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Zhi (excrescences)
The Chinese term ''zhī'' (芝) commonly means "fungi; mushroom", best exemplified by the medicinal Lingzhi mushroom, but in Daoism it referred to a class of supernatural plant, animal, and mineral substances that were said to confer instantaneous ''xian'' immortality when ingested. In the absence of a semantically better English word, scholars have translated the wide-ranging meaning of ''zhi'' as "excrescences", "exudations", and "cryptogams". Terminology Translating Chinese ''zhi'' (芝) is problematic. For instance, a recent Chinese-English dictionary says: #mushroom, in general … an object shaped like a mushroom, e.g., a chariot canopy. # ingularand in ompounds靈~ ''língzhī'', "numinous mushroom" and 紫~ ''zǐzhī'', "purple mushroom" (''Ganoderma lucidum'', ''G. japonicum''), a type of polypore mushroom that grows on wood, especially rotting logs; particularly striking examples sometimes regarded as auspicious celestial omens for having qualities conducing to long li ... [...More Info...] [...Related Items...] OR: [Wikipedia] [Google] [Baidu] |
Erya
The ''Erya'' or ''Erh-ya'' is the first surviving Chinese dictionary. Bernhard Karlgren (1931:49) concluded that "the major part of its glosses must reasonably date from the 3rd century BC." Title Chinese scholars interpret the first title character ''ěr'' (; "you, your; adverbial suffix") as a phonetic loan character for the homophonous ''ěr'' (; "near; close; approach"), and believe the second ''yǎ'' (; "proper; correct; refined; elegant") refers to words or language.''Shiming (Explanations of Names)'"Explaining the Classics" versio [...More Info...] [...Related Items...] OR: [Wikipedia] [Google] [Baidu] |
Chinese Classics
Chinese classic texts or canonical texts () or simply dianji (典籍) refers to the Chinese texts which originated before the imperial unification by the Qin dynasty in 221 BC, particularly the "Four Books and Five Classics" of the Neo-Confucian tradition, themselves a customary abridgment of the "Thirteen Classics". All of these pre-Qin texts were written in classical Chinese. All three canons are collectively known as the classics ( t , s , ''jīng'', lit. "warp"). The term Chinese classic texts may be broadly used in reference to texts which were written in vernacular Chinese or it may be narrowly used in reference to texts which were written in the classical Chinese which was current until the fall of the last imperial dynasty, the Qing, in 1912. These texts can include ''shi'' (, historical works), ''zi'' (, philosophical works belonging to schools of thought other than the Confucian but also including works on agriculture, medicine, mathematics, astronomy ... [...More Info...] [...Related Items...] OR: [Wikipedia] [Google] [Baidu] |
Angelica Dahurica
''Angelica dahurica'', commonly known as Dahurian angelica, is a wildly grown species of angelica native to Siberia, Russia Far East, Mongolia, Northeastern China, Japan, Korea, and Taiwan. This species tend to grow near river banks, along streams and among rocky shrubs. The root of the plant is widely used for its medicinal properties and is known to contain furanocoumarins and angelicotoxin. ''Angelica dahurica'' is also commonly known as Chinese angelica, the garden angelica, root of the Holy Ghost, and wild angelica, as well as its Chinese name, ''bai zhi'' (白芷). Description It is a perennial plant that grows to about 1–2 meters tall. The plant usually has a brown cylindrical root that grows approximately 2–5 cm thick. The stem is purplish-green in color, ribbed, and it usually ranges from 2–8 cm thick in diameter. First year plants remain in a basal clump about 30 inches high, fuller in rich soil, with complex divided leaves 10-20 inches lo ... [...More Info...] [...Related Items...] OR: [Wikipedia] [Google] [Baidu] |
Chinese Characters
Chinese characters () are logograms developed for the writing of Chinese. In addition, they have been adapted to write other East Asian languages, and remain a key component of the Japanese writing system where they are known as ''kanji''. Chinese characters in South Korea, which are known as ''hanja'', retain significant use in Korean academia to study its documents, history, literature and records. Vietnam once used the '' chữ Hán'' and developed chữ Nôm to write Vietnamese before turning to a romanized alphabet. Chinese characters are the oldest continuously used system of writing in the world. By virtue of their widespread current use throughout East Asia and Southeast Asia, as well as their profound historic use throughout the Sinosphere, Chinese characters are among the most widely adopted writing systems in the world by number of users. The total number of Chinese characters ever to appear in a dictionary is in the tens of thousands, though most are graphic ... [...More Info...] [...Related Items...] OR: [Wikipedia] [Google] [Baidu] |
Old Chinese
Old Chinese, also called Archaic Chinese in older works, is the oldest attested stage of Chinese language, Chinese, and the ancestor of all modern varieties of Chinese. The earliest examples of Chinese are divinatory inscriptions on oracle bones from around 1250 BC, in the late Shang dynasty. Chinese bronze inscriptions, Bronze inscriptions became plentiful during the following Zhou dynasty. The latter part of the Zhou period saw a flowering of literature, including Four Books and Five Classics, classical works such as the ''Analects'', the ''Mencius (book), Mencius'', and the ''Zuo zhuan''. These works served as models for Literary Chinese (or Classical Chinese), which remained the written standard until the early twentieth century, thus preserving the vocabulary and grammar of late Old Chinese. Old Chinese was written with several early forms of Chinese characters, including Oracle bone script, Oracle Bone, Chinese bronze inscriptions, Bronze, and Seal scripts. Throughout ... [...More Info...] [...Related Items...] OR: [Wikipedia] [Google] [Baidu] |
