Chinese inscriptions on wardrobe

[hwhatting]

A friend of mine has an antique wardrobe that, as far as she was told, was made in Korea. The inscriptions on it look like Chinese script. Can anyone read what they say? The photos are here.

[Travis B.]

Those could be Hanja.

[Rounin Ryuuji]

They're definitely Han characters, and in a fairly modern, albeit cursive form. Right off, I can make out 門 (gate), 中 (middle), 君 (lord, you), 二 (two), and 高 (high), and I think several others (I know at least the radicals composing them). Any idea where the thing was meant to be sold originally?

[Linguoboy]

I could work it out with a little time. (Damn, my characters are rusty.) It’s Literary Chinese in Traditional script, which is frequently used ornamentally in Korea. It’s almost certainly poetry, so anyone willing to google three or four adjacent characters could probably find the full text.

[Rounin Ryuuji]

Any idea which way it's meant to be read? I've been trying sections of vertical text, but I haven't found anything yet.

[Linguoboy]

Any idea which way it's meant to be read? I've been trying sections of vertical text, but I haven't found anything yet.

The traditional order is: top to bottom, right to left. But I've been trying that and coming up completely empty.

It's a really puzzling text. "訃", for instance, is not a character you expect to see on a decorative piece.

[Rounin Ryuuji]

The traditional order was what I was trying, but it seems to turn up nothing. Maybe they did a modern typeset of it or something...

[Ketsuban]

Are the shapes supposed to strike me as weird, or am I just insufficiently familiar with calligraphic Chinese? They chose a horizontal stroke for the 言 radical in 訃 like someone who's only seen the character in a computer font, but then we get a 女 at the top of the last line which has somehow grown a triangle for a head. And then there's whatever character 9 is supposed to be... it looks like a :V smiley.

I got no useful search results, for what it's worth.

[hwhatting]

Any idea where the thing was meant to be sold originally?

No, unfortunately not. It is a wardrobe meant for children's clothing, if that helps.

Are the shapes supposed to strike me as weird, or am I just insufficiently familiar with calligraphic Chinese? They chose a horizontal stroke for the 言 radical in 訃 like someone who's only seen the character in a computer font, but then we get a 女 at the top of the last line which has somehow grown a triangle for a head. And then there's whatever character 9 is supposed to be... it looks like a :V smiley.

I got no useful search results, for what it's worth.

Thanks to all of you who are trying. My friend had shown the piece to a Chinese friend, who wasn't able to read it, so it seems to be obscure; I can't even exclude that it's just ornamental gibberish created by someone who used random copied or even mis-remembered signs.

[Moose-tache]

There is a possibility that it is copied from a gugyeol script, which is basically Korean manyoogana. Several of the characters here are rare normally, but were frequently used for their phonetic value in Goryeo times to stand in for Korean grammatical morphemes. Even substituting in those values, it's still gibberish as far as I can tell, but maybe it's gibberish based on an old Buddhist text rather than proper hanja.