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Indeed, my understanding (which is backed up by your link) is that the hieroglyphs aren't just pictograms that try to draw the meaning but they tend to have par
by maxdamantus 11mo ago
Indeed, my understanding (which is backed up by your link) is that the hieroglyphs aren't just pictograms that try to draw the meaning but they tend to have particular pronunciations, and the selection of glyphs will usually depend on both the sound and the meaning of the word.
I guess Chinese characters work similarly, where eg, each character has a particular sound in Mandarin (with some characters having the same sound), but you spell words using certain characters based on the (sometimes historical) semantic association of components (radicals) within each character.
I'll admit I'm not an expert in either system, so sorry if either description seems like an oversimplification (I'm pretty sure there are exceptions in both cases).
This also leads to one of my favourite tables on Wikipedia [0], showing correspondences between various scripts, including Egyptian hieroglyphs and Arabic/Hebrew. Not all hieroglyphs are included, but you can see that each letter in Arabic/Hebrew ultimately derives from some hieroglyph which would have had a similar sound. The name of the Arabic letter ع sounds the same as the Arabic word for "eye" (ʿayn, عين) and the corresponding hieroglyph also looks like an eye.
[0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Phoenician_alphabet#Table_of_letters https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Phoenician_alphabet#Table_of_l...
- Y_Y 11mo agohttps://thelanguagenerds.com/2023/literal-chinese-translations-of-world-countries-names/ https://thelanguagenerds.com/2023/literal-chinese-translatio... You might then enjoy a list of these "accidental semantics" acquired by foreign country names, which are* rough transliterations, usually from local or English name. I can't find the nice source I originally had, so here's a stochastic patrot's approximation: United States 美国 Měiguó Beautiful Country China 中国 Zhōngguó Middle Country Japan 日本 Rìběn Origin of the Sun Germany 德国 Déguó Virtuous Country India 印度 Yìndù India United Kingdom 英国 Yīngguó Heroic Country France 法国 Fǎguó Law Country Italy 意大利 Yìdàlì Italy Canada 加拿大 Jiānádà Canada South Korea 韩国 Hánguó Han Country * Obviously CJK etc countries already had names
- fluoridation 11mo agoMost of those are just phonetic approximations using convenient characters. I'm not sure I'd say the names have any semantic content. The names for China, Korea, and Japan are the names the ancient Chinese gave them. China is the "middle" or "center" country because it's the country of the people who named it. Japan is the origin of the sun because it's to the East of China. And of course the Han are what Koreans called themselves. Nothing accidental about any of those names.
- Y_Y 11mo agoIndeed, that is what I wrote
- pimlottc 11mo agoSure, but there are multiple characters nearly every sound in Mandarin, I’m sure it’s no accident they ended up with mostly flattering ones.
- pinkmuffinere 11mo ago+1, it's no accident. The most obvious case is with corporate names, which sometimes get carefully analyzed in translation. Coca-Cola is famously translated as 可口可乐 (Ke3 kou3 ke3 le4, numbers indicate tones), with individual characters meaning "can taste can happy", and intuitively meaning something like "drinkable deliciousness"
- 0xis 11mo agoAccording to Baxter & Sagart (2014), the name Hán 韓 *[g]ˤar is from Gaya language word kara.