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莎士比亚 (Shā shì bǐ yà) — Shakespeare

Definition

noun
Shakespeare

Examples

  • 莎士比亚《姆》。
    Wǒ dú guò Shā shì bǐ yà de 《hā mǔ léi tè》.
    I have read Shakespeare's Hamlet.
  • 莎士比亚。
    Shā shì bǐ yà Shì yīng guó zuì zhù míng de xì jù jiā.
    Shakespeare is the most famous British playwright.
  • 莎士比亚。
    Lǎo shī ràng wǒ men yán jiū Shā shì bǐ yà de zuò pǐn.
    The teacher asked us to study Shakespeare's works.

Origin

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.

莎shā
士shì
比bǐ
亚yà

The characters only spell the foreign name Shakespeare; none carries its own meaning here.

Sound-only characters

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

Meaning part形符xíngfú
艸艸cǎograss
Sound part声符shēngfú
沙
沙shā莎shā
Same sound today

莎 pairs 艸, a grass component, with 沙, which supplies its sound.

Open 莎 →

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

The shape 士 comes from a simple drawing of a war axe. The character later came to mean a soldier, officer, or intellectual.

Open 士 →

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

  • 匕匕bǐ
  • 匕匕bǐ

比 is two 匕 placed side by side. Chu Wan-li treats both as sound parts, while an old reading takes the side-by-side arrangement as putting things next to each other.

Open 比 →

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

This origin belongs to the traditional form 亞; 亚 is its simplified writing.

The traditional form 亞 likely shows an overhead view of a construction, perhaps a 亞-shaped tomb. Its later simplified form 亚 is just a shorthand.

Open 亚 →
Appears in
Literature & Poetry

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