flemmings | (no subject)

mvrdrk, your book came! To my experienced eye, it was delayed at the border by customs ie the wrapping paper was slit open. You'd be amazed how many drugs are shipped through under the guise of Christmas presents that look like weighty tomes. (/sarcasm)

Have just spent a pleasant hour working through I won't tell you how few pages of The Book of Poetry section, alternately reading his analysis and looking up unknown hanzi in that dictionary you gave me so long ago. No, I don't know why I do that when there's a webpage that does it for me. Orneriness. Eventually I'll stop and just read the text, though I'm beginning to see what you mean about needing a dictionary even for that. Chiasmatic, anadiplosis, metonymy... dear god. I mean yes, he explains the terms mostly, but still. Fortunately there's another webpage that will do it for you.

Even so, the Shi Jing has its headscratchy moments. The second line of

隰桑有阿
其葉有難

to me reads only as 'its leaves are difficult.' Where people get 'flourishing' or 'lovely' from that is a mystery, though of course I could supply examples of pejorative drift in English that are much more recent than the Odes' Chinese. The Old English selig, meaning holy, that gives us modern-day silly, or (not so far a jump) dysig, foolish, that became dizzy.

I foresee hours of endless fun with this one. Thank you very much!

Flat | Top-Level Comments Only

I'm going to go look up pejorative drift ...

I think it's a standard Chinese poetry technique to split multi-character words where each individual word/morpheme means the same thing across lines. I suspect it happens even in modern poetry, but since I don't read modern poetry ...

Pejorative drift is the tendency of words to change from a positive or neutral meaning to a negative one over time. Most stunningly seen with Japanese pronouns, most of which-- to judge by their forms-- began as honorifics: お前、手前、貴様. Omae, temee, kisama: hardly honorific now.