More blameless pastimes

[flemmings]

Aka 'I have been a geek, Cynara, in my fashion.'

So, that Goujun picture from Gaiden 3 that has us all hot and bothered? Over in the lower left corner it has one of Minekura's arrgh arrgh headbang pieces of seal script writing. I of course have to know what it says. (Meaning resides in *words*, always, though you'd think with an image like that, that for once I'd make an exception.) What have I spent the evening doing? Looking at characters in Minekura's seal script passage, thinking 'that kind of looks like 'noon', looking up the hanzi for 'noon' (and falcon and several other fruitless guesses) at Mandarintools, and plugging the hanzi I find there into an instant handy-dandy seal script generator I found courtesy of google. To add insult to injury, you have to use simplified hanzi; traditional hanzi only gets you the same hanzi printed in red.

To date, I discover only that Goujun asks 'why' a lot.

Comments

[rasetsunyo.livejournal.com]

Duh that means 敖閏 and 敖潤 respectively. Sorry brain not really working today.

[purpleicicles.livejournal.com]

So I'm on the traditional chinese version? I'm presuming it's the same in chinese as in japanese - the scans I'm referencing are in japanese. Earth is 土, but I still can't find the kanji - what does it mean?

[rasetsunyo.livejournal.com]

No, I haven't got Japanese input so I've got to use Chinese. But in this case the Traditional Chinese characters = Japanese kanji, so no difference. As far as I know the first character doesn't have a meaning, it's just a really uncommon Chinese surname.

[purpleicicles.livejournal.com]

The first part of gojun's name has no meaning?!? O_o Oh well, I guess my workmate was just teasing when he said it had a meaning but he wouldn't tell me... thanks for putting me out of my misery! ♥

[rasetsunyo.livejournal.com]

flemmings will know more about Japanese usage than I, but in common Chinese usage it doesn't have any particular meaning; the ones listed, like "travel" and "boil", have been replaced in the modern language by similar characters with additional radicals (遨 for travel, 熬 for boil). All three characters are homophones in Mandarin, "ao".

And you're welcome. ♥

[flemmings.livejournal.com]

The names Minekura uses come from the Japanese translation of The Journey to the West, where the names are probably written in Japanese characters rather than the traditional Chines eones.

The gou kanji is given in two of my three kanji dictionaries, with the alternate meanings 'play' or 'be proud.' But there are no compounds with it, a sure sign of an obscure kanji. As in Chinese, both its meanings are usually expressed in Japanese by other kanji entirely.

If you take the kanji apart, 敖 is earth over direction on the left, and the radical is 'to strike' or 'a blow' on the right.

paleaswater told me it's a kind of peasanty/ common people name. These dragons are folk characters from folk tales, and quite different from the blue dragon (青龍） who appears as the guardian of the east in Daoism.

[purpleicicles.livejournal.com]

Ah, I see! Thanks for the help guys - I was going crazy trying to figure it out for myself! ♥