Dreaming in Chinese (20 page)

Deconstructing characters can be a tough exercise and at best a vague guide to either meaning or pronunciation, but there is some detectable method to what often strikes me as complete madness.
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The evolution of characters from twelfth-century B.C. Oracle Bone script to current-day simplified script

Massage, or
ànmó
, is a good example of how complicated a word and its characters can get. It is a two-syllable, two-character word. The first syllable,
àn
, is written as the character
.

The radical
is on the left side of this character, and it carries the general meaning of “hand,” the hint that this character will mean something related to “hand.”

The right half of the character,
has two elements to it. The top half,
means “roof,” and the bottom half,
means “woman.” Together, “woman under roof” is itself a character,
ān
,
meaning “peace,” which is pronounced as “ahn.” So, this right half of the character,
gives the character
the sound “ahn.”

To summarize, in
, the left part of the character
means something about “hand,” and the right part,
ān,
sounds like “ahn.” The new whole character
àn
has its own new meaning, “to press, as with fingers or thumb,” and it is pronounced as “ahn.”