Meow Is Just Another Name For Cat

Chapter 2
Meow is just another name for cat

by Jennifer Ball September 3, 2010
The Chinese word for catmao (top)is pronounced with a high, sustained tone which sounds like a cats cry. This character is approximately 3,000 years old.
hieroglyph
Gardiner's interpretation
Highlighted in pink is the sound correspondence between the Chinese word for cat and Ancient Egyptian word for cat. A form of meow has been a signifier for cat for at least five thousand years.
The hieroglyph for cat in Sir Alan Gardiners Egyptian Grammar, the bible of Egyptologists, is transcribed as miw (bottom). Ancient Egyptian hieroglyphs date from 3,200 BC.
Meow. We know this is the sound a cat makes. Five thousand years ago, so did the Ancient Egyptians. They just pronounced it miw, according to Sir Alan Gardiner, the deceased expert on Egyptian grammar. The i you see above is not really pronounced as an i but instead as a y sound (in the world of linguistics, sounds are written in italics). The tittle of the ia tittle is the dot over an iis curved (see pink circled tittle at right) to show you that its sound is somehow pervertedin this case from an i to a y so this word for cat really should be written as myw, which suggests that the Ancient Curved tittle Egyptian word for cat was probably not far from mew, another sound we recognize circled in as emanating from a feline. pink. I apologize for bringing up curved tittlesand if the sound of this word makes you titter, it is not a coincidence. Our language is loaded with Cro-Magnon baggage, such as words and letters that show a similarity to sticks, weapons, and human body parts. We think our letters are not pictures. This is part of our myopia. The alphabet is a simplified form of what was important to early man: things found in nature. Our letterforms are pictorial, but the pictures are so derivational that weve forgottenas a society, and on purpose perhapswhat they represent. It is convenient to think that our alphabet is not as logographic as Chinese, for example, but thats because many of us are in some form of denial, and perhaps even elitist: Their language is pictures; ours is not.
21 June 2013 8:54 PM Jennifer Ball, Sept. 3, 2010
Part of the problem is this curved tittle. The way to keep people from knowing things is to use arcane symbols or insufficient description. For example, Gardiner interprets the human arm hieroglyph as having a guttural sound not found in the English language (see below). He doesnt even describe this sound. Why? Because then you would know too much, and linguists would have to kill you.1 Ridicule has replaced homicide as societys response to someone with a new idea. We marginalize by deprecation. The Bow Wow theory, as it is known, postulates that the origins of speech are based on early humans imitation of animal sounds. You can guess by the name how seriously this theory is considered. Onomatopoeiaa word that In Chinese, the sound sounds like the thing it namesis the term for the class of words that mao (seen above) is the signifier for cat the Bow Wow theory covers. Words like bees, crow, cuckoo, and sounds to the and hawk, would appear to have been named after the animal that American ear like makes that respective sound. Meow, though not recognized in our Chairman Mao; howculture as a formal word, still signifies for most humans as the sound a ever, the line over the cat makes. Onomatopoeic words are obvious choices for first vocalizaa means that the pitch of this sound tions because the imitation of a sound takes only mimicry. Its easier to should be near a concopy than be original, and humans are good mimics. Perhaps an early cert D on the piano speaker made the sound of a cat. An early listener understood what was (according to Mcmeant was cat. Its not difficult to imagine. Based on the Chinese and Naughton and Yings Ancient Egyptian words for cat, humans have heard and interpreted Reading and Writing Chinese, p. 30). sound the same for at least five thousand years, and no doubt longer. Linguists allow that there are similar-sounding words for some concepts across all cultures, but these congruencies are considered insignificant because they have the excuse of being onomatopoeic or else they fall into the category of baby talk. Wouldnt those early words of children, uttered before the culture has had a chance to take a firm hold, more clearly suggest the origins of language? Should we discount words simply because they fall in the category of too obvious? Consider: Over the last 5,000 years humans have fought wars over religion, women, and body modificationbut we agree on the word for cat? An irrelevant coincidence linguists would say. Are coincidences of this magnitude irrelevant? The congruence between sound and meaning over a five thousand-year period in three distinct culturesAncient Egyptian, Chinese, and oursfor the concept of cat seems significant, especially because human evolution would be a logical explanation for this similarity. Humans have primal needs, and these needs dictate that humans behavior follows patterns, much like children have characteristic stages as they grow (this could explain the pyramids existing in disparate cultures with no apparent contact). These dependencies ended up imprinting our earliest vocalizations. The consonant-vowel pattern meow may not seem important in our language, but in Chinese, this sound patternspelled miaooccurs
Cat=mao
To hear this sound, go to http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Voiced_pharyngeal_fricative
An example where a linguist could have been informative rather than obscure. Taken from page 27 of Gardiners Egyptian Grammar.
16 times by itself, and at least 78 times in conjunction with other characters, according to www. MandarinTools.com. The Miao of Chinaone of the meanings of miaoare an ancient people known for their farming and embroidery; the word also means family, progeny, sprout. The Oxford English Dictionary does not include a listing for miao or meow. The closest word is miaow, and it means, Imitative. Similar representations of the cry of a cat (and corresponding nouns and verbs) are very widespread in numerous languages: compare e.g. German miau, Spanish miau, Russian mjau, Turkish miyav, Finnish miau, Chinese miao, etc. Even though OED claims the word is widespread, the earliest date given is 1288. Ancient Egyptian isnt mentioned. Under cat however, OED offers, History points to Egypt as the earliest home of the domestic cat, and the name is generally sought in the same quarter. Not discussed is the fact that the Egyptians used the word miw, even though Gardiners book was published in 1927. National Geographic says that the oldest evidence of a pet cat was found in Cyprus inside a 9,500-year old human grave.2 The remains of the cat, eight-months old when it died, was 16 inches from the human remains. Almost ten thousand years later, owners still bury their Ancient Egyptians and