弗里敦 (Fú lǐ dūn) — Freetown (capital of Sierra Leone)

Definition

noun

Freetown (capital of Sierra Leone)

弗里敦。
Qù nián wǒ qù le Fú lǐ dūn.
I went to Freetown last year.
弗里敦。
Fú lǐ dūn Shì sài lā lì áng de shǒu dū.
Freetown is the capital of Sierra Leone.
弗里敦。
Wǒ tīng shuō Fú lǐ dūn hěn měi lì.
I hear Freetown is very beautiful.

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 only spell the foreign name Freetown and do not carry meanings here.

Sound-only characters

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

The old form of 弗 pictures a rope wrapped around two pieces of wood to keep them straight.

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 裡; 里 is its simplified writing.

The simplified 里 stands for more than one traditional character. In most words (里, 里面) it is 裡; in others (公里) it is 里 or 裏.

衤里裡

Meaning part形符xíngfú

衤Written in full as衣yīclothes

Sound part声符shēngfú

里

Same sound today

The form 裡 pairs 衤 (clothes) with 里 as a sound component.

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.