瑜 Yú - This character contains five others within it: wang, ren, yi, yue, and dao. That means - king, people, one, month, knife
伽 jiā - This character contains three others within it: ren, li, kou. That means - person, strength, mouth
So in order to remember the character, I make up a story, such as: "The king, a person, in one month cuts one like a knife. This person's strength is in the mouth." Hmm, you could philosophize about that with respect to yoga teachers, eh? The teacher is like a king, who in one month cuts things from your life. Remember the invocation thanking Patanjali for the "jungle doctor curing you"? The teacher's strength is in the mouth because he or she communicates instructions and advice with it. Well in reality they pass through the knowledge silently through adjustments as well, but the mouth symbolizes communication. A month of study with a teacher can have life changing effects.
People who grow up learning Chinese probably don't make those associations. They learn the characters by rote without giving a lot of thought to their meaning. Those of us who learn the language late in life find it useful to make up stories so that we can remember the characters and their meaning.
Moving on to something else, now Acro Yoga has frequent flyer programs as well. See this. I'm mesmerized by this picture from their website.
6 comments:
Being a native Chinese speaker, I indeed do not use the mnemonic devices that you do. But you might actually be getting closer to the meanings of the original words using these devices: After all, as I understand it, Chinese characters were originally pictograms that directly depict things in the actual world. I wonder if that might explain why Chinese thought tends not to be very abstract in nature. Just wondering...
Dear Nobel
The reason you don't use mnemonics is because you probably learned the caracters by repetition in grammar school, something westerners are not accustomed to with respect to Chinese. You might have learned later some meanings of the pictograms, but the first method of learning was probably constant repetition. You may be right about your observation about Chinese thought not being abstract- however, other than what I have learned about Buddhism here, I don't have an insight into Chinese thought. When I studied philosophy, my training was purely western. I'm now learning eastern philosophy indirectly.
After writing what I wrote about the characters, I realize that some parts of characters are for meaning and others for pronounciation. Hence in the Yu of yoga, the character for month, yue, may be there for pronounciation, not meaning.
Cheers,
Arturo
Actually, the character for month, yue, is also used to indicate bodily parts. Many characters for various body parts (jiao3, "leg", nao3, "brain", to name a couple) have yue on the left side. So I'm guessing that Yu of yoga has yue in it because yoga is a discipline that deals with the body parts. I'm no Chinese etymologist, but I think this is a fairly educated guess. Interesting, don't you think?
Hmm... I had been a bit dry on ideas for blog posts the past couple of days. This might get me started on something.
Dear Nobel
I passed your observations to the teacher, who said yes, many body parts have yue (month) in it. We're not sure why that is.
I think your writing is of high quality. It is difficult to keep spinning the yarn. I'm more visual, so I like posting pictures. Although I suggested the wordle, it's only because the result would be funny with the post you made. By all means if you prefer to mostly write, then stick to that. A lot of us will be reading.
Cheers,
Arturo
No no, Dear Gentlemen, of course the body parts do not have the moon element in them!
A little character etymology is needed here:
When 月 is only part of a character (and not the full character 'moon') is can either be in the meaning of moon (as is 明,望, 朝 etc), or it can be as an abbreviated (= squeezed together) version of meat 肉 (as in 腕, 肌, 肝, 脳, 腸 plus all other body parts and some other words for smelly and rotten etc).
(I only know Japanese so my examples of Chinese characters might not be current Chinese writing, but the meaning is the same.)
Dear Roselil
Thanks for your input! I learned a lot from it. It does make sense that the moon character 月 in words that refer to body parts would be an abbreviation of the character for meat 肉 and would explain why it's found in Yu 瑜.
Making up stories is really for the help of the mind remembering the characters. Some stories make sense with respect to the characters and are amusing. For example, the character for "buy" is 买, which is the character tou for head 头 with a hat on. So the story is that if you are in a shopping mode it's because you're looking for a hat for your head. The character for selling is 卖, which is the character for the number 10 over the hat over the head. So if you have 10 hats, you have too many and you need to sell some. haha.
I need characters that will improve my yoga character. If you do yoga really well, you have to teach other people to do it.
Cheers,
Arturo
Post a Comment