About Age (1)

If a language has too much words ready for use and only a handful contents need to be expressed then the speaker would change expression style in many different forms, in order to make the expression not too boring. Or we may say the form >content, people would try to use various form for one content. That happened in ancient China, when there was no scientific and technical terms like our times. I think it is also a reason for English words of after having pig, meat still introduce a word of pork too.

For instance, in English the words about age could be teenager, adult, juvenile, gossoon, lad, girl, boy, lass etc. among them only the ‘teenage’ telling exactly how old and the rest are vague, yet you can find out plenty word in China dealing with the age:

Normally every word was a story. Here we only list their images. As for the story, we may tell in future.

Sheep horn image 1:

If a slave girl keep such hair style, then she was called 丫头, it means ‘丫head’. For the ancient Chinese tradition attach great importance to parents rank, so if say someone was born by ‘丫head’, it is very rude, like the English ‘son of bitch’.

Cardamom image 2:

Change hair style image 3:

Split character 瓜:

The Chinese cursive writing of 瓜 looked like image 4:

While the Chinese character eight is八, split the 瓜could be look like two 八（eight）s mean sixteen.

So the split 瓜melon means two eights or sixteen.