米兰 (Mǐ lán) — Milan (city in Italy) | TongTong Chinese Dictionary

Definition

noun

Milan (city in Italy)

米兰。
Wǒ cóng lái méi qù guò Mǐ lán.
I've never been to Milan.
米兰。
Mǐ lán Shì yì dà lì dì èr dà chéng shì.
Milan is Italy's second-largest city.
米兰。
Mǐ lán De shí shàng zhōu hěn yǒu míng.
Milan's fashion week is very famous.

Single-morpheme word

构词法gòucífǎ

音译yīnyìTransliteration

The characters spell the sound of a foreign word; their individual meanings play no part.

The characters 米 and 兰 carry no meaning here; they only spell the Italian city name Milan.

Sound-only characters

A drawing of the thing itself, worn down over three thousand years into a few strokes.

米 is a picture of rice kernels without husk, with the horizontal stroke as a bamboo sieve. It is unrelated to similar-looking grain characters.

Most characters — around four in five — are built this way: one part hints at the meaning, the other at the pronunciation.

This origin belongs to the traditional form 蘭; 兰 is its simplified writing.

艹闌蘭

Meaning part形符xíngfú

艹Written in full as艸cǎoplant

Sound part声符shēngfú

闌

闌lán蘭lán

Same sound today

In the traditional form 蘭, 艹 marks it as a plant and 闌 stands for the sound; the simplified 兰 is a later shorthand, not the original parts.

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