pets and provide for the animals should they predecease them. Cats and Chinese coded their dogs have made themselves desirable to humans, so we cultivate them: words for sound and its the perfect gene strategy. meaning. Both cul Language functions similarly to genes. Sound replicates if it tures depict cat with a picture of an animal means something. Meow transcends culture because so many cultures and a key to the anirecognize this pattern of sound as signifying cat. Mewing is an automals pronunciation. matic way to communicate the concept of cat. Perhaps the fact that The cat-looking charhumans are more than 99.99% genetically identical means we hear the acter on the left consame and think the same, so some amount of coherence exists between tributes no sound. The people, even if we havent been raised character on the right A hieroglyph can run left or the same. Based on early scripts, it ap- is considered the phoright; one reads a glyph in the pears that we notate the same: Not only netic component and direction the characters are contributes the sound, do the Ancient Egyptians and Chinese though not necessarily facing, in this case, the right. share a similar sound for cat, their The cat is the determinative with exactness. These because it determines two characters todepictions share a similar structure. the meaning, though it gether are pronounced As you can see, both the hieroglyph contributes no sound. The mao, but the phonetic for cat on the left and the sinograph sound comes from the three component on right is for cat on the right include meaning miao when alone. characters on the right. and pronunciation in their words that Cat in Chinese Cat in Ancient Egyptian designate cat. In each language, the script for cat includes two levels of coding: content (meaning) and sound (pronunciation)and in this case, both agree. Two ancient cultures not only pronounce the word for cat nearly the same, they also graphically depict the concept of cat in a similar manpronunciation meaning meaning pronunciation ner. However this similarity takes an effort to see because they are so un-
http://news.nationalgeographic.com/news/2004/04/0408_040408_oldestpetcat.html 3
function: phonetic component
"Cat" in Ancient Egyptian
determinative
function: radical phonetic component
"Cat" in Chinese
cat
mao
sprouts legengrowing in dary field (implies beast fertility) (zh) (miao)
alike pictorially. The Chinese and the Ancient Egyptians appear to have arrived at this strategy independently. One depiction does not seem copied from another. Both cultures triangulated their written ideas by combining content and sound in the same graphic in order to pinpoint the concept to be communicated just like x and y coordinates mark a location on a graph. The underpinnings of the charactersthe components that make up the wordaid understanding by adding content. Miao in Chinese means fertile. The w sound in Egyptian was a chick, synonymous with new life. If we compare similarities in the scripts between the two ancient cultures, a focus on fertility is evident in both societies. When language was being created, procreation was big, and this focus on sex was encoded into language. The hieroglyphic cat on the left is easy to recognize, and we will come back to it in a bit, but first I will focus on the language spoken by more than 800 million people: Chinese. The Chinese cat on the right is more stylized, but one can still perceive two eyes, at least one whisker, the curvature of the animals back and rump, as well as the stripes for which some cats are known. Those stripes are probably not legs as this radical (a radical is a repeated component of a Chinese sinograph) is called a legless insect and a legendary beast. This character is known as zh (the character gives no sound to the pronunciation of cat) and is also occasionally known historically as a snake or a worm (both which have stripes or reticulation). Its important to make clear that the descriptions different authorities attach to a particular Chinese character are interesting but misleadingthe true test of what a character means is in the totality of the words in which it is found. History tends to play up certain aspectslike leglessness in animals known for their agilityhowever, the boundary conditions that shade the meaning of a particular Chinese character are formed by the words that include that character. A method for categorizing what a particular character means is to organize the lexicon of words that have the character as a component. One place to do this is www.mandarintools.com. If you enter the Chinese character for catand search Traditional Chinese, you will get
dog
cat
face no face
21 listings which include mostly cats and leopards, but also pandas (bear cats) and owls (cat hawks). This zh animalI will put the pronunciation and the Chinese character it represents together for claritystood not just for mammals, not just for fur, but for animals that were lovable predators. Fuzzy but with an agenda humans could understand. Comparing the cat radical zh with the dog radical qun , one notices that the cat version has a face. Humans typically dont eat animals to whom they give faces. A common character in Chinese is a dog on a fire. You never see a cat on a fire in Chinese. The role that a radical plays in Chinese is the same role that the determinative played in Ancient Egypt (i.e., the cat, upper left on page 4, is the determinative of this hieroglyph because it determines the meaning). Think of a radical as a categorythe ballpark into which the sound you hear will fall. Both the Chinese and the Ancient Egyptian cultures used this ballpark strategy which combined content and sound together in order to communicate via writing. One could think of this strategy as a code. The key to cracking the code is to understand the culture that created it. Understanding culture helps one can understand the logic behind the strategies. Triangulations are nothing more than coordinates given together in order to hone in on an object; this method of locating something is a natural tendency of a strategic animal. The Chinese language uses more than just the sound-content triangulations. It also uses known + known = unknown. For example, if your culture knows what a bear is and what a cat is but not what a panda is, a good way to describe one to a kinsman would be by combining both ideas into the term bear cat, which is what panda is in Chinese: xing mo. The word cat is a kind of universal catchall meaning a small living unit. We have cat in lots of words. Cattle for example. This word, like chattel, comes from capital, which means head Metaphors are the method with which humans (where your cap goes). A head conceptualize new ideas. For example, a panda denotes one individual but often is a bear cat to someone who is familiar with within a group of individuals, bears and cats but unfamiliar with pandas. like heads of cattle. Even the
panda =
bear
cat
mouth

