tea & chinese characters

Hi Whytebyrd,

I have started something along those lines specificaly targeted at Pu'er Tea. While it is not nearly as comprehensive as your request, it is a start. It can be found at

Another very good resource for Tea Terms in general is the Babelcarp which can be found at

Mike

I'm not aware of anything like this for Chinese tea in general - it might not fit in your pocket! - but, for Pu'er, there's Mike Petro's "cheat sheet":

Also, while this won't help you in a Chinese grocery store, the website in my signature can translate a lot of tea Chinese (both Chinese characters and their transliterations.) It does one phrase at a time, though.

/Lew

In Western markets Chinese tea boxes will indicate the PinYin name and the corresponding Chinese characters. In the West we know the names of Chinese tea from the PinYin(English representation of Chinese) like Cha,LungChing,QiMen,MaoFeng,etc. Some English terms for Chinese also have developed historically and not a PinYin translation of the Chinese. If you were in China you'd probably would need some Chinese character dictionary for teas which probably wouldn't help because how do you 'lookup' a Chinese character. They use Radicals and we use an Alphabet. I've developed my own tea dictionary over the decades. The Internet makes it easier to find information on PinYin and Chinese character tea terms. When I get stuck, I ask here, because others have developed their own dictionaries and we have several people conversant in Chinese who catch everything that falls through the cracks. My tea dictionary which I call the Rosetta Stone was initially developed by manually coding the PinYin and Chinese characters from commercial tea boxes. With the dawn on the Information Age it now resides as a flat file on my computer searchable by english,pinyin,chinese. The most recent additions are Puer related terms I find on the Chinese auction site TaoBao.

Jim

whytebyrd wrote:

Jim... I am really, really impressed by your "Rosetta Stone." What an accomplishment that is! I can only imagine the amount of actual time you invested in that project (which is apparently ongoing).

Not all manufacturers have include a Pin Yin name either. Although I'm sure that most of the products which are packaged especially for the overseas English speaking areas do. The market I go to most frequently (Well-Farm) has a wide mix of products and very many teas are apparently packaged for domestic (their own) use. Not to mention the very interesting-looking assortments of packaged herbs and herbal "teas". (I would just love to experiment with these, if I even knew a tiny bit about what they actually are)

In my brother's Japanese character "dictionary", the ideograms are generally classified by the number of radicals they have. This, mind you, is just what he tells me, I haven't taken that particular bull by the horns yet. There are also other systems of classification, apparently.

I just can't imagine that there is not somewhere a decent "abridged" version of the above. How do they teach children to read & write? I'm not looking for an equivalent to a desk model unabridged dictionary. For my purposes, that would be like swatting a gnat with an atomic bomb.

You might try _What Character Is That?_ by Gam P. Go, published by Simplex Publications in 1995.

/Lew

Basically, a chinese dictionary could have 3 systems of character classification - by radical, stroke count, or pronunciation (in pinyin or wade-giles, etc).

And then there is the matter of traditional chinese versus simplified Chinese. If it's tea packaged in mainland china, it may use simplified characters (but not necessarily so). And if it's tea packaged in Hongkong, or Taiwan, it's in traditional chinese characters.

So for many characters, you need to be able to recognize both the simplified and the traditional form. Some simplified characters look vastly different from the traditional form.

Radical dictionaries are complicated to use - especially if you don't know what radical to look under. And some dictionaries just don't contain that many characters, so occasionally you may never find the character you're looking for.

If you want to play around with radicals, and dictionaries, try an on-line dictionary like zhongwen.com.

And The Pocket Oxford Chinese Dictionary is pretty good too. You can get it through Amazon.com or your bookstore. But it's actually not pocket-sized, it's pretty thick and big.

Chinese children learn to read and write by at first learning simple characters - like numbers, etc. They start off by recognizing the character and it's associated meaning. Then, they must write the characters carefully many times over - until they perfect writing it.

