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Headbanging time with Shinohara Udo
I should stop reading, or trying to read, Shinohara Udo. Or rather, I should stop reading her HK-set stories. Or rather I should stop trying to read the Chinese she peppers her HK-set stories with.
See, here we have a repeated character- 唔 - that exists happily in Japanese, even if MIME doesn't have it. Consists of 口 (mouth radical) + 吾 (I, right element) to form a kanji that also means I. She has a bunch of her henchmen apologize: 對唔住, furigana'd as sumimasen. She has her hero say お唔該, furigana'd as arigatou. (And why's that kana お there, huh?) I look the hanzi up in Mandarin Tools, I look it up in my paper dictionary, I hazard a guess it's pronounced wu and look it up in both places again and can't find it.
She has another hanzi, 口 (mouth radical) + 地 (earth, right element.) Her gangsters use a compound "我 + mouth-earth" that's furigana'd as ware-tachi. Can't find it anywhere.
She has a third kanji, evidently nonexistent in Japanese: 口 (mouth radical) + 卑 (base, vulgar; right element.) Add it to the kanji 酒 and the compound gets furigana'd as beer. I go look up this mouth-lowborn kanji in MT (mouth radical plus 7 lower bound to 9 upper bound.) Do I find it? No. I find 唔 wu2 instead, that insists with transparent sincerity that it was always there and I just didn't see it the first two times.
Johnson spot blindness apart, is there an explanation for these mysterious mouth hanzi? Are they special Cantonese-only? Did she invent them herself? What?
Right now I could do with some mean-mouthed sake myself, but there's no way I'm leaving the house.
See, here we have a repeated character- 唔 - that exists happily in Japanese, even if MIME doesn't have it. Consists of 口 (mouth radical) + 吾 (I, right element) to form a kanji that also means I. She has a bunch of her henchmen apologize: 對唔住, furigana'd as sumimasen. She has her hero say お唔該, furigana'd as arigatou. (And why's that kana お there, huh?) I look the hanzi up in Mandarin Tools, I look it up in my paper dictionary, I hazard a guess it's pronounced wu and look it up in both places again and can't find it.
She has another hanzi, 口 (mouth radical) + 地 (earth, right element.) Her gangsters use a compound "我 + mouth-earth" that's furigana'd as ware-tachi. Can't find it anywhere.
She has a third kanji, evidently nonexistent in Japanese: 口 (mouth radical) + 卑 (base, vulgar; right element.) Add it to the kanji 酒 and the compound gets furigana'd as beer. I go look up this mouth-lowborn kanji in MT (mouth radical plus 7 lower bound to 9 upper bound.) Do I find it? No. I find 唔 wu2 instead, that insists with transparent sincerity that it was always there and I just didn't see it the first two times.
Johnson spot blindness apart, is there an explanation for these mysterious mouth hanzi? Are they special Cantonese-only? Did she invent them herself? What?
Right now I could do with some mean-mouthed sake myself, but there's no way I'm leaving the house.
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Hmm, from the Cantonese dictionary at http://www.cantonese.sheik.co.uk/scripts/wordsearch.php?level=0 I get
唔 m4 ng4 not
啤酒 is standard for beer, that ought to be in the dictionary
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Fine. I shall now pass over any mouth hanzi with the mental note 'unknown Cantonese emoticon.'
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