meow/miao
This character says to make the sound a cat makes (written in three different typefaces at 100 points)
word category signifies one of many. Cats are one of many: clones of each other, perhaps this is why we think they have nine livesthey look so alike, they appear to live forever. In elementary school, a copycat is a pejorative for one who copies another. Cats are famous for making copieseven children know this. Not only does the zh radical suggest imitation, when it is accompanied by mio, this sense of cloning is magnified because mio depicts reproduction, both in its shape (note the bilateral symmetry) and in its most basic meaning: that of a fertile field, the quintessential metaphor for reproduction in every kind of mammal. The character that is leftmiaois the Chinese depiction of that fertile field accompanied by a character that represents a mouthduplicated in three different typefaces so that one can see the similarities between a modern face up top, to the older, handwritten depictions below. The character means, say this sound: miao. This is the sound a cat makes in both Chinese culture and American culture. Notice that the character highlighted in red in all three examples is a kind of rectangle (more squarish on the bottom two). This is the mouth character, though sometimes it can be simply an orifice. This mouth is a common component of a sinograph (also known as a Han character), and in this case, it means the reader is to make the sound of the character on the right: miao. Miao or miao1 is the sound a cat makes. (I will now write the tones with numbers in order to be clear as to which of the four voiced tones found in spoken Mandarin Chinese are meant.) Miao1 is the Pinyin pronunciation; Pinyin is the spelling of Chinese sound in Roman letters (Roman is what the style of letters I am writing this with are called). In Pinyin, is also miao2, and it has two sprouts or blades of grass growing on the top of a cultivated field. This field could be a rice field, but it is also metaphorical, so it is any fruitful pasture that signifies stability, home, progeny, and longevity. In analyzing the graphic, one notices that the lines dividing the field into fourths could be a division of land or a stake in the groundor both. Chinese is a cumulative language. In Chinese, a stake in the groundmeans ten. Ten fingers is how one holds onto something tenaciously. That stake is in the center of the field, illustrating a tight grip: ownership. That cross also creates quadrants on the field which represent irrigation and cultivation, as well as fairness to subsequent generations as these divisions are even distributions 6
of the land. Put a square around a stake and you have possession. The sprouts growing over the divvied land are symbolic of the beginning of life; they synecdochically imply sons. The square and quartered field is a miniature chessboard, the boundaries defining ones realm, the turf one must defend. The English have a similar miniature checkerboard in the form of a coat of arms. It is often divided into fourths; it also has bilateral symmetry. The plant growth, or mantling, which commonly emerges from the top of the coat of arms, signifies life and mirrors the sprouts which flower above the quartered field. The family crest depicts conquest with its helmet and ax, but the miao2 character also has conquest in the division of its land. The root character of miao2 is tian2also roughly 3,000 years old which is a field and means to cultivate. Cultivated land is a metaphor for Manifest Destiny, an idea embodied in the 19th century Caucasian conquest of territory but present in all cultures, which is that land, plants, animals, even humans are there for the taking. When youre focused on survival, such nicetiesconcern for others for example are not priorities. This field metaphor is seen in phrases like, Hes sowing his wild oats, where oats euphemistically stands in for sementhey are both seedsand women are the implied field into which the unknown he is sowing. At ww.usingenglish.com/reference/idioms, this phrase is defined as, If a young man sows his wild oats, he has a period of his life when he does a lot of exciting things and has a lot of sexual relationships. At http:// www.urbandictionary.com, this same phrase is defined as, To lead a promiscuous and self-indulgent lifestyle. Less stylistically, to nail lots of women before you settle down. Nailing is a key phrase. Pinning them down. Making them bear your babies. Its all about reproducing because thats how a culture survives. You can see this focus on reproduction in the table on the next page. If you take the Chinese Han character for cat and swap the animal radical for womanyou get pretty girl. A pretty girl makes for a stable home life (theoretically) because she will bear children. Miao2 represents stability because cultivated land is stable. Plants stay where you last left them because they have roots there; animals stay because someone cares for them and stables them; consequently, they produce offspring or copies. If you swap
coat of arms
miao2 Cabbage Crop and Rice Paddies Near Kunming, Yunnan photograph by Diana Mayfield
http://www.lifesip.com/family-crest.html
woman for hand , you get copy or to trace because now the hand is making the reproduction, not the woman. If you swap that same character for metal (thats the shine of ore you see under the mountain), you get anchor, because metal plus stability equals anchor. If eye goes before the miao2 character, the meaning becomes aim because a steady eye is needed for a good shot. Aiming is what predatory animals do. They go after what they want. Man idolizes predators because man is a predator. A predator doesnt always kill. Sometimes a predator dominates by passing on genetic material aggressively. Miao2 is all about depositing procreative material and making copies. The structure of the Chinese written language is much more consistent than most people realize. The pronunciation component of a character also provides context. Miao2 not only suggests the sound, it suggests stability. This unrecognized aid to the meaning of a character is true of Ancient Egyptian as well (refer to page 30 for a more in-depth analysis). Both languages use the pronunciation portion of a character or a hieroglyph to clue the reader as to the meaning; this is in addition to the determinative/ radical portion, which is already acknowledged by linguists to demonstrate meaning.
The Stability of Mio

