480531170

nifying a person looking outside and perceiving
it as bright, giving ‘clear, bright’ (Gu). Katō
also takes as ‘person’, or rather ‘big person’,
but rejects the ‘window’ interpretation, regarding
reduplicated instead as phonetic
with associated sense ‘wound, injure’, giving
‘suffer a wound’. A further view (noted by
Mizukami) takes reduplicated as representing
breasts or tattoos, giving the proposed
meaning ‘pair of breasts/tattoos on a person’.
Perhaps a weak point with the breasts/tattoos
proposal, at least as far as breasts are concerned,
is that the elements accompanying
in the OBI (status tentative) and bronze
occurrences appear to represent something
other than breasts. Difficult to ascertain what
was originally represented by this graph. See
Note below. ‘Refreshing’ is almost certainly an
extended meaning from ‘clear’. Note: the element
reduplicated is perhaps a regularization
of the rather divergent shapes in OBI
and bronze. OT1968:250; GY2008:1212-13;
KJ1970:587-8; MS1995:v2:822-3. We suggest
taking the graph as ‘big person’ 56 and the
crosses as wounds.
Mnemonic: BIG MAN WITH FOUR WOUNDS
CLEARLY NEEDS REFRESHING
1637
L1
喪
SŌ, mo
mourn, loss, death
12 strokes
SŌSHITSUloss, forfeiture
moFUKUmourning dress
moCHŪin mourning
Bronze ; seal . Bronze form has 985 ‘die;
lose’ (originally, depiction of person hiding),
together with what in one view is taken as 㖾
(original way of writing [CO, ‘quarrel loudly
to correct someone’]) as phonetic with associated
sense ‘die, disappear’, giving ‘corpse is reduced
to bleached bones through exposure to
elements’ (Katō). Alternatively (Gu), the bronze
form is interpreted as consisting of twisted
branches of a mulberry tree combined with 㗊
(‘noisy’) or (same meaning here), signifying
‘people wailing/lamenting beneath mulberry
tree’; Gu notes that in ancient times there was
an association between the mulberry tree and
the grieving process when someone died.
Another view is offered by Shirakawa, who
interprets on the basis of the bronze form
as originally consisting of , plus CO ‘wail,
lament, mourn’ (originally, ‘dog howls’); he
interprets this combination idiosyncratically as
lining up prayer receptacles (his interpretation
of ) and adding a dog sacrifice to them, giving
the overall meaning ‘lament the deceased’;
alternatively, it seems ‘lament the deceased’
could be extrapolated from this combination
of elements simply by taking in its generalized
sense ‘lament’ (the bronze forms vary in
shape: several could be taken as including
a tree with twisted branches, while several
others could alternatively represent a dog).
Proposed OBI equivalents are listed by Mizukami
and also Gu. SS1984:544; MS1995:v1:240-
41,230-31,v2:836-7; KJ1970:409-10;
GY2008:578; AS2007:337; ZY2009:v1:134.
We suggest taking this graph as ‘ten’ 35,
two boxes , and as ‘strange’ variant of
clothes 444.
Mnemonic: MOURN THE LOSS OF TWO
BOXES OF STRANGE CLOTHES
1638
痩
SŌ, yaseru
become thin
L1
12 strokes
SŌSHINslender body
yasetsuchibarren soil
yasegataskinny figure
Seal ; a late graph (Shuowen); traditional
. Has 404 ‘sick-bed, sickness’, and (‘old
man’; see 1630) as phonetic with associated
sense ‘slender’, giving ‘grow thin’. For the modern
form, we suggest 2003 ‘hand’ and
338 (‘expound, talk’). OT1968:681; TA1965:206-
12; GY2008:1747.
Mnemonic: HANDY TALK ABOUT SICKNESS
THAT MAKES YOU THIN
486 The Remaining 1130 Characters