Tuesday, September 23, 2014

0006 冬

冬


This is fuyu, meaning 'winter.' The two lower marks are an alteration of


冫


which means 'ice' or 'water,' and which is itself an 'abbreviation' of


氷


which means 'ice.'


The other part of the character—


夂


—is not used in any other character in Japanese (as far as I can tell), but it comes from an old character representing a thread skein, fastened by a pin, which signals 'the end' and 'fixation.' The notion is that winter is the 'frozen end of the year,' i.e., ice plus the end of of the skein.

No comments:

Post a Comment