Radical Radical means: Radical + miao
Radical + miao =
Explanation
animal woman hand metal

cat copy anchor
cats reproduce
pretty girl women reproduce

hands reproduce
eye

aim
8
reproduction produces progeny which = stability metal + stability = anchor
steady eye = aim
Fallopian tubes
http://www.copenhagenfertilitycenter.com
Reproductive organs found only in females.
Hieroglyph meaning uterus and related concepts, found in Egyptian Grammar, Sir Alan Gardiner, page 466, between intestine and leg bone.
ovum
Note the similarity of this Chinese character to the uterus hieroglyph and to the Fallopian tubes graphic above; note also that the dots inside imply eggs. Again, dots inside the ovaries imply eggs.
hatch, sit on eggs
pretty; charming girl
This girl is pretty because she has empty ovaries, which shows that she is a virgin.
Cats are linked to women in many cultures because of these same generative and stable qualities. Cats breed like rabbits, which, before birth control, was exactly how women bred. Statistically, weve all evolved to be fertile. This is why cat and pretty girl are both pronounced mao, with a slight difference of tone (this is similar to Hebrew where the difference in tone of means either camel or to wean a child, i.e., a woman; see Chapter 1 at www.originofalphabet.com for more info). By calling the pretty girl a cat, one is suggesting that she will be fertile. One way of depicting fertility is metaphorically with a field; another way is more literal by actually showing the equipment required to be fertile: Fallopian tubes. Both the Egyptians and the Chinese used body parts in their scripts. Many people ask, How did they know what Fallopian tubes looked like? Its important to remember that early mans life was violent and gory. They took animals apart all the time, and that sometimes included humans. Sacrifice was a bloody endeavour. The root of the word sacred and sacrifice comes from sacrum. The sacrum shelters the Fallopian tubes. The Fallopian tubes lead from the ovaries of female mammalswhere eggs are producedto the uteruswhere an egg combined with sperm turns into another mammal. An illustration of Fallopian tubes can be seen at the top of this page; this graphic is meant to be used as a reference for comparison to the Ancient Egyptian hieroglyph and the Chinese characters underneath, since modern humans are less familiar with our insides than early
woman
Two examples of the character that means woman. Commit this shape to memory because woman is in lots of words.
man was. The hieroglyph directly below the Fallopian tubes illustration is the Ancient Egyptian hieroglyph for bicornuate uterus of heifer, vulva, and cow. The third and fourth graphics on page 9 are Chinese characters for ovum and hatch, respectively, both of which include the stylized, Fallopian tube-looking character which resembles our lower case g next to a p. The p character is known as the seal radical. Note that the words ovum and hatch contain two dots in the Fallopian tube-looking character. These are eggs. Note also that pretty; charming girl has (next to the woman radical) a similar depiction to ovum but without the two dots; it would appear that a pretty girls seal radical is empty. Could a girl be pretty by the mere fact that she is a virgin and has no other males child in her womb? Perhaps that seal is a euphemism for hymen or barrier. The loss of a womans virginity has historically been required in order to finalize a deal. This seal is what seals a woman from another mans genetic material, along with whatever else might have been traded in the bargain. Using human evolution as ones lens around which all language is filtered, a pattern begins to emerge that focuses on fertility andconsistent with the first 50 chapters of Genesis preservation of seed. Its easy to discount this theory if one has not read the beginning of the Bible or the histories and myths of early cultures. Women were a source of regeneration, and this was the focus of primal man because it allowed humans to build a work force or an army. It allowed them to see themselves in their offspring: Sons. They are the future around which all life radiated. The desire for children is what unites men and women. Children soften the human existence. They make adults laugh because they are new to the world and everything is a wonder. They are the prototypical clown, wide-eyed and falling. They make one forget the ofttimes violent act that beget them. Man has two sides: murdering and nurturing. Languages scripts reflect these two sides, but we dont see it because we are still so motivated by sex and procreation that we are in denial: Facing our animalistic nature is too painful. If sex is important to us now (and I think we can safely say it is), imagine its significance before entertainment existed. Back then we had fire and sacrifice for excitement. Women were cloistered. The only way you could get at them was to be very powerful or to conquer and pillage. Ones own women were off-limits unless there was an exchange of collateral and a sanctifying of the union. Another tribes women, however, were fair game. And I mean game in the sense of a game animal. The focus on pretty girls has always been with us. When establishments like Hooters, an American restaurant chain that insists the name Hooters refers to owls, has 425 franchises, this demonstrates that euphemism is thriving in 2011. I recently spoke to a man who had just frequented a new Hooters at Tanforan Mall in San Bruno, California, and he claimed he hadnt known that the place was famous for large-breasted women. This is like saying that one reads Playboy for the articles. The owls eyes in the Hooters logo are meant to represent the two Os
10
Synonyms
Woman + stylized Fallopian tubes which are empty = youth, fertility, and virginity. Woman + miao = youth, fertility, and virginity. Note that the body partshave been replaced by a field with sprouts. Another synonym for pretty girl, however the woman radical on the left has been replaced by the side man radical, which looks more like an arrow heading to a target. A prostitute is a kind of magnet for men, as a target is a magnet for arrows
(same as ) good looking, a prostitute
of the word Hooters, and of course, owls hoot when they call to each other. Its the perfect cover: Hun, its just owls. But any conscious person who has been to a Hooters knows that T and A is what Hooters is all about. This is not the first time in history that eyes and breasts have been correlated. Perhaps those big eyes belong to males who cant help the fact that evolution has given them an instinctual desire for large breasts because bodacious tatas suggest ample milk for a future generation. Sex is everywhere in society, why wouldnt it be in language? Language was written at a time when procreation was the major focus of all cultures. In Chinese, theres at least three ways to write pretty girl (see above), and one of them means prostitute as well. This character includes the fertile field miao2. Why would the breeding potential of a prostitute be important to someone having sex for money? Because fertility The Hooters logo insuggests youth. Men have evolved to be attracted to cludes a poorly drawn youthful women because that is the way the genes owl that is supposed are most likely to replicate. Menopause to represent the word Hooters, but of course, is natures way of telling this word really refers to men to move on to more womens breasts. This is fertile womenbut an example of modernbefore you get day euphemism.
11
Tits
(pardon my French)
Ass
Could the hidden symbolism of miao2 be tits (breasts being equated with sprouts or buds) and ass (or vagina, the plus sign signifying in this instance female reproductive organi.e., something a male would want to penetrate)? This explanation resolves why prostitute, cat, and pretty girl could be represented by miao2 with only a change of the radical to signify the difference in species.
riled, consider that we hardly ever listen to naturewe live past 30, we take antibiotics, we fly in airplanes. Fortunately these days, fertility isnt the only thing driving relationships. Miao2 is clearly a complex character. As I consider how many ways it represents females, I wonder if this symbol could have other meanings? Could it toolike the Fallopian tubesbe a replication of female body parts? Could the miao2 symbol represent tits (the two t-like upper parts) and ass or vagina (the lower square with the plus in it)? A common symbol for women includes a plus sign: . It isnt difficult to see this miao2 character as signifying female anatomy when we know that it is linked to the word prostitute as well as cat. Cat house, catting around, and tom cat all carry the sense of sexual licentiousness. Cat fight means a fight between two women (according to Wikipedia). Women are often likened to animals or plants. Those two t-shaped characters represent sprouts; breasts are often considered buds (or nubs, think nubile); the vagina is the proverbial field. This may explain why the ancestors of the ancient Miao culture now prefer the name Hmong. Why has no one noticed that miao2 has this connotation? The Chinese I have spoken to only learn a subset of their language. Many had never seen the characters on page 11 for pretty; charming girl. One woman told me she learned Chinese as a child in a class of 50, and it was strictly rote; there was no pattern recognition of the language. Even when using pattern recognition, there are at least three aspects of the written Chinese language which make
12
little girl (she has no milk)
Little girl has no dots in her two respective squares because she has no milk. This character is composed of woman to the left and clown to the right. Mother, female elder has two dots, signifying milk. These examples are in a different typefaceApple LiGothicin order to familiarize the reader with the characteristics that are integral to the sinograph, as opposed to those which are stylistic to the typeface.
mother, female elder (she has milk)
it difficult to retain: 1) Radicals look one way by themselves and another way when combined with other characters; 2) Traditional vs. Simplified scripts add that many more characters to recognize; I was told that educated Chinese read Traditional but write Simplified (I have used only Traditional for this paper); 3) Shapes change their meanings depending upon what they are to represent: dots mean eggs sometimes, milk other times. Above, the mother or female elder has milk, so she has two dots in her two respective squares; the little girl does not yet have milk, so the character that depicts her has no dots. Little girl is a combination of woman and clown. A clown is what someone would be with breasts and no milk if he were not a little girl. (I learned from years of theater that the underpinnings of comedy are men in womens clothing and people falling down.) Clowns often do pratfalls, as do small children. Children were the worlds first clowns. Remember that children were not always treated as well as they are in present day first world countries. Childhood was a new creation starting about Dickens time, at
13
(non-classical form of ) a girl; a little girl
A Matter of Orientation
sodomy; to bugger
The field character in the right sinograph implies that it is a target, as it did in the word for prostitute. Could the field character be a bulls eye that says, + marks the spot for fertilization? This tian2 character is sometimes interpreted as hunt. least in terms of preserving innocence. The characters above make this shockingly clear. Both sinographs contain the same two charactersa woman and a fieldbut orientation makes all the difference in meaning. The first example is woman left of field = little girl. The second example is woman under field = sodomy. Odd that just changing their positions yields such different meanings, yet it makes sense if one goes back in time to when little girls (and little boys) were not as protected as they are now. That field character tian2 is a bulls eye of sorts. When one examines the etymology of tian2, it is referred to as a rice paddy; however, to hunt game is inherent in that definition (according to www.chineseetymology.org, www.websters-onlinedictionary.org), and hunting is what tian2 is all about in the characters seen above. Even little girls are potential targets because they will eventually be able to reproduce, and with the right lineage and circumstance, they could be valuable. Language is all about control and domination, as is much of human nature.
(same as ) a human; a man; a boy (non-classical form of ) to remain; to stay, to keep, to preserve
male, man, son, baron

Here is a similar scenario as above, yet the definitions are more prosaic. Field plus strength yields male in both orientations, unlike above. 14
pubic
region
cave; hole turbulent till land, cultivate; hunt

