30Oct/092
Ideogram Fun
Via Sean at NeoChaEDGE, here's a cool visual representation of the Chinese characters of various food items.
Can you tell what each of these items are?
Answers after the jump:
From left to right, top to bottom:
羊: sheep
牛: cow, ox
猪: pig
葱: onion
蒜: garlic
é±¼: fish
虾: shrimp
蟹: crab
èœ: vegetables
笋: shoots (also part of the word for asparagus: 芦笋)
鸡: chicken
é¸: duck
é¹…: goose
蛋: eggs
竹: bamboo
茄: eggplant
è‡: mushroom
瓜: melon
è—•: lotus root
è: carrot
苹: apple
梨: plum
æ©™: orange
æŸ : lemon
莓: strawberry
ç±³: wild rice
é¥: cooked rice, meal
豆: bean
è„: grape
桃: peach
October 30th, 2009 - 21:24
To an untrained eye, the actual characters look nothing like the visual representations. I can obviously see a fish in the representation, but the character sure as hell looks like some interconnected lines that form a rectangle that is bisected both horizontally and vertically with other lines.
And honestly, I think the English word “eggs” looks more like an egg than the Chinese word. There are some round stuff in the ‘g’s
November 1st, 2009 - 20:30
Jascha,
I agree- few modern characters, especially the simplified ones we use on the mainland, look anything like their meaning. There are exceptions though; one of my favorite words in Chinese is rainforest, which looks like this: 雨林.