Chinese Bronze Inscriptions
Chinese bronze inscriptions, also commonly referred to as bronze script or bronzeware script, are writing in a variety of Chinese scripts on ritual bronzes such as ''zhōng'' bells and '' dǐng'' tripodal cauldrons from the Shang dynasty (2nd millennium BC) to the Zhou dynasty (11th–3rd century BC) and even later. Early bronze inscriptions were almost always cast (that is, the writing was done with a stylus in the wet clay of the piece-mold from which the bronze was then cast), while later inscriptions were often engraved after the bronze was cast. The bronze inscriptions are one of the earliest scripts in the Chinese family of scripts, preceded by the oracle bone script. Terminology For the early Western Zhou to early Warring States period, the bulk of writing which has been unearthed has been in the form of bronze inscriptions. As a result, it is common to refer to the variety of scripts of this period as "bronze script", even though there is no single such script. The term ... [...More Info...] [...Related Items...] OR: [Wikipedia] [Google] [Baidu] |
Oracle Bone Script
Oracle bone script () is an ancient form of Chinese characters that were engraved on oracle bonesanimal bones or turtle plastrons used in pyromantic divination. Oracle bone script was used in the late 2nd millennium BC, and is the earliest known form of Chinese writing. The vast majority of oracle bone inscriptions, of which about 150,000 pieces have been discovered, were found at the Yinxu site located in Xiaotun Village, Anyang, Henan Province. The latest significant discovery is the Huayuanzhuang storage of 1,608 pieces, 579 of which were inscribed, found near Xiaotun in 1993. They record pyromantic divinations of the last nine kings of the Shang dynasty, beginning with Wu Ding, whose accession is dated by different scholars at 1250 BC or 1200 BC. Oracle bone inscriptions of Wu Ding's reign have been radiocarbon dated to 1254–1197 BC±10 years. After the Shang were overthrown by the Zhou dynasty in c. 1046 BC, divining with milfoil became more common, and a much smaller ... [...More Info...] [...Related Items...] OR: [Wikipedia] [Google] [Baidu] |
Chinese Particles
Grammatical particles, or simply ''particles'', are words that convey certain grammatical meanings. The term is often applied to words that are difficult to classify according to traditional grammar. Both Classical Chinese and Modern Standard Chinese make use of particles. In Chinese, particles are known as () or (). They belong to function words (). In other words, they have no lexical meaning, but are used to indicate certain grammatical information. This contrasts with content words (). Particles in Chinese usually take the neutral tone.Li, Charles N. & Thompson, Sandra A. (1989). ''Mandarin Chinese: A Functional Reference Grammar''. Berkeley, CA: University of California Press. : p. 238 Studies by earlier authors The first book devoted to the study of Chinese particles, , was written by Lu Yi-Wei () in the period of the Yuan Dynasty (1271–1368). Later important works include (Some Notes on the Helping Words) by Liu Qi () and (Explanations of the Articles Found in the Cla ... [...More Info...] [...Related Items...] OR: [Wikipedia] [Google] [Baidu] |
Radical 140
Radical 140 or radical grass () meaning "grass" is one of 29 of the 214 Kangxi radicals that are composed of 6 strokes. It transforms into when appearing at the top of a character or component. In the ''Kangxi Dictionary'' and in modern standard Traditional Chinese as used in Taiwan, Hong Kong and Macau, (with two horizontal strokes) consists of four strokes, while in Simplified Chinese and modern Japanese, (with a continuous horizontal stroke) consists of three strokes. In the ''Kangxi Dictionary'' there are 1902 characters (out of 40,000) found under this radical, making it the most commonly used radical. , the upper component form of , is the 30th indexing component in the ''Table of Indexing Chinese Character Components'' predominantly adopted by Simplified Chinese dictionaries published in mainland China, while is listed as its associated indexing component. Evolution File:艸-seal.svg, Small seal script character Derived characters Variant forms This radical cha ... [...More Info...] [...Related Items...] OR: [Wikipedia] [Google] [Baidu] |
Chinese Character Classification
All Chinese characters are logograms, but several different types can be identified, based on the manner in which they are formed or derived. There are a handful which derive from pictographs () and a number which are ideographic () in origin, including compound ideographs (), but the vast majority originated as phono-semantic compounds (). The other categories in the traditional system of classification are rebus or phonetic loan characters () and "derivative cognates" (). Modern scholars have proposed various revised systems, rejecting some of the traditional categories. In older literature, Chinese characters in general may be referred to as ideograms, due to the misconception that characters represented ideas directly, whereas some people assert that they do so only through association with the spoken word. Traditional classification Traditional Chinese lexicography divided characters into six categories (). This classification is known from Xu Shen's second century dictionar ... [...More Info...] [...Related Items...] OR: [Wikipedia] [Google] [Baidu] |
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