Four examples that include the field radical demonstrate that the radical is euphemistic for a broad interpretation of field. At top, pubic region is consistent with vagina, as is cave; hole, (we will revisit this relationship on page 23). Turbulent could describe conquest (thats water plus field), and the final example, till land, cultivate, hunt is consistent with predatory behavior.
Searching Chinese textual databases uncovered the above characters, all of which include the field radical. The top example, pubic region, consists of vermillion or cinnabar on the left (think red) and field on the right. A pubic region is a red field. The next example is the corpse/body radical plus field, which means cave or hole. Though modern day humans may have a hard time with this equating a body with a cave or hole, in order to understand any language, one must step out of ones default brain processes and enter the orientation of the culture one wants to embrace. To understand Chinese, or any written language, one must mentally go back 2,000 years when the written language began. Examining triple radicals is one way to do this. If a radical means something, than tripling the radical should mean three times as much. For example, three trees is a forest, three men is a crowd, three horses is a herd, three water signs is a flood. However...
15
Adultery through the ages

Chinese Text Project
Three women mean adultery? Three sons equal weakness? These are spikes of aberrance between modern thinking and ancient China. These characters, along with their definitions, are archaeological relics. They tell us about the culture when these characters were first inscribed. This was a culture unlike our culture now; this was a culture that viewed women as something to be owned, a culture that gave no importance to a womans feelings of attachment or even her mobility. Keep in mind that the production of tiny shoes for bound-foot women ended in 1998.3 The examples above, from Chinese Text Project, show the current representation of the triple radical for adultery, debauchery, (far left). (For a sampling of Triple Radicals, view the opposite page; for a full Triple Radical database, go here: http://www.originofalphabet. com/2011/01/blog-post_20.html.) The precursors to the character for adultery are, moving left to right, Seal Script from the Bronze Age; Jinwen, circa 1100-770 B.C.; and Jianbo, an ancient form of writing on silk. In all four depictions, a trio of women are a consistent representation of evil. If one woman is bad, three are plotting. In a repressed society, womens only outlet was gossip, and scandal was the soap opera of the day. A group of women clustered together would be suspect, especially when male control was absolute. Adultery would have been a serious transgression and something to whisper aboutbecause unlicensed sex could produce a future of competing genetic lineages. Illegitimate children were a threat to those in power. Putting structures in place to retain power is part of why writing started. Ten thousand years ago, the first stages of writing were in the form of tokens, which were used as a way to keep track of slaves, livestock, and other commodities. When women are commodities, impregnating them is a crime. Unsanctioned procreation means that male As seed is growing in a woman owned by male B, which would be a breach of ownership. The only way a man could be sure he was the father was to know where his women were at all times. Crippling a woman by binding her feet, as they did in China for more than 1,000 years, was one way of ensuring that ones woman wouldnt be inseminated by another because her mobility would be restricted, limiting her access to other men. China is not 3 The Chinese Xinhua News Agency announced, in 1998, that the last factory to manufacture shoes for bound-feet women in Harbin, China, had ended production. http://www. sfmuseum.org/chin/foot.html
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A Small Sampling of Triple Radicals

Triple Radical
Triple Radical Meaning forest, dense, dark multitude, crowd; masses, public running herd flood, infinity adultery(wicked) weakness beautiful eyes, head depth crystal intuition, bright a group of springs run fast, rush about, flee plants private, secret, fortress
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Single Radical Meaning tree man horse water sign woman son eye sun twinkle in eye Eureka moment? water plus intuition bull sprout cocoon (vagina?)
www.etytmologyonline.com
www.oed.com The roots of dwell include deadly nightshade (see purple highlight above), according to www.etymologyonline. com. OED (below) does not include nightshade as a root, but it does include stun, make giddy. Some cultures bound feet, some used drugs, and some used other types of restraints in order to control humans.
the only culture that controlled women however. Other cultures appear to have used different techniques to subdue humans, including drugs (specifically Deadly Nightshade, also known as Belladonnabeautiful lady in Italianwhich is at the root of the word dwell, according to www.etymologyonline.com) and restraints (Ancient Egyptians had depictions of tethers and prisoners in bondage in many of their words, however, the tethers had been replaced by the loaf shape by the Middle Kingdom. Owning and controlling land, seed, and women is the recurrent theme of language. These possessions are metaphorically interchangeable, such that a woman is a field, and sperm is seed. When a character is used metaphorically, that character becomes a common component of other words. Seed is metaphorically depicted as rice in Chinese script. The importance of grain in fostering the beginning of civilization is touted in Guns, Germs, and Steel, but the picture of grain itself is revered in the Chinese language. Two different radicals represent different aspects of rice, the major grain of China. The radical that is hulled or husked uncooked rice is
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mi3 he2
hulled or husked uncooked rice
grain still on stalk; rice plant

Rice is so important, it has more than one depiction. Here are two different radicals that mean rice.
pronounced emphaticallythink DeNiro in Taxi Driver: You talkin to me? That me is how to say rice in Chinese. However the tone of mi changes to a more playful sound when calling a cat. The cat-calling mi1 uses the first tone in Chinese, and this tone sounds like the third note in the Sound of Musics famous Do, Re, Mi song, spelled the same way. According to OED, the musical note mi comes from mira, which means miracle in Latin. Mirage would seem to be related. Mira means look in Spanish. Ra or re is sun in Ancient Egyptian. Ri4 is Pinyin for sun in Chinese, and both cultures suns are depicted as closed, roundish shapes that have a dot in the middle. That bright sun makes one squint, and mi is all about squinting because of the brightness. (Mi4 can also mean sun.) Being dazzled is a theme which carries through many mi words. Mi3 resembles a flash of light, the glint of reflection off water. It resembles the sun in its roundness.. The bilaterally symmetrical mi3 resembles a snowflake,
Here is the Ancient Egyptians depiction of sun (above) from Gardiner, page 485, and sun, day, daytime from Chinese Text Project (below). The leftmost version is modern Chinese, and the unicode that identifies it on the computer is underneath. Notice how the older versions, specifically the Jinwen version, look similar to the hieroglyph above.
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Mi through the centuriesalways bilaterally symmetrical.

