From knotting things, to Cangjie creating characters, to oracle bone inscriptions and bronze inscriptions of in the Shang Dynasty, and after thousands of years of development, to the running script, regular script or running script or running script fonts that we often use today, the history of Chinese characters has a long history. Nowadays, Chinese characters are not only used by Chinese people. Many foreigners are also attracted by Chinese characters and Chinese culture, so they learn Chinese and learn to write Chinese characters.
However, you can often see foreigners complaining that Chinese characters are difficult to learn, with many homophones, and some combinations of words, which makes people confused, so they don’t understand why they are combined like this. In fact, every Chinese character in can trace its past and present, and they have rich history. Similarly, some combination words are closely related to our traditional culture, such as what we often call "going to the toilet" and "going to the kitchen". So, why can't they be called "going to the toilet" and "going to the kitchen"? Let's learn more about it together.
Feng Shui and Direction Space
Early humans were actually the same as animals in today's society. Although they could not speak and did not have so-called cultural activities, they had their own language system. But humans have more outstanding evolution in front of other animals and need to be recorded when language is enough, so there is a knot to record things.
, and a little more advanced, is to create pictures on the stone walls. Now, early murals can be found in places where early civilizations were born in the world. But murals are complex after all, so they have the idea of creating text, striving to be simpler, more efficient, and meet the needs of long-distance information transmission.
However, who created the first text? Different civilizations have different opinions, but they are all related to myths and stories. The creation of characters in ancient China is generally related to Cangjie . During the Shang Dynasty, there were clear official words, which were divination words written on the turtle shell.
These words have pictographic characteristics, so today's archaeologists can make guesses and research based on their rough appearance, and what they mean. But oracle bone inscription is complicated after all, and bronze inscription is an inscription engraved on bronze ware, which is not very convenient, so the text begins to evolve continuously, and it is combined with other words on the way of evolution to express new meanings.
However, some words are easy to understand and are related to specific physical objects, such as "eating". Food is the main one, and eating it through the mouth to meet people's physiological needs. However, some vocabulary of is far from the real thing, and many people don’t know the real meaning, such as “going to the toilet” and “going to the kitchen” .
According to the toilet and kitchen we see now, they are at the same level as us. Why do we need to use "up" to go to the toilet, but "down" to go to the kitchen? It can't be said that the ancient toilets were built in the upper beam area, while the kitchen was built in the low-lying area, right? This is simply impossible based on architectural knowledge. So, what is the real reason?
In fact, there are two reasons why the two combinations of words "to" the toilet and "to" the kitchen are combined like this. The first one of is that these two words are related to ancient Feng Shui and spatial orientation. According to its function, toilets are generally damp and dirty places. Places like
are bad positions in the Five Elements and Eight Trigrams. Bad positions will naturally have bad meanings. If this position needs to be "down", it will have similar meanings to jumping into a kang, but this is just a dirt and wet pit. In order to get rid of the bad meanings in Feng Shui and Bagua, people have "up". Here, "up" means escape. Therefore, the upper and lower parts are here, and we must not only connect Feng Shui knowledge, but also combine the directional space to achieve the saying "going to the toilet".
And "down kitchen" is closely related to the kitchen environment. If you want to cook in the kitchen, you have to make a fire. The heat of the fire is transmitted upward and around, accompanied by rising blue smoke.At this time, if a person is at the top, he must be smoked by fire and smoke from the smoke, so it is best to go down. In this case, "going to the kitchen" is naturally not better than "going to the kitchen". Therefore, the combination of "low kitchen" was born.
status and feudal hierarchy
The second reason for this combination is that it is closely related to the feudal hierarchy status in ancient times. Generally speaking, the "upper" among "upper" in "upper" and "upper" are all about ancient emperors. When watching some movies and TV dramas, you will find that some people will not say it explicitly, but will point fingers above the top of their heads to hint, referring to the emperor. Of course, ordinary people cannot see emperors, and occasionally they can see several nobles or figures in the upper class of society. People like
usually don’t go to the kitchen to cook. In fact, they are just a person who can reach out and eat. The reason for all this is because they have a high level. , servants and slaves can do kitchen cooking, but their group attributes determine that kitchen cooking is not too high-end, because it is hard and tiring, so is the bottom-level people in the society, and when they enter the kitchen to cook, they become "going to the kitchen". The same is true for the combination of "going to the toilet". The ancient toilets were only found by nobles, and some were worship buckets. When using the toilet with , the bucket is generally very high, so if it is convenient, you have to move upward, so there is a "toilet".
Those servants cannot enjoy the toilet, they only have the pit. The word "pit" determines that the convenient place must not be Liangshan or towering places, but low-lying places. Then these servants will have to go downhill when they go, because they belong to the bottom of society and have no right to go to the toilet.
Conclusion
Through understanding, we found that the "up" in "going to the toilet" and the "lower" in "going to the kitchen" are closely related to the traditional Feng Shui culture and the essential characteristics of things in the house. Similarly, the birth of their combined vocabulary is closely related to the characteristics of feudal society in the past - level. Our past culture was not born out of thin air. Everything can be traced back to the distant past, and at the same time it demonstrates the wisdom of people in that era.
can be seen. We always say that the ancients were underdeveloped in technology, and their ideological cognition was not as advanced as we are now, so their creativity in all aspects was far inferior to today. But in fact, when we learn to trace the past, we will find that we actually had great fallacies with the ancients, and they were not unwise. On the contrary, their abilities sometimes surpass our modern people. Some inventions in modern society are used to draw on the wisdom of the ancients. Therefore, we cannot deny the past by , but take the essence and remove the dross inheritance and development.
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