Talk:犟

huiyizi
Could also be huiyizi --Geographyinitiative (talk) 14:02, 21 November 2020 (UTC)
 * I'd take the book 汉字字源 with a huge grain of salt. — justin(r)leung { (t...) 17:00, 21 November 2020 (UTC)
 * I agree of course, but I include it on this talk page because I feel that "stubborn" and "strong cow" (or similar) could be related via metaphor in the mind of the creator(s) of this character. The problems I have encountered with glyph origins are: (1) the common man wants to find a huiyizi origin for all Chinese characters and will latch on to anything they see that gives a meaning to the Chinese character components, which creates a giant industry of bullshit books catering to these people (both for Chinese people and non-Chinese people have this problem), (2) the common man hates the idea that Chinese characters include phonetic components and will try hard ignore it even if there is no other explanation for the component in the character, (3) apparently no serious work has been done to establish the approximate dates or dynasties to which individual characters have been dated or if there is, we ignore it on Wiktionary except for the broad categories of "original" (characters Zhengzhang would have) and "后起字" (non-original characters), which is just not enough- we could go deeper with each character just like we go deeper with many words in English. Every glyph origin should (at minimum) say the dynasty or general era of history that a character is dated to- that's the origin part of glyph origin.
 * For this character, if society were not influenced by the "ideographic myth" we could have an honest discussion about what was in the minds of the people who made this character. Did they mean to imply "strong cow" is connected to the meaning "stubborn"? I would imagine that someone creating Chinese characters WOULD see a connection there- a scholar in an ancient agrarian society may have seen stubborn livestock before, strongly resisting the will of the farmer. This character becomes analogous to the English language concept of "stubborn mule". But again, because of the ideographic myth's influence, people today will gloss over the second half of the glyph origin- someone who is making up Chinese characters may have seen a pronunciation connection to 强 as well. So the ancients may have intentionally created a huiyi jian xingsheng zi.  But because the common man today does not want to hear that Chinese character components are connected to the sound of the character overall, hence the scam book 汉字字源 relegates that part of the explanation to a terse sentence, catering to the ideographic myth.  The real question here is: when was this character created, and what did the people who made it think the components represented? To know that, we really need a date/dynasty of origin and a general location of origin. Zhengzhang doesn't have this character, so it could be a later character.
 * I would want the glyph origin to be something like:
 * "Glyph Origin
 * Ming, southern China.
 * Phono-semantic & Ideographic compound-
 * then-Mandarin/or/local language pronunciation of the character at the general location the character came from (xxx),
 * original meaning ;
 * then the pronunciation of the phonetic (yxx) in that same language of origin, and
 * the meaning of the phonetic (strong),
 * plus the meaning of the semantic (cow);
 * potential note on how the two components were combined to make the original meaning" ;
 * potential note on the relationship of the phonetic component to the pronunciation of the character- if the pronunciations are not the same, why are they different? --Geographyinitiative (talk) 14:12, 22 November 2020 (UTC)