After learning simple characters, they go on to learn about radicals and what they mean. Then, they can memorize characters by all the radicals in a given character. Then, they must practice writing the characters carefully again, many many times. And memorize each one.

In combination with that, they're taught simple poems, and simple texts to help them learn to recognize the words in a sentence. Simple poems are good, because they rhyme, so it's easier to memorize the poem than the characters. But when they read it, they can recognize the character's meaning instantly - because they already know the poem.

It's far easier to recognize characters (read) than it is to write. And some chinese kids, though they can read the character, they find it's hard to write. So they just write they way they think it should be written. Basically, they make up their own characters. But amazingly, they can read it back to you, even if you can't read it.

Space snipped-for-privacy@y43g2000cwc.googlegroups.com4/29/06

Jim, why not put your linguistic database up for all of us so we can benefit from your hard work and effort. Michael

I still have my first six pack of TenRen tins with the English,PinYin,Chinese from 1973. It contained one classical informational miscue where the character for Red was translated as Black. Lew and Mike make their tea directories available online. I've always threatened to do so but they beat me too it so they get the credit. However websites come and go. Since Google never forgets I post the Chinese characters others like Danny help me resolve. One place to start is Zhongwen.Com. There is a published book for that site to make sense of it all. Actually the site supports the book. You 'guess' the radical and find the character from there. But not many tea terms like Lew or Mike or mine. I maintain mine for personal satisfaction. But language is important especially as it is encoded on the Internet so the more you know the more you learn. I've only seen one published appendum of tea terms with English,PinYin,Chinese but it is trivial to even mine or the two others. There are websites for Traditional Chinese Medicine if you want to learn more about the herbals. There are books of TCM and Martial Arts which might interest you. Your brother's Japanese dictionary probably uses 'number of strokes' which is another way to organize the Radicals.

Jim

whytebyrd wrote:

Not to mention that there are many different styles of calligraphy. I find some of them pretty illegible.

I think this point merits underlining. Say you can break down a given character into four different radicals. There's no rule that will infallibly tell you which of the four is "the" radical to look up the character under. I haven't seen a dictionary that lists characters under *all* their radicals. Does anyone know if such a beast exists?

This is something to remember if you ask a Chinese person to write down a character for you. If you can't find it in a dictionary, it may be because they wrote it wrong.

/Lew

You'll need Chinese fonsets GB2312,Big5 or Japanese Shift_JIS,EUC-JP or an appropriate OS for Unicode to see the Chinese characters in my file. The file would also be viewable if you downloaded a Chinese editor like Northstar. I don't have any native language fontsets or Unicode loaded on my computer. When I need to see the graphical representation I use Zhongwen or Unicode.Org. I've developed routines to do that for me using the various native language code pairs or Unicode. I'd have to scrub my file for a presentation that wouldn't make me look like an idiot. I'd have to exlain it is Wade-Giles or Cantonese and not PinYin. Some terms by themselves don't mean anything like Yellow Sprout which refers to a Yellow tea or one of my favorites the Babelfish puer translation 'returns to gansu' which means 'sweet aftertaste'. To me the file makes sense but to most it would be gibberish. Sites like this with tea terms are easy to find if you know what to look for

Jim

Michael Plant wrote:

...I delete me...

Lew wrote: "There's no rule that will infallibly tell you which of the four is "the" radical to look up the character under. I haven't seen a dictionary that lists characters under *all* their radicals. Does anyone know if such a beast exists?"

You have pinpointed one of the biggest pains in the ass associated with learning Chinese. Actually every character has only one radical. The more you use a dictionary, the more luck you'll have figuring out which of the possible radicals is *the* radical. One small hint is that it is usually the outermost.

Some dictionaries - usually the bigger and more scholarly ones - have a section after the radical index entitled "hard to find characters". Those sections can be really useful, as the authors have often done a very good job of anticipating which characters are likely to confuse a learner.

I'm aware that most people talk that way, but it kind of begs the question of what makes it "the" radical.

Outermost? It's pretty unusual for one radical to enclose all the others, though it does happen.

