A little Chinese

[puerhking]

I dont know about you guys but I get tired of not knowing what my beengs say. So I thought I would share a bit of what I have learned.

The meanings below are for the individual characters. When they are paired together the meaning can change.

for each character from left to right:

Menghai tea factory

1) meng - I am guessing on this one because I could not find this character for meng.

2) hai = sea

3) cha = tea

4) chang = cliff can also mean factory

China

5)zhong = middle (middle kingdom aka china) this can stand alone for china

6) guo = country 5/6 together = china

Yunnan

7) yun = cloud

8 nan = south

Xishuangbanna

9) xi = west

10) shang = pair

11) ban = wooden piece

12) na = thread entering? not sure on this one



If anyone else wants to share perhaps collectively we can understand some of this mystery.

I found a really good book at the library - Learning Chinese Characters - Tuttle

[wyardley]

for each character from left to right:

Menghai tea factory

1) meng - I am guessing on this one because I could not find this character for meng.

http://www.panix.com/~perin/babelcarp.c ... se=menghai
http://www.nciku.com/search/zh/detail/%E5%8B%90/134659

Xishuangbanna

9) xi = west

10) shang = pair

11) ban = wooden piece

I think it's bǎn (版) as in "edition", "page", or "printing plate"

12) na = thread entering? not sure on this one

http://www.panix.com/~perin/babelcarp.c ... huangbanna
http://www.nciku.com/search/zh/detail/%E7%BA%B3/1310719

nà is 纳, as in to accept or receive.

Why doesn't the name make any sense? Well Babelcarp also says:
"name deriving from the Dai word Sipsongpanna, literally Twelve Thousand Rice Fields"

Based on the comments there, I think a lot of the local names in Yunnan are in local languages of the ethnic minorities there, so when they're written in characters, they're just phonetic approximations of the name that don't necessarily have much (or any) meaning.

[puerhking]

Thanks for your insight wyardley. I do understand, as per the book I am reading, that many of the characters are for phonetic sounds as opposed to their individual meanings. I wasnt sure I should include that info. My intention is to be able to understand some of the important wrapper info like where is it from ie what area of xishuangbanna and or what mountain it is from and the like.

So now I can recognize the characters for china, yunnan, xishuangbanna, tea factory etc. How they are derived is not so important for my needs. Perhaps I should have left the definitions out.

I do have a question though. How do I get chinese characters to show up? They just show up as boxes. Do I need to load something to see them on regular internet pages?

Thanks.

[thanks]

Thanks for your insight wyardley. I do understand, as per the book I am reading, that many of the characters are for phonetic sounds as opposed to their individual meanings. I wasnt sure I should include that info. My intention is to be able to understand some of the important wrapper info like where is it from ie what area of xishuangbanna and or what mountain it is from and the like.

So now I can recognize the characters for china, yunnan, xishuangbanna, tea factory etc. How they are derived is not so important for my needs. Perhaps I should have left the definitions out.

I do have a question though. How do I get chinese characters to show up? They just show up as boxes. Do I need to load something to see them on regular internet pages?

Thanks.

I'm not going to lie, while I find all this interesting all I can think about is how good that Dragon Pole shu must taste from Menghai. Is it as good, and delicious as it looks?

[gingkoseto]

wow you guys are good at deciphering

XiShuangBanNa is the name of a region, simply pinyin version of the pronunciation from local ethnic language (totally different from Mandarin), so no need to translate every character.

A friend of mine speaks and reads Chinese, but can't write Chinese. Sometimes when he need to write single words, he uses google translate. That's cool!

[Salsero]

Good info here, guys. Thanks for posting it.

[wyardley]

Thanks for your insight wyardley. I do understand, as per the book I am reading, that many of the characters are for phonetic sounds as opposed to their individual meanings. I wasnt sure I should include that info.

Most Chinese "dialects" are essentially different languages - they're mutually unintelligable. Dialects like the local dialects of Yunnan don't really have a written language, and don't necessarily correspond to particular Chinese characters, and so in this case, the Chinese use characters with a similar sound to represent the word phonetically, in much the same way as they represent English words (like names of cities) with Chinese characters that sound (sort of) the same phonetically (like "luo san ji" for "Los Angeles"). But Chinese characters all (as far as I know) have meaning. There's no equivalent to katakana in Japanese where there are characters that are only used to represent sounds phonetically (other than zhuyin / bopomofo, used as another type of pinyin).

I do have a question though. How do I get chinese characters to show up? They just show up as boxes. Do I need to load something to see them on regular internet pages?

Depends on your system, as well as whether the web server is sending the correct content-type for the page. My guess is that you just don't have the right fonts / multi-language support installed. You should look online for information specific to whatever operating system you're running.

[puerhking]

Most Chinese "dialects" are essentially different languages - they're mutually unintelligable. Dialects like the local dialects of Yunnan don't really have a written language, and don't necessarily correspond to particular Chinese characters, and so in this case, the Chinese use characters with a similar sound to represent the word phonetically, in much the same way as they represent English words (like names of cities) with Chinese characters that sound (sort of) the same phonetically (like "luo san ji" for "Los Angeles"). But Chinese characters all (as far as I know) have meaning. There's no equivalent to katakana in Japanese where there are characters that are only used to represent sounds phonetically (other than zhuyin / bopomofo, used as another type of pinyin).

Yeah that makes perfect sense. Makes it more difficult though. Thanks for answering my question.

[puerhking]

I'm not going to lie, while I find all this interesting all I can think about is how good that Dragon Pole shu must taste from Menghai. Is it as good, and delicious as it looks?

thanks.....I hear you. It is no coincidence that I chose that one. I think it is the prettiest shu beeng I have ever seen.

[puerhking]

a few more things....

whether its sheng or shu are almost always in parenthesis

sheng cha



shu cha



top to bottom - yi wu zheng shan - zheng is a peak in yiwu mountains

[Salsero]

That's so cool. I felt my Chinese IQ leap by like 38% in just a second! That Shu character is so complicated. Is there a way to visualize it simpler? Now I can read "mountain" and "sheng" and usually "tea" in Chinese!

[heavydoom]

some characters in the chinese language are based on the actual shape of the thing they are supposed to describe. also remember this, there are sometimes two ways of writing a chinese character. the character for the number " one " can be written two ways. a simple horizontal line or a much more difficult way. so the character for mountain, looks like a mountain. the character for mouth in chinese, looks like a mouth albeit a squarish one. the same thing for heart. rest assured that this is not always the case. some characters do not look anything like what they are supposed to look in real life.

[Salsero]

So what is "Qing Cha"
青茶
which is given as an alternate for "sheng cha" in the Wikipedia article on puerh? Does one ever encounter that term on wrappers?

[nada]

青（qing) = green

[Salsero]

青（qing) = green

So will I often see that character on a wrapper? Is it interchangeable with the other one?