorization of all possible combinations of glyphs and conjugations thereof.
- sdrothrock 10y ago
  Thus proving that the alphabet is too cumbersome to be practical because it requires the pure memorization of all possible combinations of letters, with the lengths of such combinations becoming longer and longer as words are added to vocabulary.
  - madeofpalk 10y ago
    Eh. It's a "leaky abstraction". Makes things easier, until it doesn't. Much lik3 "I before E, except after C"
    - sdrothrock 10y ago
      The primary problem with people who don't know Japanese or Chinese arguing against kanji/hanji is that they use very loose comparisons that they think are 1:1. For example, when you write "inconceivable," you're not regurgitating every single letter in a line from memory. You probably remember the prefix "in," "conceive," and you know "able." You probably also know the common patterns "cei" or "eive" or "con," so the word "inconceivable" really isn't as complex as the initial length makes it look, as long as you know the blocks. Kanji/hanzi are the same way -- they look complex and inscrutable to the uneducated eye, but they're all made of common building blocks that make it easier to remember them. After all, human memory works roughly the same way all the world around; people wouldn't be able to memorize thousands of 20-stroke character if they were all completely patternless. The vocabulary utilizing kanji/hanzi works the same way. Someone could look at "inconceivable" and say "well shit, that doesn't make sense! It's long, you'd have to memorize so many letters, and the letters themselves have so many bits! Plus it has 'in' in it, which makes no sense because 'in' commonly means 'inside of something', and 'con' usually means 'to swindle someone'! This alphabet thing is completely useless." It's absurd, reductionist, and a bit offensive.
      - Margh 10y ago
        A child/foreigner can point at "inconceivable" and ask: 'what does "in-con-ceiv-able" mean?' as opposed to 'what does "..." mean' A japanese beginner will see 照り焼き and say "uhhhh.. ri..." compare this with seeing テリヤキ
userbinator 10y ago
...and in the Eclipse, the Oracle eats the 日. (https://en.wiktionary.org/wiki/%E5%8F%A3#Etymology https://en.wiktionary.org/wiki/%E5%8F%A3#Etymology and https://en.wiktionary.org/wiki/%E6%97%A5#Etymology https://en.wiktionary.org/wiki/%E6%97%A5#Etymology if you didn't get the admittedly horrible pun.)

gizmo686 10y ago

That is not wrong, but weird to give as a first definition. The word "食" can mean either food or eclipse. In both cases it is read the same way; so I assume this happened because they did not have a symbol for eclipse so decided to use a homophone. http://jisho.org/search/%E9%A3%9F http://jisho.org/search/%E9%A3%9F

cynix 10y ago
I thought the original character for eclipse is 蝕, but people got lazy and started using a more common character with the same pronunciation.

deleted 10y ago

[deleted]

zorceta 10y ago

It's not a very good choice to use "食” to represent "eat" here. In modern Chinese we say "吃", and you can see that "吃" has a square part, which is exactly "口". And "食" also means "food", but "吃" doesn't. Also, since ancient Chinese people thought eclipse was caused by a "dog in the sky" eating the moon, it's reasonable for them to use "食" to describe it. But modern Chinese almost always say "月食", meaning eclipse of the moon, to distinguish from eclipse of the sun, so Google Translate did this wrong. It should translate it to "eat" or "food" first.

gleenn 10y ago
It's probably because it's a Japanese website and 食 does make sense to represent 'eat' in Japanese.
- zorceta 10y ago
  True. And it also makes sense in Chinese despite its "ancient" feel. I just didn't realize it's a Japanese website :/
  - imron 10y ago
    Well, it is called Candy Japan.
chewxy 10y ago
When I was younger and took chinese lessons, there was a push to use more "official" chinese. We'd be told that in official use "吃" is a verb used by ghosts (which is to say, it's impolite to use 吃, and "食" was to be used by humans. So... eh YMMV. I personally find that elitist though, but then again, in chinese history there was always a distinction between what the commoner spoke (白话文) and what the intellectual elites wrote (文言文) so I'm not surprised that this mentality has continued on EDIT: I'd also like to add that 食物 is food, which translates literally to "eat" and "thing". Put together it means "edible thing", i.e. food. The original meaning of 食 still means, "eat", not "food". It's a modern contraction that "食" means food

shasheene 10y ago

If anyone is interested in this kind of etymology, academic Kenneth Henshall has written 'A Guide To Remembering Japanese Characters' which contains the etymologies for the ~2000 general use Kanji. Over the millennia of evolution of the characters, some characters have multiple disputed etymologies which are still unresolved by the academics who study the history. For the record, 食 is a pictogram of a small amount of food (the "roof" looking thing) stacked on a heavily stylized pictogram of a kind of table or plate (do an image search for 'takatsuki table'). It's claimed the Japanese word for bean 豆, has an older stylization of the same takatsuki table with a little bit of food at the top. From a learning to read and memorization perspective, most people will probably find doing Look/Cover/Write/Check type drills (either manually or with a spaced repetition flashcard program like Anki) much more effective than using mnemonics based on (sometimes very complex) etymology.

chewxy 10y ago
The etymology of 食 is a bit more complex than that. It's ancient chinese that combined an upside down mouth: 亼 (best approximation) and a bowl of rice. This is the 甲骨文 version: http://imgur.com/NRBoG7F http://imgur.com/NRBoG7F. Cute eh? It looks like someone nomnomnoming a bowl of rice. EDIT: found another one: http://imgur.com/BsQsNBb http://imgur.com/BsQsNBb
Al-Khwarizmi 10y ago
The method of "Tuttle Learning Chinese Characters" ( https://www.amazon.com/Tuttle-Learning-Chinese-Characters-Revolutionary/dp/080483816X https://www.amazon.com/Tuttle-Learning-Chinese-Characters-Re... ) is working very well for me for memorization. It uses mnemonics, but it only loosely follows real etymologys. It diverges to nonsensical, but memorable stories when this will make things easier to remember. It also has mnemonics to remember tone and pronunciation (for Mandarin Chinese only though).

shiro 10y ago

The original character for eclipse was "蝕". We use 食 now in Japan because of some simplification. (But the symbolism of moon eating sun is there, as you see 蝕 has 食 in it.)

ekianjo 10y ago
蝕 was still used with this writing in Berserk, though.