Also, why 食 is translated as "Eclipse" in Google?
Also, since ancient Chinese people thought eclipse was caused by a "dog in the sky" eating the moon, it's reasonable for them to use "食" to describe it. But modern Chinese almost always say "月食", meaning eclipse of the moon, to distinguish from eclipse of the sun, so Google Translate did this wrong. It should translate it to "eat" or "food" first.
I personally find that elitist though, but then again, in chinese history there was always a distinction between what the commoner spoke (白话文) and what the intellectual elites wrote (文言文) so I'm not surprised that this mentality has continued on
EDIT:
I'd also like to add that 食物 is food, which translates literally to "eat" and "thing". Put together it means "edible thing", i.e. food. The original meaning of 食 still means, "eat", not "food". It's a modern contraction that "食" means food
I'm just suggesting from modern Chinese's perspective, because, after all, we are modern people. 文言文 (uh I don't know its English translation) is fun to read and learn, but it's like Latin since basically nobody writes it anymore.
I do find 文言文 to be quite elegant and terse though.
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Is a preference for 食 a Taiwanese thing? All the mainland Chinese people I've ever heard say 吃.
Since HK was quite insulated from the Cultural Revolution, and evidence from older texts that use 食 all the time (喫 was not really used IINM), it would not be amiss to say that the development to prefer 吃 is quite new. Hence in my other post I mentioned that it was political agenda that drove selection of preferred words to use.
addendum: I think there is also a nice narrative in the shift to use 吃 - it was more a "commoner" word, and communism was then about replacing the elite sounding words with simpler words that is common to everyone.
乞 is most commonly used with 乞丐 (begger), but the etymology of the word comes from qi (气) according to zhongwen.com
I'm a westerner who learned Japanese as an adult. I feel its quite unfortunate how much of the meaning was lost with the Chinese simplification. I can mostly make out Taiwanese/Republic of China newspapers, but can see nothing in the simplified characters.
Edit: Yay, I'm wrong, see below. Thank you internet.
And although I don't know the "喰" character, I can tell it didn't become Chinese 吃 and Japanese 食. 食 is more "ancient", where "吃" seems only used so widely in modern time.
Simplification of Chinese characters indeed started many arguments, but the "tranditional" Chinese used in Taiwan has also developed some "simplified" characters.
On the other hand, you might recognize 吃 as the 喫 from 喫茶店 (café).
The Chinese simplification was overall a good thing. A lot of the simplifications are from Japanese, even. Like, compare the Traditional 體 with the Simplified 体 (body) - the latter is from Japanese.
Those simplifications appear to have been designed purely for reduction of stroke count (that is, making it faster to write by hand), not for simplification in the sense of making it more simple, logical, and consistent.
(As a matter of fact, that "simplification" introduced further inconsistencies, in that certain radicals were written differently when part of a character, while the traditional writing maintained it. Example: 金 gold is the left part of money, which you can see in the traditional 錢, but not in the simplified 钱. Similarly 言 in traditional 說 vs simplified 说.)
Japanese kanji come from Chinese characters, but has become very different too. As a native Chinese, I think there is a clear link between modern simplified Chinese and 'near ancient' Chinese character. Here 'near ancient' means characters used up to 汉(漢, Han) Dynasty. Before Han, Chinese was very different too. There has always been a simplification process and a link.
It was quite funny because staff at restaurants thought I was some kind of weirdo who could point at exactly what he wanted on the menu but couldn't answer basic questions.
They appear to have simplified them predictably in a way that is not impossible to understand if you have a senior HS-level of kanji knowledge.
For the record, 食 is a pictogram of a small amount of food (the "roof" looking thing) stacked on a heavily stylized pictogram of a kind of table or plate (do an image search for 'takatsuki table'). It's claimed the Japanese word for bean 豆, has an older stylization of the same takatsuki table with a little bit of food at the top.
From a learning to read and memorization perspective, most people will probably find doing Look/Cover/Write/Check type drills (either manually or with a spaced repetition flashcard program like Anki) much more effective than using mnemonics based on (sometimes very complex) etymology.
EDIT: found another one: http://imgur.com/BsQsNBb
It uses mnemonics, but it only loosely follows real etymologys. It diverges to nonsensical, but memorable stories when this will make things easier to remember. It also has mnemonics to remember tone and pronunciation (for Mandarin Chinese only though).
I don't know which of these is true, if any of them is. But your link doesn't have enough etymological information to indicate one way or another, either!
