WANT!

[kevyn]

Just when I begin to learn to read Chinese, BoingBoing puts the spotlight on this:



"...Chinese characters are cleverly placed over some of the things."

Cool! Definitely WANT!

( Ganked from BoingBoing )

Comments

[aadroma.livejournal.com]

Just remember that many Chinese characters contain both a semantic element and a phonetic element. That is to say, part of the character will relate to the character's meaning, and another part will be related to how the character is (or more likely, was) pronounced.

In Mandarin, too, there are quite a number of characters that are "borrowed", meaning that they originally had one meaning but are commonly used for another meaning altogether -- see 沒, méi, which originally meant "drown" (and has a water radical), but now means "not" (as in, saying something doesn't exist in 沒有, méiyǒu.