![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
Entry tags:
Of seals and dragons and dragon seals
Armor of Light and 3K are being even less rivetting than usual. Or maybe that's yesterday's heat and teeth-grit near-migraine talking. 3K is at the battle of Red Cliff and I, frankly, am not impressed by anyone's behaviour there. Even ascribing most of it to authorial bias, Zhou Yu's 'look he's gonna win the battle for us kill him now' attitude stretches my belief oh, just a tad.
But Karin 1 was sitting by my bedside and I read a few pages of that instead until compelled, by the sudden appearance of the Dragon King of the Eastern Ocean, to go look up his name hanzi. The manga has them furigana'd in as close to Chinese as katakana can get and I was wondering how close that was.
敖 - Chinese ao2 or 4, Jpnse gou- is fine in katakana, as it turns out. Took a while to find because it isn't in my basic Chinese hanzi textbooks or in IME. However it's one of the first in that ancient Analytic Dictionary of Chinese and Japanese I got last September (which BTW has a million abbreviations the author never expounds on. 敖 is defined 'ramble; amusement; sometimes u.f. 傲'. U.F to you too, Mr. Karlgren.)
広 - katakanized as kuan, Jpnse kou- is of course problematic. That's the Japanese simplification of the hanzi, and it took a little tracking to discover the trad is 廣, the simplified is 广, and whatever it is, it's pronounced guang3 (also an1 and yan3, but I gather the dragon king is in the guang line.)
I'd happily go on with Karin but it involves wading through the assassination of someone I rather like and I feel disinclined. Hence the hanzi study.
And then went to bed and dreamed of dragons. Western ones that do take man form and do mate with matrilocal female dragons but are much more internecine than my own. Corwin of Amber-type dragon son (in human form) shows up at his father's place all chip on shoulder and two fisted, angling for recognition and possibly the throne, amid the ranks of dragon brothers and half-brothers. Dad says something obscure about 'we'd thought we'd leave you with the females' meaning that in the inevitable chronic dragon wars Corwin would be fighting on the other side and, Dad implies, no loss. But since he's so two-fisted he can hang with his Dad's dragons. There's also a younger, more delicate son, and when the dragon army flies in dragon form he's helped by his half-brother born of a human woman. Yappari-Chinese-papa Dad remarks approvingly on half-human's Confucian virtue-- 'that boy from Scarborough takes good care of his younger brother.' Am tickled at having a half-human dragon born in TO's uninspired burbs, because that wasn't the English Scarborough no way. Am also tickled by half-human dragons being able to take dragon form and strongly suspect I ganked that (and a few other things) from the Great Selkie o' Sule Skerrie, which I haven't thought of for decades, and not until this moment in fact. 'I am a man upon the land, I am a selkie on the sea.'
But Karin 1 was sitting by my bedside and I read a few pages of that instead until compelled, by the sudden appearance of the Dragon King of the Eastern Ocean, to go look up his name hanzi. The manga has them furigana'd in as close to Chinese as katakana can get and I was wondering how close that was.
敖 - Chinese ao2 or 4, Jpnse gou- is fine in katakana, as it turns out. Took a while to find because it isn't in my basic Chinese hanzi textbooks or in IME. However it's one of the first in that ancient Analytic Dictionary of Chinese and Japanese I got last September (which BTW has a million abbreviations the author never expounds on. 敖 is defined 'ramble; amusement; sometimes u.f. 傲'. U.F to you too, Mr. Karlgren.)
広 - katakanized as kuan, Jpnse kou- is of course problematic. That's the Japanese simplification of the hanzi, and it took a little tracking to discover the trad is 廣, the simplified is 广, and whatever it is, it's pronounced guang3 (also an1 and yan3, but I gather the dragon king is in the guang line.)
I'd happily go on with Karin but it involves wading through the assassination of someone I rather like and I feel disinclined. Hence the hanzi study.
And then went to bed and dreamed of dragons. Western ones that do take man form and do mate with matrilocal female dragons but are much more internecine than my own. Corwin of Amber-type dragon son (in human form) shows up at his father's place all chip on shoulder and two fisted, angling for recognition and possibly the throne, amid the ranks of dragon brothers and half-brothers. Dad says something obscure about 'we'd thought we'd leave you with the females' meaning that in the inevitable chronic dragon wars Corwin would be fighting on the other side and, Dad implies, no loss. But since he's so two-fisted he can hang with his Dad's dragons. There's also a younger, more delicate son, and when the dragon army flies in dragon form he's helped by his half-brother born of a human woman. Yappari-Chinese-papa Dad remarks approvingly on half-human's Confucian virtue-- 'that boy from Scarborough takes good care of his younger brother.' Am tickled at having a half-human dragon born in TO's uninspired burbs, because that wasn't the English Scarborough no way. Am also tickled by half-human dragons being able to take dragon form and strongly suspect I ganked that (and a few other things) from the Great Selkie o' Sule Skerrie, which I haven't thought of for decades, and not until this moment in fact. 'I am a man upon the land, I am a selkie on the sea.'