as you can see to the left in variety of typefaces. Snow is known for its whiteness. Mi3, too, represents whiteness by implication. If one considers all the things that rice is: 1) seed, 2) white, 3) sustenance, 4) sticky, 5) ubiquitous, and 6) identical to other grains, it makes logical sense that this mi3 character is a component of phosphorousbecause white things glow. This is the same reason that mi3 is in air, gas, steam, vapor; spiritbecause vapor is white. Mi3 is in bewitch, charm, infatuatebecause when one is dazzled by whitenessor a lot of riceone may be confusedanother word represented by . Food is an intoxicant when one is starving. Eating wasnt as habitual as it is now. Hunger was a frequent condition in the beginning of man. When ones entire life is focused on survival, food takes on more meanings. Mi3 is rice, but it is also seed, the progenitor of rice. When characters are honed over thousands of years, they tend to pick up meanings as they get molded into perfection. Rice is a grain; a grain is a seed; a seed multiplies and reproduces. Reproduction matters to early man, so this seed is equated with something else that reproduces rapidly: cats. This white-inflected, round, food representative is also the sound a cat makes, and consequently, the sound to call a cat (see below), which is mi1. Mi3 even resembles a cats face, and that me sound is the beginning of the word miao/meow. A mink, a cat-like animal that begins with mi, has similar associations to women as cat does; according to OED, mink is U.S. slang. An attractive or sexually provocative woman; a girlfriend. Also in extended use. Cf. fox...minx. On page 22 the similarity between the character for the sound of a cat, and an actual cats face in a frontal view is seen by superimposing one over the other. There is also a character which represents the bleat of a sheep, and it too resembles a sheeps face from the front. Depicting an animals head frontally is a reverent actit gives the animal face, literally, in a culture that constantly thinks about preserving and losing face. Cats, and it would seem sheep, were special creatures to early man, and so they earned a character that presented them as more than just their bodies. They were so special, they got a face. Mi means face and food. In English, me is our identity, yet it could also be meat with just the addition of a t sound. Humans are meat,
A whole lot of white riceseven (type) faces of mi.
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much as we hate to recognize it; and meal, besides being a time of eating, is also the edible part of a grain (OED). Rice allowed the Chinese culture to flourish. Mi3 means rice, yet the character looks more like a face that is reacting to the blinding whiteness of rice; the eyes in the face are slits, seemingly in order to shield them from the brilliance. Mi3which is eye plus ricemeans to be blind. Mi1 means squint. Myopia is the condition of bad eyes. According to OED, myopia is related to mystery, which has the base of to close (the lips or eyes), probably of imitative origin. When we close our lips and hum, we make the mmm sound. Babies close their lips to take in food; if they dont have enough food, they start making noises that sound like mmm as their lips try to take in food. Mmm is synonymous with hunger. Mmm says, Feed me! Clearly mi signifies for ideas that are even more expansive than just narrowing the eyes and calling cats. Representing grain, this character is found in many words that play on the metaphorical idea of rice as a seedsomething which starts small but grows to abundance. When a concept is importantand the concept of food was huge in the beginning of manthe character which stands for that concept ends up being used in many related words. The original idea is an underpinning to subsequent ideas. However the original idea wasnt just an idea, it was food. Sustenance is key when it comes to having the energy to extrapolate. When youre starving, you dont have time to invent written language. Once you have abundance, controlling it, taxing it, and doling it out necessitates record keeping. A prevailing theory suggests writing started as accounting. Rice isnt significant in ones. You need thousands of kernels for even a bowl. Once man figured out that this small grain could feed a multitude, rice took on huge stature. The character mi is in words that include paste, glutinous, and mucous. If
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www.philrice.net/how-to-cook-rice/
Rice, seen here as grain still on the stalkas well as husked and ready to be cooked.
Cats vs. Sheep
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http://nutritionwonderland.com

Sources: Wikitionary, Chinese Text Project; the bleat character is so popular, there are three other variants: , , and.
This character youre wondering why, is a conceplook at a bowl of rice tual bowl of congee (see right). The rice. The two word congee describes flanking chara gelatinous porridge of rice acters reprerice. If rice gruel was a sent bows: two staple, you would expect bows make a to find it in many words, bowl, with rice and you do. Perhaps even in our words as well. Could in the center. congealwith gel rice congee be a form of congee? The character for congee is two bows and rice in between (see top of page). A bow is a half circle. Two half circles make a circle. A circle can describe a bowl (see bow in the word bowl?). This characterseen above, represents a bowl of rice. The table below shows rice plus other characters found in definitions related to reproduction. The first example, grain, shows the rice radical combined with descendant. Rice was more than rice to the ancient Chinese. Rice was the future. Rice was posterity. Being a metaphorical culturelike all culturesthe fact that rice congee looks a lot like semen is not lost upon the Chinese because this rice character is also the radical for essence, semen, spirit (see green highlight below). This character which means semen is composed of rice and a character which essentially means purity. This character has color meanings as well (blue, black, green), but these are perceived as the essence of an entity. This character is about flesh
Character
meaning
rice radical + ?
grain
rice + descendant
essence; semen; spirit
rice + young
seed, pip, pit, stone
rice + child
roe or spawn
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fish + rice
blueapocalyse.blogspot.com
exploding. The third example shows rice combined with a child character which produces the meaning seed, pip, pit, stone. In all of these words, the rice radical is telling the reader to think in the seed/egg/grain category. The rest of the sinograph gives the specifics once youre in that egg mindset. Even in the case of roe, spawn, where fish is the radical, the addition of rice doesnt mean a satisfying meal, instead it means caviar...which is a tasty fish dish, but the rice character doesnt signify for rice as much as it does seed. If mi is really more seed than rice, and miao means to make a copy of something, it is no surprise that together they mean to reproduce (see above, top). The rice radical sandwiched between the two halves of miao accentuates the fact that life is flourishing. The example below a fetus inside the belly (see above, bottom) shows rice inside the stomach, and the radical on the left is the flesh radical. One note about the flesh radical: it almost always looks like the moon, though its official depiction looks more like a suggestion of ribs and a spine enclosed in a body (see lower left). If you consider that the best eating on an animal is the rump, and that mooning someone is to show your rump, a relationship can be seen between moon and flesh: the whitest part of the body is the part one keeps covered. This isnt a pretty theory, but it is elegant. The disturbing nature of this theorythat humans are animals and have acted animalistically in the pastis what keeps people from having seen these similarities between different languages before. We live in denial and euphemism. The swapping of actual meatthat looks uncomfortably upright and humanfor the moon is an example of this euphemistic process. To include a graphic representation of meat is too painful for humans, so weif we learn Chineseswap the meat radical for the moon radical. Edward Albee pointed out Americans fear of their dirty selves in Whos Afraid of Virginia Woolf when George calls the bathroom a euphemism. Now even bathroom is too personal, and we have substituted the word restroom. According to MandarinTools, the Chinese expression for this room means wash bath separate, yet the major purpose of this room (or hole) is to be where we defecate and micturatepoop and pee. Were pure after the event, but the event itself is not pure, no matter how much we fixate on the clean up.
flourishing, to reproduce
rice between field and sprout
a fetus inside the belly
rice as a fetus inside stomach

