Monday, October 13, 2014

0069 崩


This character means ‘to crumble, fall to pieces, collapse.’ It’s pronounced and kuzusu in Japanese, and in Chinese it’s bēng.

The upper figure


means ‘mountain,’ and the representation is pretty transparent. Three peaks. The lower part of the character consists of two of these:

.

And each of them means ‘moon, month.’ They are just there as phonetic clues to the pronunciation of the word.

The archaic forms

  

suggest a way of remembering the character’s meaning. Can you see the moon characters as a representation of an avalanche down the slopes of the mountain?

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