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Chinese inscriptions on wardrobe
Posted: Tue Aug 10, 2021 1:00 pm
by 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.
Re: Chinese (?) inscriptions on wardrobe
Posted: Tue Aug 10, 2021 1:11 pm
by Travis B.
Those could be Hanja.
Re: Chinese (?) inscriptions on wardrobe
Posted: Tue Aug 10, 2021 1:15 pm
by 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?
Re: Chinese (?) inscriptions on wardrobe
Posted: Tue Aug 10, 2021 2:54 pm
by 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.
Re: Chinese inscriptions on wardrobe
Posted: Tue Aug 10, 2021 3:29 pm
by 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.
Re: Chinese inscriptions on wardrobe
Posted: Tue Aug 10, 2021 6:11 pm
by Linguoboy
Rounin Ryuuji wrote: ↑Tue Aug 10, 2021 3:29 pmAny 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.
Re: Chinese inscriptions on wardrobe
Posted: Tue Aug 10, 2021 8:46 pm
by 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...
Re: Chinese (?) inscriptions on wardrobe
Posted: Wed Aug 11, 2021 1:36 am
by 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.
Re: Chinese (?) inscriptions on wardrobe
Posted: Wed Aug 11, 2021 2:35 am
by hwhatting
Rounin Ryuuji wrote: ↑Tue Aug 10, 2021 1:15 pm
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.
Ketsuban wrote: ↑Wed Aug 11, 2021 1:36 am
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.
Re: Chinese inscriptions on wardrobe
Posted: Wed Aug 11, 2021 3:57 am
by 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.