/Lew

When I say outermost I guess I'm thinking of something like 缩 where the radical is 'silk' instead of roof or person.

Can you give an example of one that confused you?

Does "outermost" mean "leftmost"?

If by "confused" you mean I initially guessed wrong about which was "the" radical, well, there are so many. Statistically, I suppose the leftmost turns out to be "the" radical most often, so I usually try that first.

By the way, would you *please* quote the context you're responding to? Google Groups can be persuaded to do that.

/Lew

Of course not. It's more like the last element that was added to the more primitive or basic character. Keep practicing, and get a bigger dictionary with a stroke index for the challenging characters. Eventually it will become clearer (and attempts to explain the phenomenon will seem less threatening).

That's what I meant by 'confused', yes. Unless we're talking about a character where there is basically no radical (夹曲甩 and many more) then there is one radical that will lead you to the dictionary entry. If you don't know what it is, then you are 'confused'.

Sorry, I didn't realize that was your pet peeve. It was pretty obvious what I was responding to based on the sequence of the messages, but I am happy to oblige, as you can see, and in the future I'll stick to the rules.

Improving your ability to guess from context will help you with the tricky characters too.

Unneccesarily snippy or testy responses will alienate people who are making a good-natured effort to help you.

There is no confusion actually.

There are broadly 3 stages in the development of a chinese character: Ideograph (Pictograph), Phonetic Borrowing, Pictophonetic Writing. These stages often overlap. What is known as "radical" usually comes from the Ideograph - the basic form of a character which would mostly stem from a primitive drawing.

Looking at the example Alex cited, "? " (suo - meaning to shrink), it is not difficult to see that the left-side character is the "radical", while the right-side character is a compound, or pictophone consisting of a roof, under which are 2 characters - the left is a man, the right, in its earliest form, was a drawing of a mattress; together, it depicts a man lying on a mattress under a roof - this character is mainly pronounced as 'su' - to take shelter.

Alex mentions that the left-side character is that of "silk", which isn't wholly correct. For simplicity of reference, we often call it 'si', meaning silk.

Putting the 'si' meaning "silk" and 'su' meaning "to take shelter" and coming up with 'suo' meaning "to shrink" doesn't seem logical now does it?

That's because the left-side character is not pronounced as 'si', nor does it indicate "silk". It is pronounced as 'mi', meaning 'fine silk'. In old chinese, it was written that the silk spun & twisted by 5 silkworms is called 'mi', while silk spun & twisted by 10 silkworms is called 'si' (hence the chinese character for 'silk' is written as 2 'mi'). From this character derives the meaning to "make finer, to twist and tighten". A skein of silk twisted and roped around a shelter limits the space, hence the meaning "to shrink".

However, etymology is not exact science, and there are characters which scholars can only offer the best guesses at how they arrive at the final meaning.

The right-side character means to "take shelter", but it can also mean "a unit of measurement" (pronounced as 'xiu', usually to measure a night); so a rope to tighten a unit of measurement can also mean "to shrink".

Danny

You needn't impute motivations like that.

Thanks; it isn't only *my* "pet peeve", if you want to characterize it that way; it has a history on this newsgroup.

I appreciate your effort to help, I really do. If "snippy or testy" applies to my response to your use of the word "outermost", well, I found that baffling. Maybe we should take this offline?

/Lew

Sorry to have jumped to conclusions. Let's just get back to tea.

That's what you see using Google Groups, a relatively new web frontend for Usenet. Lew and I and many others are using clients (newsreaders) which show a thread in the more common tree structure. That usually involves explicitely selecting the articles you want to read. So to understand what you're referring to if you don't quote anything would require me to read the article you're replying to and your article in that exact same order.

And even then, I'd have to guess which part of the article you're referring to.

I'd say Lew just wanted to help. Proper quoting is more a service to your readers, frankly. Courtesy, if you will. It makes for easier and faster reading.

Hope I could help you understand Usenet better,

Stefan