flesh
moon
The moon radical is often used for the flesh radical in Chinese. This is both a simplificationnote the similarities in orientation and horizontal stripesand a kindness. The moon is easier on the eyes and conscience than seeing actual flesh.
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If mi1 is semen, then ao1 would appear to be where the semen goes because the sound as well as the concept of mi+ao = miao1, which means fertility and stability.
All language is metaphorical. This is how new words and concepts form. In the case of Chinese, mi would seem to be the first half of both the sound and the concept of miao . If we examine the characters with the sound ao1 (I hear this sound as a high pitched ow), only two characters show up at MandarinTools.com. The first has the meaning concave (see above). Interesting that ow a common term for pain, would signify for a word that means with cavern or indentation. Physically indenting a human would make that human say ow. If we consider the strong human desire for sexwhich, considering the difficulty of life for early man, is evidenced by the fact that we exist in large numbersthe equation of mi equaling semen accompanying ow equaling concave and resulting in a term miao which means fertility is not a surprise. For those of you following along, consider: cav and vac are palindromes. A vacuum and a cave share similaritiesfor one thing, they draw you in. Vac and vag are not that dissimilar in sound, especially when you remember that cave and pubic region use the same field character in Chinese (see page 15). Ideas and sounds were basic in the beginning. There were only a few things that mattered to early man: pain and how to avoid it, pleasure and how to achieve it. The second meaning of ao1 is to boil; stew; to simmer which is not a bad description of ejaculation. These words mi and ao came together because semen and the concavity of women come together to produce humans. Rice symbolizes the beginning of a long span of progeny. No surprise that rice is historically thrown at weddings because it symbolizes fertility. Several websites insist that throwing grain is a centuries-long tradition but that wheat was more common instead of rice. One might throw the grain most accessible, the salient fact being that the concept of grain is more significant than which grain is being thrown. Miao3: small, deWeddings signify a union, and a union means the continuation of a spised. Cat on left, dynasty. sprouts on top, son Not all offspring are born of acknowledged unions. When or child on right poverty is the state of both parentsor even onelineages tend to which is overshadbe less important. In fact, the father is often unknown, especially owed by the other in the early days of man. Paternity was guesswork before genetic characters. testing. In cases where there is not the stability of family or wealth, children are often unwanted, and miao has been around long enough to reflect this fact. Miao3 means small and despised (see right). Theres that cat character bottom left, the sprouts on the top, but the character on the right is a version of son, child and is overshadowed by the other characters, yielding something unimportant. Cats reproduce at a quick pace; rapid replication makes an entity less special. As civilization progressed, so did the cat population. If a civilization sees worth in cats, the name of the animal is more likely to be onomatopoeic: meow. However, if a
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civilization views cats as unconstrained breeding machines, it calls them by the less reverential, monosyllabic cat. Cat signifies one of many, just as rice does, and as woman did back when women were cloistered in harems or nunneries or some type of safe enclosure. Numbers were fuzzy then. Myriad was around 10,000, but whos counting when it comes to rice? Ghenkis Kahn allegedly impregnated myriad women. That means a lot of us are related to Mr. Kahn. Professor Mark Jobling at the Department of Genetics, University of Leicester, makes this more clear: 8 per cent of the Y chromosomes over an enormous geographical area belong to a very closely related cluster with a time of origin only about 1000 years ago. Comparison of this distribution and its likely date and place of origin with those of the Mongol Empire suggests that the ancestors of this multitude of chromosomes were Genghis Khan and his dynasty of male-line descendants.4 Genetic studies have shown that the male gene pool is smaller than the female gene pool. This has been ascertained by studying the mutation diversity of the y chromosome, which is unique to the male. Jobling writes, This is why the Y chromosome is so widely used in human population studies. As it passes from father to son down paternal lineages, the only changes occurring are due to mutation, and the molecular record of the past is therefore relatively easy to interpret.5 Long ago, most men died in battle. Women were cloistered in groups by rulers who impregnated them. The majority of men who procreated were kings, conquerors, rapists, and some lucky ones who managed to pass on their genetic lineage by some other strategy that helped them nail women. Jobling explains, European colonists of the Americas and the Pacific took with them all of their genes, but contributed almost none of their mitochondrial DNA [which comes from women] to the local populations; in contrast, they spread a generous number of their Y chromosomes [which comes from men]. This sex-biased admixture is a striking reflection of the sexual politics of colonisation and slavery.6 If all this makes you feel squeamish, remember that its hard to fault those ancestors because we exist. They figured out a strategy to survive long enough to procreate, and eventually we resulted. As you read this, consider that you live and have perhaps procreated yourself. Its easy to denigrate your forbearers until you realize that the difficulty of survival would drive one to extremes. Definitions exhibit this because they are a relic. Every cultures dictionary is an archaeological dig. In Chinese, the definition Cutting off feet as form of punishment (see above) has only a knife on the right and flesh on the left (euphemistically depicted by the moon). How would one know which flesh was to be cut? Was cutting off the feet the most common flesh to be removed? Does the fact that women were hobbled for a millennium suggest that 4 5 6 http://genome.wellcome.ac.uk/doc_WTD020875.html ibid ibid 26
this character may not have needed more clarity? The simplicity of this sinographsuggests it was used regularly. If these types of punishments were readily administered, human beings were significantly less special than they are now. And if humans were less special, imagine how cats were treated. There is no word that specifically The Hebrew qat (above), means cat in Strongs pronounced kat according Concordance, which is a to the International Phonetic lexicon of words from the Alphabet, and the Ancient Old and New Testament. Egyptian hieroglyph ktt (left) both mean small and However, there is the word are close in pronunciation; qt, in Hebrew (the this sound/meaning language is read right to correspondence suggests left, so our rendition is a a relationship of triviality. mirror image of theirs) The sound kat/ktt has represented smallness for pronounced kat according a long time, and smallness to the International suggests women, specifically http://hieroglyphs.net/0301/cgi/lookup. Phonetic Alphabet (or pl?ty=tr&ch=k&cs=1 girls. Kitty, Kate, Katie, IPA)which means small Kathy, and Caddie are all thing. This soundwhich common names for female humans. I would spell cot after http://www.scribd.com/doc/10929802/Dictionary-oflistening to the voice at Middle-Egyptian searchgodsword.com, one of the websites that has Strongs Concordancesignified small in many early cultures. Even now, our word cot means small bed; cottage means small house; cotton is a small ball of white plant material; and cut means to make something smaller. The seeming unimportance of this monosyllabic word that means smallness is balanced by the longitude of its sound/ meaning correspondence: kat/kot/cut has meant small for several thousand years. When an idea has a sound correspondence for that long it suggests that human populations find something logical in that association. That sound-to-meaning relationship has stuck with us for a reason. The Ancient Egyptian word for be small and girl was ktt. Hebrews qttmeans to be cut off. Something cut off something else would be, by definition, smaller, because it would have been clipped from the main entity. The sound of t often swaps with d. This is because the tongue is in exactly the same place in the mouth to form both sounds. The only difference is one is voiced and one is not. Voiced means that one is using ones larynx. If you put your finger on your Adams Apple while you
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make the d sound, you can feel it move. This does not happen when one makes a t sound. But the tongue and mouth are in the same positions, so the sounds are very close. In Sumerian the word for cut was pronounced kud, and this has been attested for 1,111 times (see right); kid meant something similar. To us, cud is the small mouthful cows chew when they cut the grass with their teeth; a kid is a young child or goat; kitty is a small cat. These words have a relationship to each other if one thinks in basic terms. In Sumerian, kita meant lower (see right) which is where down is, and where one finds cats, dogs, children, and women, especially in the beginning of man. In Ancient Greek, the closest cat word katameans down, but kata is rarely written by itself; usually it is compounded with another word. The Greek word (seen left) pronounced katabolay shares the sense of fertility with miao, with the strongest sense being the injection or depositing of the virile semen in the womb,
In Sumerian, the most common word for cut is kud, according to the Pennsylvania Sumerian Dictionary which is maintained by the Babylonian Section of the University of Pennsylvania Museum of Anthropology and Archaeology at http://psd. museum.upenn.edu. Kita means lower. In Greek, kata means down. These two words: lower and down, have similar meanings.
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The Greek word katabole means to deposit semen. The hieroglyph for semen is myw. Both words, cat and miao, seem closely linked with the idea of progeny and fertility.
but it also means laying down a foundation,7 which is what progeny do. This kata ideawhether sprout, feline or childseems rooted in the idea that something small will get bigger and reproduce. In Japanese, kata means pattern, model, type. Its literal translation is shape which cuts the ground8 or pattern in the earth.9 This is a lot like the phrase, to leave ones mark, which is what one does when one reproduces. Cat and miao seem inextricably linked. In Ancient Egyptian, myw meant semen (see above). If you recall from page 1, miw meant cat. The relationship between cats and fertility that was seen in Chinese appears to have existed in Ancient Egypt as well. A piece of cat iwmeant is and are in Ancient Egypt; iw also meant wrongdoing. It would seem that to exist was assumed to be a transgression. Iwr meant conceive. Iw seems to play the same role that the id played in Freudian psychology: that of the child or helpless soul. The w sound is a quail chick according to Gardiner. On the next page you can see a list of words from Ancient Egyptian that started with the sound mithe first half of cat. Mi in the hieroglyphs means come, just like it does in Chinese. The rest of the words relate to semen, water, or making copies. The sound me has a universal theme of cloning. Isidore of Seville (seventh century AD) writeshis actual words are in italicsThe offspring of any kind of animal are incorrectly called pups (catulus), for, strictly speaking, pups are the offsprings of dogs. He also writes, The mouser (musio) is so called because it is troublesome to mice (mus). Common people call it the cat (cattus) from catching (captura).... Others say it is so named because cattat, that is, it seesfor it can see so keenly (acute) that with the gleam of its eyes it overcomes the darkness of night.10 The predatory nature of cats, along with their good eyesight, makes them humans
7 8 9 10
www.searchgodsword.com http://www.masutatsuoyama.com/kyokushinkata.htm http://www.a-kato.org/kata/ Etymologies of Isidore of Seville, page 252-253

