Rrrrrrrrandom!

[kiya]

Kevin has apparently won a jade Laughing Buddha statue in his most recent card tournament. It was the Sportsmanship Award. (Did you know that CCG tournaments had Sportsmanship Awards?)

So he came home and put it down next to me.

I'd sorta wanted to have a Laughing Buddha around.

It gives me the giggles every time I look at it.

Which just goes to show that it works.

(Incidentally, can anyone here read Chinese characters? I'm curious as to what it says on the base. I can tinker with the photos of him to get something for the characters if anyone can actually read them.)

Comments

Re: sort of kind of maybe

[boojum.livejournal.com]

Hmm. I can't see the characters well enough to get a stroke count[1]. The first and third look like characters I've seen before, though. The first looks like "know". (This animated image of the character being drawn (http://www.ocrat.com/chargif/GB/horiz/d6aa.html) should show you what it looks like even if your browser doesn't have Asian fonts.) The third looks like "life". (animated picture (http://www.ocrat.com/chargif/GB/horiz/c9fa.html))

Pages of links for the first (http://zhongwen.com/cgi-bin/zi3.cgi?uni=77E5) and third (http://zhongwen.com/cgi-bin/zi3.cgi?uni=751F) character.


[1] The way you look up characters in a kanji dictionary is by radicals (subcharacter bits) and stroke count. This is complicated by stroke count not always mapping to "count the lines" or even "count the number of pen/brush strokes used to make the character" and probably by the Chinese/Japanese differences.

Re: sort of kind of maybe

[kiya]

Hm. The first one is pretty close -- the image you linked to only differs in that the sign on the statue is a square, and that one is a rectangle with feet.

The third is spot on.

The second one is a . . . damn, I used to know that character, I think . . . I don't know the order. It's got a horizontal stroke and a vertical stroke; two diagonal strokes downwards at forty-five degrees; two strokes upwards that are sort of dots -- they don't connect. That's under a radical that reminds me of a temple or building: cross-stroke with a hook on the right side, stroke above that, stroke above that with a slanting stroke to its left.

"Know" and "Life". That makes sense, I think. Much coolness -- thanks!

The fourth one is a rectangle divided into three parts with two strokes under it (not touching), which I can only describe as a moustache, accompanied by a character that looks like a crossed J with a diagonal stroke coming up to meet the cross-point on the left.

Re: sort of kind of maybe

[boojum.livejournal.com]

Did you clear up the image again, or were my eyes blurry this morning? The verbal descriptions help too.

The second one seems to be a variant of ki (spirit, mind). It's usually seen as the roof-radical with an assymmetric X under it. The X looks a little like a dagger to me. If you go to this wwwjdic page (http://www.csse.monash.edu.au/cgi-bin/cgiwrap/~ssb/access?Ac=A&AeC=on&Au=www.csse.monash.edu.au/cgi-bin/cgiwrap/jwb/wwwjdic%3F1R) and pick the two radicals involved, you get a choice of two characters. The first one (and its alternate) are what I'm thinking of. The roof-radical is in the middle of the second row of four-stroke radicals and the radical underneath it is the second six-stroke radical. The script which translates all characters into mini-images won't give me a proper URL for the destination page, for some reason.

The fourth one is probably wealth (animated picture (http://etext.lib.virginia.edu/cgi-local/breen/wwwhalsod?1457_%BA%E2)). I hadn't thought of that part as a mustache, but it makes sense, and will help me distinguish in my head between those two marks and the two marks where the righthand one is a sort of L-shape. I'd been thinking of them both as "feet". Thanks for the mnemonic!

I think square vs. rectangle-with-feet is a font issue. I think proper handwriting of the radical gives you a sort of rounded-trapeziod-short-side-down-with feet, which is at the other end of the continuum from the block-printing square.

This was fun to do.

These posts have been brought to you by Jim Breen's wwwjdic (http://www.csse.monash.edu.au/~jwb/wwwjdic.html) and the Nelson character dictionary.

Re: sort of kind of maybe

[kiya]

Ooh, wow, neat toy! (The WWWJDIC page.) Yeah, spirit/mind looks like that's what that is. And wealth looks right, too. Yay! Thank you much indeed!

Glad my weird visualisation descriptions were useful to you. :)

I wouldn't be surprised if it were a font/handwriting issue; from the very minimal experience I have with this sort of pictographic writing that seems in accord.

I'm glad you had fun. :) Thanks again for the help.