Another Short History of Linguistics (13)

Today, Chinese people found if any character have to accompany a group of male, female, young etc. characters, it would be endless character, so they shift to use character combined compound words. That is male-cattle 公牛, female-cattle母牛 and young-cattle 小牛etc. So the number of necessary to remember is saved greatly. Later we will talking about where the character of male 公and female 母 came from.

The number of Chinese characters have been invented more than 100,000 yet today, we only use 3,000 of then to express everything, what about the rest of them? They are sleep in dictionary, but one day some of them may wake up again. For instance the character of 囧 few years ago, when someone put it on internet, the Chinese people even don’t know what it is. But now it has been widely accepted. A young girl said, “When I talk to someone in the internet, who pretend my age and he ask me what 囧 is?  Immediately I know he is not my age person, he must be much older than I thought.”

 Pic from: http://images.uncyc.org/zh-tw/thumb/6/61/%E5%9B%A7%E8%87%89%E6%BA%BC%E5%B7%B4%E7%AD%94.jpg/300px-%E5%9B%A7%E8%87%89%E6%BA%BC%E5%B7%B4%E7%AD%94.jpg

Put this character in Google image, you will find many pictures about it. The character of口means mouth.