Off on another Saturday morning Wikipedia jag, I have stumbled across the joys of Chinese constellations. They are beyond fun. Many have lovely evocative names---sometimes, as is often the case, seemingly more evocative in translation than in the original. Lest I keep you from discovering them for yourself, here I give only a small sample of the rich and wacky tanglings they offer the crosslinguistic wanderer.
To start off on the technical side, 卷舌 Rolled Tongue, in its common translation as 'retroflex', brings gladdening warmth and validation to the hearts off all phoneticians. And the swirl-vs.-lisp of it should be familiar to any student learning standard Beijing-style Mandarin who then goes and talks to non-northerners, i.e. the huge swath of everybody else in the world who speaks Mandarin.
Beyond this, is it not great to have in your mental sky now asterisms like 酒旗 Banner of a Wine Shop (they have ads up there!), 敗瓜 Rotten Gourd, and 狗國 Dog Territory? And, eminently practical and hospitable, the ancients kindly saw fit to install a 廁 Toilet.
I'm particularly fond of 土公 Official for Earthworks and Buildings, as it might translate more directly as Public Guy In Charge Of Dirt.
But nothing really beats 虛 Emptiness for best constellation of all. I have a hard time locating it, though.
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3 comments:
yay! a new post! and a lovely one too. :). don't really see the images of the constellation names (except for Emptiness ;) but it is lovely to imagine these earthly things appearing among the stars...
Yes, it's great how human beings look up into the sky, spy these wee spots of light, and immediately start drawing lines between them. We do that with practically everything, come to think of it, fine weavers and stitchers that we are.
I love that we don't just put heroes and whatnot up there (though the endings of Clash of the Titans and D'Aulaires Book of Greek Myths (do the SEARCH INSIDE!) move me as much now as they did when I was a kid)---but also small bears, little foxes, fish, flies, flying fish, mahi-mahi, dogs, dolphins, doves, wet goats, crows, cranes, crabs, chameleons, clocks, boxes, cups, tables, easels, furnaces, the no-foot bird, little horses (everyone calls me 小馬 in Mandarin, so I get my own name up there in the sky), seven sisters, swans, someone named Norma (Norma Jean?), sculptor's chisels, toucans, and the absolutely hilarious Triangle. In other words, it is a happy clutter.
re 'emptiness', at least one Aboriginal group in Australia defines constellations by the absence of stars rather than the 'join the dots' approach.
word verification of the day: oqmqk: the urge to say something obscene which only gets half suppressed.
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