Chinese characters: 02 (鮮 (鲜) / xiān, xiǎn)

 

鮮 (鲜) is made up of 魚 (鱼) / yú / fish and 羊 yáng / sub-family caprinae which includes sheep and goat.

    Pronounced in the first tone (level tone: xiān), it means “fresh”, which is easy to understand.  Fish and sheep/goat meat are strong in smell, especially if they go off, so they have to be fresh.  (I know, I know, the logic should be a character that indicates “not fresh” as they smell so strong, but then I tend to choose a path that makes it easier for my students to understand / remember.)

    Another reading for the same character, however, is a third tone version (xiǎn), which means “rare”, e.g., 

鮮有 / 鲜有 / xiǎn yǒu / “rare have” = to be few and far between 

鮮見 / 鲜见 / xiǎn jiàn / “rare see” = to be seldom met with 

鮮為人知 / 鲜为人知 / xiǎn wéi rén zhī / “rare by people know” = to be little known

    Now, isn’t that interesting:  that “fresh” and “rare” should share the same character!?

    Here's my personal theory.  In ancient days when the written script first came into being, technology hadn’t got to the point of making transporting fresh food fast and easy.

    Therefore, fresh fish would’ve been rare, because a huge tract of China is away from the sea and even from rivers.  

    Ditto fresh sheep/goat meat:  China doesn't have that much land for rearing grazing animals like cows and sheep, because so much of it is mountains or desert, so it’s not a country known for its dairy culture (haha, word play!).

Chinese tones and English vowels

It had always baffled me why so many Western students of Chinese simply cannot tell the difference between Chinese tones (just to name one aspect of the Chinese language), which makes them come up with the totally wrong interpretation of the message.  

    I have now thought of the English equivalent for non-English speakers:  the English long vowel and short vowel, which a lot of speakers of Chinese and some, if not all, European languages just cannot distinguish.

    Examples:

--> People will say “sheeps”, and get corrected (“no s for plural sheep”), when it is “ships” they meant to say.

--> One French girl was losing at a croquet game in a posh-neighbourhood garden in Surrey, and protested loudly, “You can’t!  You can’t!!”  Except that she uttered the short vowel version — spelt with "u" instead of "a" — of (the British pronunciation of) “can’t”, thus rendering it into a four-letter swear word.

--> One French woman said she had a farm wedding, with a tractor loaded with hay and her beloved grandmother’s “shit” on the hay.  She’d meant the long vowel version: sheet (as in bedsheet).