tea & chinese characters

Mike snipped-for-privacy@4ax.com/5/06

I'm afraid I can't answer that without a lot of thoughtful consideration so as not to scare ya'll too badly. You'll be signing a waver just in case. Michael

I am fascinated and impressed by the activity on this topic. Little did I know when I first started it what a snowball was going to get rolling.

I'm afraid that I don't keep up very diligently with internet groups, so have just "returned" to find this development. I've saved it so I can explore the links and good advice for some days to come.

I loved the discussions on eytomology also... I'm probably one of the few people who have actually read the introduction and discussion of word forms at the front of those larger unabridged dictionaries =).

Still, it just points out the complexity of the whole subject. I did finally look through my brother's books on Japanese. He said that they use almost the exact same traditional characters as are in Chinese, so I thought perhaps it could shed a little light. Anyway, he has something called "Character Fast-Finder" (perhaps not the exact title, but unless asked I'm not going to go dig it out).

This book has a different, more visual, way of finding characters. It gives you a choice of whether to look at the right sub-character, the left, the top the bottom or if it is a more simple one, the entire thing.. So a simple character, such as "woman", directs you to one area, but a compound character directs you to another.

I can see that there are still flaws in this method, but I have met with some interesting results... Perhaps slightly better than Babelfish, but I'll have to download the Chinese character sets and find out.

Then, also, the meaning of the character is perhaps not quite accurate in all cases =)...

I was using a box of herbal tea for my investigations, that has Chinese and Pin Yin and an English "commentary." The english did not match up with the meanings given in the dictionary, although I could see that it was somewhat in the same line. Such as one character's dictionary meaning was given as "origin", but I the english commentary used "native".

This problem was also alluded to above, so I can see that context and familiarity could heavily influence translation. This, however, is certainly not unique to Chinese translation, but fairly endemic in any.

I see that I have acquired another hobby/interest to add to tea...

Thank you all Whytebyrd

Michael Plant wrote: