I’ve heard this factoid for a number of years, pre e-mail glurge too, but is there any truth to it? The “two women…” part is attributed to Chinese, Japanese, Korean, any language with pictograms. It’s also said to mean misery, war, despair ASF.
A bit of googling and some playing around with babelfish leads me to believe that there’s no basis for this at all. Which makes sense (Occam’s razor and all), since it’s just a bit too clever.
So the questions are: Is this just some UL or is it real?
And - more probable - who came up with this?
According to this source, although the combinations of multiple women results in some interesting and amusing meanings, there is no actual character consisting of two women under one roof.
I know this is an old thread, but since it pops up to the top of some google searches, just thought I’d explain.
The character people are thinking of is the very uncommon one 奻 (nuán). There’s no roof, but they are together and the meaning is “quarrel, quarreling, foolishness, foolish, etc…” It’s by no means the common Chinese word for trouble (烦, 问题, 等等…), but it’s not non-existent either.
Some others
㚣 (xiáo*) 一 very archaic for “pretty; cunning; lewd”
姦 (jiān) 一 “wicked, wickedness; debauch, debauchery” (i.e., more about the man’s misdeeds than the women’s; bizarrely simplified to 奸, [woman] + [dry &/or f*ck])
好 (hǎo/hào) 一 the most common word for “good” is [woman] + [child]
安 (ān 一 the common name & a word meaning “peace, peaceful” is (1) [woman] under a [roof]
如 (rú) 一 [woman] + [mouth] = “if”
嬲 (niǎo) 一 a [woman] btwn 2 [men] is “flirt”
嫐 (nǎo) 一 a [man] btwn 2 [women] is “fool, tease, prank”
妧 (wàn) 一 [woman] + [money] is an (archaic) word for “good-looking”
(*Not “jiao”.)
Also note that there are at least some Chinese feminists who do feel that these characters and others (娱、耍、婪、嫉、妒、嫌、佞、妄、妖、奴、妓、娼、姘、婊、嫖、等等) are sexist and are pushing to emend them. (So far just blogging lawyers & the like, nothing before the Ministry of Education who control standard character forms.
That’s a pretty odd claim to make about Korean, as it’s written almost entirely in an alphabet; there are just a handful of borrowings from Chinese (which are in any case deprecated, at least in the north). Even for Chinese itself, only a tiny minority of the characters are pictograms.
Then there is my favorite, the word for “Mother”: 妈. A woman and a horse.
That is to say, it’s a woman who works like a horse, and never a woman who looks like a horse, if you know what’s good for you (one of my Chinese teachers told me that one:D
The horse bit is the phonetic component. “Mother” and “horse” are nearly homophones. Many (most?) Chinese characters are like this – one component to hint at the meaning and another component to hint at the pronunciation.
Incidentally, the word in question is pronounced “Ma”, much as you could use to refer to one’s mother in English. You can also use “Mama” if you prefer compound words.
I don’t know about “being Chinese”, but I’ve always heard old timers say,
“Any man that thinks he can keep two women happy and satisfied at the same time, is either a liar or a damn fool, and most likely both!”
Odd. A lot of stand-alone characters (as in, not used in combination with another to form a different word) have the same meaning in Chinese and Japanese. However, the Japanese mother 母 represents breasts, which makes a lot more sense than a horse.
Yeah, Chinese is Semantic-Phonetic for most of its characters, so deriving half-assed jokes, while admittedly amusing (no sarcasm intended), usually has little basis in fact. Doesn’t stop some people (even Chinese people :p) from doing it tho. A notion I fully support.
The fun one is the Japanese baka, or idiot (fool, etc):
馬鹿
Horse + Deer. Japanese scholars haven’t even pinned this one down, the best we have are a handful of likely apocryphal stories that boil down to “so stupid you can’t tell a deer and a horse apart.”
