Question about 天花板

[Kenny同志]

On 5/1/2022 at 6:48 PM, Moshen said:

  The detective is inspecting the spied-upon person's house and goes into the bedroom, where he looks up and says, "I see you have a 天花板."  This is translated as "ceiling."  But this must be a special kind of ceiling.  Doesn't every room in every house have a ceiling???

A 天花板 can only be a ceiling, although the term is sometimes used metaphorically to refer to a limit or the highest level of something.

 

Not every house or room has a ceiling. And this was very common in rural China before the 1990s. Here's a picture: 

 

 

 

 

[roddy]

Consider

https://interiordesign.lovetoknow.com/decorative-ceiling-beams

https://www.decoist.com/living-rooms-ceiling-beams/?chrome=1

 

Those rooms do not, I would say, have a 天花板. 

[EnergyReaper]

Consider the rooms from roddy's 2nd link.

If 天花板's definition is 一座建筑物室内顶部表面的地方, it seems we can say those rooms have a 天花板. But out of habit, I would only call a flat ceiling that isn't completely covered by decorations or beams 天花板, e.g. I would not call the  "vaulted ceiling" in the link 拱形天花板, but 拱形房顶 or 拱顶 for short.

As for the story Moshen read, I guess that's a 吊顶 because there is space between 吊顶 and 天花板. Who can directly crawl on 天花板 must be Spider Man or other superheroes with similar ability. ?

In my opinion, if you are not sure, always using 房顶 is safer.

[abcdefg]

On 5/4/2022 at 10:34 PM, Kenny同志 said:

Not every house or room has a ceiling. And this was very common in rural China before the 1990s. Here's a picture: 

That was the setup in my girlfriend's childhood village. The snapshots she showed me were similar to this one. 

[Kenny同志]

On 5/5/2022 at 11:25 PM, abcdefg said:

That was the setup in my girlfriend's childhood village. The snapshots she showed me were similar to this one. 

In my hometown, houses of this type were not uncommon when I was a child in the late 1980s but soon clay bricks became widely used. In some parts of Guizhou and Yunnan, I assume such houses existed in large numbers until the late 1990s. 

[abcdefg]

On 5/5/2022 at 9:07 PM, Kenny同志 said:

In some parts of Guizhou and Yunnan, I assume such houses existed in large numbers until the late 1990s. 

Yes, I think they did. My lady friend was originally from a small village in the Ailao Shan Mountains 哀牢山 of SE Yunnan, close to Lu Chun 绿春。It was beautiful scenery, but economically still a poor farming community, mostly rice and corn. The houses had packed earth floors and the kind of roofs described here in this thread as she was growing up.