[lojban] Re: About my chop

[Philip Newton <lojban-out@lojban.org>]

On 10/16/05, John E Clifford <clifford-j@sbcglobal.net> wrote:
> Ok, this has NOTHING to do with Lojban, but I
> think there must be some Chinese scholars out in
> this group.
>
> I am thinking of getting a seal made while I am
> in China.  Years ago, my Chinese Culture
> professor (Lee Shao Chang, as we wrote it then),
> gave me a name:
> chi li fu (now, I suppose qi li fu) which he
> wrote with (Unicode/GB/Big5 -- I can't get any of
> these to print right consistently) qi2 "pray"
> (7948/C6ED/ACE8) fu2 "good fortune"
> (798F/B8A2/BAD6) but for li he used something
> that looks like the phonetic of li4
> "sharp"(4FD0/C0FE/AB57), that is, without the
> "man" radical.

So you mean li4 "gains, advantage, profit, merit" (5229/3291/A751)?

Also very commonly used to transcribe foreign names containing a "li" sound.

> The meaning he gave it was that
> for li3 "bountiful"(8C4A/-/E054).

I thought that character is read "feng1"... and according to the
Unicode.org site, that character is read either "li3" or "feng1", but
they say it's a simplified form (used e.g. in Japan) of 8C50/-/C2D7 --
which, it says, is read only "feng1". (The simplified form used in
China is 4E30/2365/A4A5). So I'm not sure where the li3 reading comes
from. The site gives "abundant, lush, bountiful, plenty" as the
definition of either character.

>  So after all
> these years I have to ask (before I get my seal
> cut) whether Dr. Lee was having a joke on me or
> whether his character is a legitimate way of
> writing li3 "bountiful"

IMO no.

> or whether he just goofed.

Maybe what he said was that U+5229 meant something similar to U+8C4A/U+8C50?

> (I don't expect you to figure out the first part,
> so the second and third are the important ones).

Not sure whether I can help you there.

I'd say it's probably safe to go ahead with U+5229 -- not only is it
commonly used in transcriptions, its meaning is also positive, as far
as I can tell.

mu'o mi'e .filip.
--
Philip Newton <philip.newton@gmail.com>


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