It's a "leaky abstraction". Makes things easier, until it doesn't. Much lik3 "I before E, except after C"
For example, when you write "inconceivable," you're not regurgitating every single letter in a line from memory. You probably remember the prefix "in," "conceive," and you know "able." You probably also know the common patterns "cei" or "eive" or "con," so the word "inconceivable" really isn't as complex as the initial length makes it look, as long as you know the blocks.
Kanji/hanzi are the same way -- they look complex and inscrutable to the uneducated eye, but they're all made of common building blocks that make it easier to remember them. After all, human memory works roughly the same way all the world around; people wouldn't be able to memorize thousands of 20-stroke character if they were all completely patternless.
The vocabulary utilizing kanji/hanzi works the same way.
Someone could look at "inconceivable" and say "well shit, that doesn't make sense! It's long, you'd have to memorize so many letters, and the letters themselves have so many bits! Plus it has 'in' in it, which makes no sense because 'in' commonly means 'inside of something', and 'con' usually means 'to swindle someone'! This alphabet thing is completely useless."
It's absurd, reductionist, and a bit offensive.
'what does "in-con-ceiv-able" mean?'
as opposed to 'what does "..." mean'
A japanese beginner will see 照り焼き and say "uhhhh.. ri..."
compare this with seeing テリヤキ
Really? You don't think someone with less experience in English would say "what does... inkonsayvaybull mean?" There are plenty of instances where the word is not pronounced the way you think it is.
> A japanese beginner will see 照り焼き and say "uhhhh.. ri..."
A child or beginner would probably be more likely to say "uh, what's that thing with the 日 and the 火, it's something ri something ki." Just because something is a symbol doesn't mean you can't describe it. Children are also very likely to just sketch out a picture of what they remember, even if it's incorrect, and you can usually figure that out.
You're missing his point and English is a crappy example because it's spelling is an unmitigated disaster. For example, if you can read and vocalize the Greek alphabet, you can just ask someone what "νόστιμο φαγητό"* means because you can vocalize it. You only need basic knowledge of the alphabet there. Where as with Chinese/Japanese you need to have a good base of characters to be able to potentially vocalize an unknown character which requires much more work than learning a new alphabet.
(* νόστιμο φαγητό means delicious food)
While many Chinese characters have a phonetic component (in addition to a component related to the meaning), it rarely corresponds exactly to the current pronunciation (in Mandarin).
Furthermore, you can very rarely conjure the right character out of pronunciation and and some aspect of the meaning.
> people wouldn't be able to memorize thousands of 20-stroke character if they were all completely patternless.
Well, people don't. 20 strokes is an unusually high stroke count, and people don't remember thousands of those. Simplified chinese characters were created because traditional characters were too complex and cumbersome for people to remember.
Also why did Korea and Vietnam abandon them entirely?
Or just inertia. Norway has had a steady stream of language reforms over the last century aimed at bringing the official written language better into sync with a majority of spoken dialects. This is a result of hundreds of years of Danish rule that ended in 1814, followed by the period of national-romanticism in the period up to the subsequent break from Sweden, that led to a lot of desire to make language etc. more uniquely Norwegian.
As a simple example, we inherited parts of Danish counting.
It used to be in some parts of the country that we'd say "fire og tyve" for 24 - literally "four and twenty". This was changed to "tjuefire" (twentyfour) in the early 1950's. Anyone who has learned Norwegian in school since then has learned the new form in school and been marked down for using the old forms etc.
Despite that, and being born to parents who were in primary school when this had just changed and who learned the new forms, I still regularly use the old form.
I never learned it at school, and I occasionally had teachers complain about it. I don't use it consistently, to make matters worse - it's not a conscious choice to use a more conservative style or anything, it's just habit I picked up mostly from my dad, which is persisting in my spoken language now, when I'm 41, despite having changed in a language reform a couple of decades before I was born.
This is a difference where there's no practical benefit at all to the old form - it's longer, and the new form is more consistent with spoken Norwegian overall -, yet more than half a century later the old form still persists out of habit.
In particular, trying to engineer changes to language tends to take a long time even when there's no resistance to the change.
Is that what they use hanyu pinyin for these days? I've always thought of pinyin as a pronunciation guide for Mandarin, similar to furigana in Japanese.
If I had to guess, most Japanese people aren't going to have much trouble disambiguating ‘eat’ from ‘eclipse’. (And as zorceta explains, Chinese uses different hanzi for them anyway.)
(https://en.wiktionary.org/wiki/%E5%8F%A3#Etymology and https://en.wiktionary.org/wiki/%E6%97%A5#Etymology if you didn't get the admittedly horrible pun.)