乔治敦 (Qiáo zhì dūn) — Georgetown (place name, e.g. capital of Guyana…

Definition

noun

Georgetown (place name, e.g. capital of Guyana or a district in Penang)

乔治敦。
Qiáo zhì dūn Shì guī yà nà de shǒu dū.
Georgetown is the capital of Guyana.
乔治敦。
Wǒ qù nián qù le mǎ lái xī yà de Qiáo zhì dūn.
I went to Georgetown in Malaysia last year.
乔治敦。
Qiáo zhì dūn Dà xué shì yì suǒ hěn yǒu míng de xué xiào.
Georgetown University is a very famous school.

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 乔治敦 spell Georgetown and carry no meanings of their own.

Sound-only characters

An abstract idea shown by a mark or a diagram rather than by a picture of an object.

This origin belongs to the traditional form 喬; 乔 is its simplified writing.

The traditional form 喬 was built by adding a distinguishing mark to an older character for 'tall'; the simplified 乔 is just a later shorthand.

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

Sound part声符shēngfú

台

The sound has drifted apartThe sound part was a clue two thousand years ago — it often still helps, but not always.

治 has 水 (water) and 台; 台 gives the sound, and the character named a river.

Two or more meaningful parts placed together so that their meanings combine into a new one.

The form behind 敦 combines 亯, an ancestral shrine, with 羊, a sheep, showing a cooked goat as a sacrifice.

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