Jump to content
Chinese-Forums
  • Sign Up

What is this character?


x_o 88

Recommended Posts

I couldn't find it when I entered "di" or when I looked in the character palette, so I'm going with no simplified form.

[Edit] There are two that I'd like to know about. The first looks like 先 with a 一 on top of it, and the second looks like 会 with a 不 on top. Anyone have any ideas?

Link to comment
Share on other sites

Glenn, the short answer is that the 会 with a 不 on top has been created by 闽 (mǐn) speakers to represent, you guessed it, 不会, in a similar way to 甭 (béng) having been created for the phonetic merging of 不 and 用 in Mandarin. You'll see the character (and variations of it) a lot in Fujian, Taiwan and Guangdong.

It's actually a little more complicated than this. Let me know if you'd like a fuller explanation.

Can't help with the 一 and 先 character yet - will have a search for it tonight once I get home.

By the way, where did you come across these characters?

Link to comment
Share on other sites

Thanks for the answer; I had figured it would be something like that.

I came across them in the character palette. There are lots like them, which I'm guessing are characters idiosyncratic of differenct dialects/languages. For instance, there's 冇, which I understand as being a Cantonese character for 没有. The two that I was wondering about are both in bold typeface in the character palette, which makes me think that all of the ones in bold are similar. Here are some more examples:

Link to comment
Share on other sites

Interesting. The characters appear perfectly on my computer here at work (Japanese IE 6, set to unicode), but I can't copy them into any other application. My computer at home on the other hand, which should be running the same software, only shows black dots. However, I can copy the characters into a word file and they come out fine so long as I use a Hong Kong font set. :conf

Link to comment
Share on other sites

Looking at these characters, most of them (if not all) are 方言字 that don't appear in standard font sets. I can tell you straight off that the [口兮] character is often used in mainland China to represent the possessive pronoun in Hakka (客家話), equivalent to 的 in Mandarin. They're not all from a single dialect, although some may be used by more than one dialect - for instance 冇 is also often used in Hakka (in the same way as in Cantonese) as well as in many 闽 dialects, where it means 不实.

[口了] is used by several dialects in place of 了 when the colloquial pronunciation (白音) differs from literary pronunciation (文音).

[口山] is apparently used in Kunming (昆明) as a sentence final particle.

Can't comment on any of the others yet without further investigation.

Link to comment
Share on other sites

Join the conversation

You can post now and select your username and password later. If you have an account, sign in now to post with your account.
Note: Your post will require moderator approval before it will be visible.

Guest
Click here to reply. Select text to quote.

×   Pasted as rich text.   Paste as plain text instead

  Only 75 emoji are allowed.

×   Your link has been automatically embedded.   Display as a link instead

×   Your previous content has been restored.   Clear editor

×   You cannot paste images directly. Upload or insert images from URL.

×
×
  • Create New...