[lojban] Re: About my chop

[John E Clifford <lojban-out@lojban.org>]

--- Philip Newton <philip.newton@gmail.com>
wrote:

> 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.
> 

Thanks.  As you will notice in the records,
someone came up with the right character and a
close enough meaning ("profitable", I think) to
allow me to go ahead with what I had.  It also
turns out that seal cutters in China -- at least
at the touristy places I went -- are pretty
conversant in English and pretty well up on these
sorts of questions.  The one I finally used and I
chatted a while about it and figured out what Dr.
Lee probably meant and cut the seal accordingly
(he also did some nice things for my daughter
Sara (si ri "silk sun/day") and wife Martha (ma
hua - "agate bouquet" -- skipping the usual
"horse" though that "ma" is used as the phonetic
behind a "jade" radical). 



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