Dongxi means “thing” or “something” (东西/ dōngxi), which is a little specific, very general meaning. At the
same it can mean east and west (东西/ dōngxī), it could be a name (董襲 / Dǒng Xí) or it can be a
location (for example洞溪 / dòngxī).
As a noun dōngxī means “east and west” or as an adverb “from east to
west” (东西 / dōngxī / east and west), but at the same
time these two characters can also mean “thing” (东西 / dōngxi / thing).
Now why do the words “east-west” also have the seemingly so unrelated
meaning “thing”? There are numerous anecdotes and potential explanations. Sheng Wenhe was said to have asked his friend the philosopher Zhu Xi “Why do you buy east-west,
why not north-south?”. Zhu Xi referred to the theory of the five elements,
which associates each of the elements with an orientation. Zhu Xi said south is
fire and will burn his basket, north is water and he cannot carry it in his
basket. Earth he doesn’t need and his basket can only carry wood and metal, so
he buys “east-west”.
Another potential explanation could be related to trading with imported
goods, coming from the east such as Japan and Korea or from the west such as
the Middle East and Europe, which were sold on markets for east-west-wares,
which was later shortened to “east-west” for “things”. A similar explanation
attributes the origin of the word “thing” to two markets in the east and west
of Chang’an city.
As a completely different possibility, the meaning could also be unrelated
to cardinal directions but stem from the original meaning of the individual
characters which mean bag and basket, something in which “things” are usually
carried.
The character 东 (dōng) evolved from a
pictogram that represented a bag which is tied at both ends, similar to how
candies are wrapped. This can still be guessed when looking at the traditional
version of the character:東. In spoken language the sound “dōng” means “east”
and a similar sound was already associated with this character. The reason why
the character 东 became the written expression for “east” might not
have been the meaning but the pronunciation of the character. The same might be
true for the character 西 (xī), which originally represented a bag or a
basket and became the written expression for “west”.
Nevertheless, the character東can be imagined to represent the rising sun日 behind a tree木 with the rising sun symbolizing the east, although this mnemonic trick
may not be the real origin of the character. The traditional character東 in its simplified form东was derived from cursive
script, a shorthand calligraphic style for Chinese characters. As a mnemonic
for the word “west”, the character 西can be imagined to represent a bird sitting in
its nest looking towards the west.
Sources and further reading:
No comments:
Post a Comment