To answer the actual question, in Japanese there’s no such character. One woman under a roof is “gentle.” The best you’re gonna get strictly with a woman under a roof (or a woman and a roof radical in general is):
案 – Root under Woman under Roof, which can mean “fear” or “worry.”
窶 – Woman, under (what according to Jisho) is, two mouth radicals and a couple random line pieces, under a hole or cave (roof + leg pieces) which means “emaciated” and isn’t a standard use or commonly used Kanji.
I was unclear, and I apologize: 媽 is only one such word for mother in Chinese, the other being 母 (and pronounced “Mu”). Also, the latter I usually see as a compound word (“Muqin”), but I can’t remember the character for “qin” in this case, and it seems that I can’t figure out how to get Windows 7’s pinyin interpreter to let me do compound words like it did back in Windows XP.
EDIT: Also, it seems I somehow switched it from Simplified to Traditional, and I don’t know how I did that. shakes head
Pictograms has a very specific linguistic meaning, which means that pictures determine the meaning of the character fully. Only basic Chinese characters have this (like Woman, or “one”). Most of the characters are what’s known as Semantic-Phonetic, which means that part of the character contributes its pictoral component to the meaning, whereas the other part contributes its SOUND, without contributing to the meaning. You can’t just look at a character and guess what it means from the components without knowing how the parts are arranged, i.e., knowing which parts contribute to the sound and which to the meaning.
Jragon’s already answered your question, but I thought I should point out that Japanese isn’t usually written with an alphabet. Most of the time Japanese is written in a syllabic script (kana) and/or borrowed Chinese characters (kanji).
Well… moraic script for Japanese, two characters aren’t necessarily two syllables, such as in the case of vowels that extend the length of pronunciation of the previous character.
Japanese uses two syllabaries in addition to Chinese characters (which is really the bulk of what you see in written Japanese). Katakana is used mostly for foreign words. Hiragana is used mostly for the inflected part of Japanese that doesn’t occur in Chinese (a highly uninflected language). Imagine using this: “#s” to indicate “numbers”. The # is like a Chinese character, and the “s” is like a hiragana. Not exactly, but it gives you an idea.
And since most foreign words that Japanese use are English, you can get a good jump on reading Japanese by learning Katakana. It’s not very difficult, but you have to get used to the way Japanese pronounce English words because the transliteration isn’t always obvious. An added benefit of learning katakana is that you will learn the range of sounds used in Japanese, and you’ll understand why they pronounce English as they do.
I actually found a good example. The character (a pictogram) in Japanese for white is:
白 – of which one of the readings is “haku” (ハク*). The character for “mora” or “beat” is:
拍 – also read “haku.” What does this have to do with white!? Well, it doesn’t, it simply gets the sound “haku” from the character 白 which is read with that sound, aka the phonetic component. The semantic component is the thing on the right, the radical is derived from 手, meaning “hand.” Still a little lost? Note that an alternate meaning of the kanji is “clap” from which “beat” or “rhythm” is a logical extension. So it has the meaning (or rather, a meaning related to) “hands” but a sound related to the sound of “白.” It has nothing to do with white hands (despite the fact you could make some half-assed explanation for how your hands can turn white when they get raw), it simply has to do with clapping hands.
Written in katakana since this is the “on-yomi” or original Chinese reading.
I don’t know, maybe in academic or formal contexts, but the Japanese love their freaking katakana nowadays. Even 本田, almost clearly named after some family named “Honda” is rendered in katakana for marketing, it’s “cool” or “edgy” or whatever. In addition, Japanese uses an almost ridiculous amount of loan words in every day speech, I’ve seen a number of .jp websites that are practically 80% katakana. Hell, even animal names (for the most part) are in katakana. I’d say if you want to learn Japanese, katakana should be your first stop nowadays. Kanji are a necessity eventually, but katakana are just overwhelmingly important in a modern context.
Yeah, I had something like that in my post, but took it out because I didn’t want to make it more complicated. You do see a lot of katakana that makes you go why would they right that in katakana? But it’s definitely true that there are lots and lots of katakana you’ll encounter everyday that are nothing more than transliterated English words.
Considering it also can be used to mean “relief” or “eased mind” as in 安心 – anshin, or “contented” I could see it easily extending from an idiom such as “I am content with that price/that price is a relief.” But this is mostly armchair theorizing.
I know you’re probably joking, but note that I just glued two woman characters to the superscript on each side of a cup character, since that kanji doesn’t fo realz exist. That has absolutely no concrete meaning whatsoever, the actual phrase in Japanese would probably be
二人の女の人と一杯のカップ。Two women and one cup. You could probably get more… derogatory for the women if you wished.
why would they right that in katakana? But it’s definitely true that there are lots and lots of katakana you’ll encounter everyday that are nothing more than transliterated English words.