I'm starting my most recent Chinese language class this month at the local community college. I seem to be fascinated with how the characters are formed. It's like each character is a puzzle in a box and when you open it, it's never the same.
There is the story about the development of the Chinese language, maybe between Huang-Di and his advisor, I could look it up I guess, who shows the Yellow Emperor the footprints made by different birds in the sand along the beach. In a similar vein, he offers that a written language could be created by constructing a graphic for each different word in the same way.
Now, after you get past tree and river and house and leg, the language is a lot less precise on the face of it, but the ambiguity of the needed modifiers renders a great banquet of nuanced meanings, once you get to that point of course.
2,500/162 lbs
Each of us literally chooses, by his way of attending to things, what sort of universe he shall appear to himself to inhabit. - William James
