Friday, September 19, 2003

Roman proverb redux

As I do every day, I went over to Brainy Smurf's blog and did some reading. As it turns out, the Smurf has also posted about the sinicized Roman proverb, and even provides a graphic showing you what the nine characters would look like (in his graphic, you read across, left to right; my calligraphy is written in columns, which you read rightmost to leftmost). It's a nice graphic.

But they're not all the same characters I found in my own search.

Dammit.

So now I have to find out what's up. I suspect a few things: (1) Korean hanja are usually the older forms of Chinese characters, which may account for why some of the Smurf's characters look different; (2) Korean use of hanja has probably become somewhat idiosyncratic over the centuries, which may explain why some characters are completely different.

And there's also the chance I'm just plain wrong.

More on this as it develops. I've posted a comment on the Smurf's site... I'll update this post with his response.

UPDATE: After an exchange over on the Smurf's turf, I've concluded that there's only one character I need to change, and not so much because it's wrong: it just hurts my eyes. I'll be changing the "gyeong" in nam-gyeong to "geun." The meaning-- PENIS-- remains exactly the same.
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