I'll see if I can find you something in print...as for the waiters, it is both. They usually write in a form of Cao Shu (more like a scribble actually) that they understand among themselves, it can be sloppy, but it is systematically a simplified form of the actual characters, as in the case below:
Fried Rice with Egg Actual: ??? They write: ???
Flat Noodles with Beef Actual: ???? They write: ??? (Cantonese simply call it ??)
Half the time, I have to pause and take a good look and decipher the characters when the check is presented...
The character is not upside down. What I meant is that if you turn the 'sheng' character as shown upside down, and round off the corners etc, you'll see the similarity between what you posted and the upside down 'sheng' character...
Hmm.... This is quite an interesting post. But I do have to agree with Kevo. It is the "sheng" character but upside down. However, when I first glanced at it, my immediate impression was "shou" meaning long life too. But when I flipped my screen upside down, it clealy presented itself as the "sheng" character. There are many calligraphic styles, such as the Grass style or Running style, not to mention older styles. Some are almost undecipherable to modern readers of Chinese. And yes, there are books or scrolls or whatever to demonstrate variations of each character in calligraphic script. I have a Korean dictionary like that, of only a limited number of characters.
I will note that, if this were sheng upside down (which was my best guess), the stroke order would seem off. Seems like you wouldn't normally do that middle cross after the vertical stroke, which is what would be the case if this were sheng. It does look like (if it were right-side-up) they did the top stroke, then the middle stroke, then the vertical stroke, with the curl and the swoop at the end (sorry for lack of proper stroke names, but you get the picture). Then again, it does seem weird that they wouldn't at least cross the top bar with 'shou' and maybe hook the bottom, but at least it looks like they did things in the right order if it is shou, which I would imagine to be more important than something like a dot in such a free writing style...
[kevo]
[corax] this sort of information is worth its weight in gold. most people would not even think to describe this to us. thanks kevo for another fascinating glimpse into the intricate workings of asian culture.
question: is this type of cao shu at all likely to be the next step in 'simplified' characters in the chinese-speaking world? or do you think the 'next step' is more likely to be a massive move, on the mainland at least, toward using pinyin or some other phonetic-representation system, replacing hanzi altogether?
He said it's shou. When we turned it upside down, he said it's shou upside down. They use this character on things sort of as advertisement. It's used for good luck. It would be pointless to put "gai" on a box of tea and try to sell it. It's similar to the ? character you usually see around southern China; although they DO turn that character upside down usually because of a superstition in believing that when you turn it that way, it brings the luck back to you.
Don't really see how this fits in as an example. Your first example, the first one is the "fan ti" script that is still used in Hong Kong and Taiwan. The "chao" character wouldn't be written as "shao" no matter in what restaurant you go unless your server is really uneducated; which isn't too uncommon in China. You gave an example of how they sometimes abbreviate the language in the second example.
I hope the above is what you witness, and not what you are taught...the inversion of the fu character is something many people are doing in the past 10-20 years, which probably started out as a game adults pkay on kids: during Lunar New Year the adults will show the kids a piece of paper with the fu character written upside down, and then ask the kids what character is that. Kids would then shout Fu Dao (upside down) Fu Dao! in which Dao shares the same pronounciation with Dao (arrive) - the kids are then given sweets or goodies. The whole game is to bring in the joy during festive seasons. Businessmen and media advertising later adopted this Fu Dao for the same significance, but this is completely incorrect. Upside down Fu, as written and placed on doors, actually meant tht the family is jinxed with bad luck and wishes to reverse the fortune. The other place to stick an upside down Fu is on the toilet door, to signify that as waste is flushed out, good luck is flushed in.
But back to the character.
When I first looked at the character, I thought of Shou too, but several points tell me it is not: the character is missing the tell- tale dot on the right, and the top should be a cross bar, not a T bar; when I follow the calligraphic strokes, there is no continuity in the flow of the pen. To write this character, if it Shou, the writer has to draw a bar, then a J with a curl that cuts across to the right and abruptly swips down. Then to finish it, draw a flatten O on the central stroke. This is not how Shou is written, in any script, even by a westerner.
For the character to be Sheng, one draws a 4, with the stroke starting from the upper left, curving down over to the right, up and curve it backwards, then down cutting through the stroke, then upward again on the left to draw a swipping small O, leaving a small tail,, then finish the character with a bar at the bottom. This is how most people writing Sheng in Xing Shu might do.
Ultimately though, Jim has to decide the character for himself.
Please read what Lew wrote. My first example is not in fan ti script. Please look at the characters. If ? is a fan ti for ?, you need a new teacher. ? is the same fan or jian ti, ? is written in jian ti, not fan ti. So which is in fan ti? 'no matter in what restaurant' - unless you have been to all the Chinese eateries in the world, you can only say 'in the restaurants I've been to', which is not exhaustive. I just ate last week at Xiao Nan Tian in Hongkong and watched the waiter wrote Nian Gao ?? as ??? The second example is the same, ? written for ? Most times it is not that the waiters are uneducated. They substitute one character for the other with the similar writing or sound in order to expediate things: they write it fast and pass it on to the kitchen. They do this for efficiency. What is more horrifying is when the literate do it in their published works, and one I can name on the fly is Teaparker. In several books by him the pages are peppered by characters which share the same sound, or similar strokes, but mean differently. Waiters do it to make their job quicker, but a writer?
Everyone agrees my character is upside down :-). This is how I satisfied myself it is. Three characters meaning Big Leaf Tea were written on the flat side of the rectangular sheng box. I imagine the box was flipped on one edge for the rightside up 'sheng' character on the other edge which I mistakenly showed upsidedown. I dont know I think the sheng itself got more expensive or taste better because of this discussion. I learned some stuff about Chinese handwriting. I want to thank everyone for their efforts. This is the best group about tea on the net.
Jim
PS At the PPP everybody was talking about this and that blog. I said I belonged to RFDT on USENET. Only one person had even heard of USENET.
"this type of cao shu"? Let's first agree on what is meant here. I think what we're talking about is one character per syllable, the character being selected from the universe of (as many as 100 in some cases) on the criterion of simplicity: probably the fewest strokes.
So it would be a syllabary. The Japanese use a couple of syllabaries, as far as I know, so there's a precedent.
Actually, you are right about the characters. That night I just took a glance at what was written and we had gotten the sauce more than the local tea so I apologize. But again, you only demonstrated how they abbreviate some characters to save time.
Looking at the character again with another friend that does calligraphy for a living, he said it looks like "xiang" or ? which means fragrant. He didn't rule out "shou" but he's definitely sure it isn't anything upside down.
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