洛克比 (luò kè bǐ) — Lockerbie (a town in Scotland, site of the 1988 Pan Am Flight 103 bombing)

Definition

noun
Lockerbie (a town in Scotland, site of the 1988 Pan Am Flight 103 bombing)

Examples

  • 洛克比。
    luò kè bǐ Shì sū gé lán de yí gè xiǎo zhèn.
    Lockerbie is a small town in Scotland.
  • 洛克比198812。
    luò kè bǐ Kōng nàn fā shēng zài 1988 nián 12 yuè.
    The Lockerbie bombing occurred in December 1988.
  • 洛克比。
    Měi nián dōu yǒu rén dào luò kè bǐ jì niàn yù nàn zhě.
    Every year people come to Lockerbie to commemorate the victims.

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.

洛luò
克kè
比bǐ

洛克比 spells Lockerbie; the characters carry no meaning of their own 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
水水shuǐwater
Sound part声符shēngfú
各
各gè洛Luò
The sound has drifted apartThe sound part was a clue two thousand years ago — it often still helps, but not always.

洛 shows 水 (water) and 各, and 各 supplies the sound.

Open 洛 →

No reliable origin is recorded for this character.

Open 克 →

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 →

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