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[3]: 124 The Chinese character for fish is yu (traditional Chinese: 魚; simplified Chinese: 鱼; pinyin: yú). It is pronounced with a different tone in modern Chinese, 裕 (yù) means "abundance". Alternatively, 餘, meaning "over, more than", is a true homophone, so the common Chinese New Year greeting appears as 年年有魚 or 年年有餘.
Some characters are only attested in the oracle bone script, dropping out of later usage and usually being replaced by newer characters. An example is a fragment bearing character for 'spring' that has no known modern counterpart. In such cases, available context may be used to determine the possible meaning of the character.
After Wang Yirong discovered in 1899 that ancient bone fragments on sale for medicinal purposes bore an early form of Chinese characters, there was great interest in these bones. Local farmers dug up at least nine caches containing about 100,000 fragments, which were sold to collectors, both Chinese and foreign. [ 1 ]
Xian are common characters in Chinese fantasy works. There is a genre called xianxia , which is part of a larger genre called cultivation fantasy or cultivation, named after the beings where characters usually seek to become xian in a fantasy world that is either militaristic or fraught with other dangers.
The Chinese dragon or loong [1] is a legendary creature in Chinese mythology, Chinese folklore, and Chinese culture generally. Chinese dragons have many animal-like forms, such as turtles and fish , but are most commonly depicted as snake-like with four legs.
Oracle bones bear the earliest known significant corpus of ancient Chinese writing, using an early form of Chinese characters. [ a ] The inscriptions contain around 5,000 different characters, many of which are still being used today, [ 6 ] though the total number of discrete characters is uncertain as some may be different versions of the same ...
The form of early Chinese divination was pyro-osteomancy (or pyromancy), denoting burning animal bones to seek answers to human inquiries. [127] Oracle bone divination with scapulae and turtle shells was a source of state power for the late Shang dynasty (c. 1250 – 1046 BCE).
Most Chinese characters represent only one morpheme, and in that case the meaning of the character is the meaning of the morpheme recorded by the character. For example: 猫: māo, cat, the name of a domestic animal that can catch mice. The morpheme "māo" has one meaning, and the Chinese character "猫" also has one meaning.