Don't localize, Loekalize!
Forget everything you were told about the character 設. Your textbooks claim it means to set something up through words because they see a mouth and a hand holding a stick. It sounds logical, but it is a complete lie. If you go back to the oldest scripts, the mouth vanishes entirely. The oracle bones [ ]
Japan is watching high school baseball at 甲子園 this week. Yet the 甲 in that stadium s name is a turtle s belly, cracked open by fire 3,000 years ago. Not a metaphor. The photograph is a real Shang plastron from Anyang: plates laced together in rows, a seam down the middle, others crossing it. The 甲骨文词典 [ ]
生 means life. It has more readings than any other kanji. Yet the picture is one weed pushing through dirt. Japan s official list gives it twelve readings, which no kanji beats. Trivia puts the real total above 150. Taishukan, publisher of the biggest kanji dictionary ever made, admits it has never actually seen that list. [ ]
Why is the character for review depicted as a beam, a pan, and two lumps of silver? Because in ancient China, a review was never just an opinion. It was a weighing, and the beam had to come to rest perfectly level. 言 (words) + 平 (level) = 評 Combine the symbol for words with [ ]
Why on earth is there no weapon in the character for 'fight'? You have two hands and one mysterious object, but zero swords. It turns out the ancient version of 争 is not a duel. It is a chaotic game of tug of war. You have 爪 (a hand gripping from above) and 又 (a [ ]
One setting in an Unreal localization target decides whether your string IDs survive the trip to a translator. Counted from two kits of the same game ten weeks apart: 996 lines that each said which line they were, against 1,410 engine keys sharing nineteen names. In Spanish that damage shouts. In Japanese it says nothing at all.
衝 is the kanji they used for the ram that smashed city gates. Here it is under a willow, bouncing a silk ball. 衝く (tsuku) means to bounce, to strike, to drive something through, and the card is a Meiji print by Mizuno Toshikata of three Keicho-era women playing temari, exactly what this verb does. [ ]
Japan is watching high school baseball at 甲子園 this week. Yet the 甲 in that stadium s name is a turtle s belly, cracked open by fire 3,000 years ago. Not a metaphor. The photograph is a real Shang plastron from Anyang: plates laced together in rows, a seam down the middle, others crossing it. The 甲骨文词典 [ ]
創 means creation. Old shops carve it on the signboard for the year they were founded. Yet the character is a cut in flesh. Take it apart. 刂 is a knife, the standing blade that lives down the right side of a character. 倉 is a granary. It is the trap. The oldest form was [ ]
央 means center. Yet the oldest form of it is a man with a wooden collar locked around his neck. Take it apart. 大 is a person seen from the front, arms and legs spread. The piece across the top is not a lid. It is the 枷, the wooden collar a convict was locked [ ]