Nov 17, 2013 - Part 9

Part 9

Dr. Oliver Lee’s Presentation at the Tsung Tsin Meeting  - 11/17/2013

I passed out the following handout, which Luther also projected on our computer screen. I said that some members had expressed interest in learning how to write their own family names, so I compiled 16 family names in modern simplified characters and traditional Chinese characters, followed by their pronunciation in standard Hakka, and the altered Hakka as pronounced in counties closer to Canton such as Zhongshan, Bao On, Huiyang, etc.

Then I used the blackboard to illustrate several principles used in the writing of Chinese characters.

First, the strokes are always written from top to bottom (never from bottom up, except for some upward hooks), and from left to right (never from right to left, except for some downward slanted strokes). Usually, but not always, the horizontal strokes come first, then the vertical strokes.

Second, as shown more clearly with the traditional characters, Chinese characters tend to occupy a rectangular imaginary frame. If you go outside that frame, the character tends to be distorted and irregular (although in cursory brush strokes the characters are often quite irregular, as seen for example in Mao Zedong’s poems).

Next I used the character for Lim/Lam/Lum to demonstrate the sequence of strokes. Along the way I explained that the 木 character means “tree”, and if you put two “tree” characters together you get the word 林，which means “forest “, and if you want to get poetic about it, you can use the character 森，followed by the character林. This gives you  森林，and you really got yourself a forest.

Then I showed an example of the down-to-earth basis of many Chinese characters. I wrote the 木 character, but with the tree branches somewhat low. This allowed me to insert the character for “sun” （日）into my original “tree” character, creating a new character, 東, which means “east”.  So if a person is looking at a tree in the morning, and sees the sun behind the tree, she is looking east, and that’s what the東 character expresses.. Unfortunately, there’s no comparable explanation for what happens when the person is looking at a tree in the evening.

I closed by offering to coach anybody, whenever convenient. in the writing of his or her name in Chinese.

Common Chinese Family Names