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The beginning of a list of words in Ancient Egyptian that begin with mi from http:// www.scribd.com/doc/10929802/Dictionary-of-Middle-Egyptian. These words center around making copies and semen (including the euphemism waters). Even spine could be a metaphor for an object which injects semen. The preponderance of words that signify for equivalency also share the letters T and Y, both which can signify for women in the hieroglyphs: T because two of themttrepresent milk in the word irtt (the entire cluster is transcribed by Gardiner as milk, but ir means to make) and this double-T combo is also found in the word for beget wtt. The two-T combination means other things, including the cat goddess Bastet (bAstt), but the root of these words is two loaf-shaped objects, think our capital D turned sideways twice, which demonstrate equivalency. Breast or bread? You make the call. For a deeper analysis of Ancient Egyptian, please refer to www. originofalphabet.com, Chapter 1 and Chapter A.
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doppelganger, as the postcard left eulogizes. Cats, eyes, and women were often synonymous in early history, especially in Ancient Egypt. In Mistress of the House, Mistress of Heaven, Women in Ancient Egypt, the authors write, A variety of feline goddesses were also popularly represented in amuletic form. One of the oldest to appear is the goddess Bastet, patroness of the city of Bubastis in the Nile delta. As an amulet, she typically appears in late Dynastic Egypt as a seated cat, often accompanied by her kittens....cat amulets were almost certainly worn by women for their fertility-enhancing powers. Along with a number of other female deities, Bastet was often represented as a maned lion-goddess.11 According to Geraldine Pinch, an Egyptologist at the Oriental Institute of Oxford University, The images of lions and cats tearing out the throats of foreign captives may allude to the myth of the Eye of Ra being sent down in her lion form (Sekhmet) to destroy the humans who had rebelled against the sun god....When the eye who was the first-born daughter of Ra [the sun god] became alienated from her father, she wandered the deserts [as a Distant Goddess] in the form of a lion or a cat. A relief in the temple of el-Dakka in Nubia showed this goddess with the full mane of a lion and the swollen teats of a nursing lioness.....The myth of Thoth and Shu luring the Distant Goddess back to Egypt with promises of food and comfort mirrors the way the Egyptians had transformed wild cats into pets....An Instruction Text of the GrecoThe busty Ancient Egyptian lion goddess Sekhmet is one Roman Period form of the Eye of Ra; the warns Egyptian men that women Eye is the consort and the daughter of the sun goda are like a friendly kind of Eve. She is depicted A cat sculpture, roughly 2,000 years old, cat when you by a variety of animals, unearthed in Alexandria. especially cats and cows. give them what
Stella Marrs, Design: Sean Tejaratchi; www.stellamarrs.com
11 Mistress of the House, Mistress of Heaven, Women in Ancient Egypt; Capel, Anne K., and Glenn E. Markoe, editors, 1996, page 70
http://www.foxnews.com/scitech/2010/01/19/ancientgreek-temple-dedicated-cat-goddess-unearthed-egypt/
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http://www.mnsu.edu/emuseum/prehistory/egypt/images/religion_images/sekhmet.jpg
eyeball; pupil of eye semen
Both of these Chinese words are pronounced jing1. Mandarin Tools defines the lower character as energy; perfect; excellent; refined; very; proficient. However this seems like euphemism because four other sites Chinese Text Project, Cojak, Wiktionary and the www. Cantonese.sheik.co.uk dictionary include semen among their definitions. Both characters share the essence character highlighted in green.
they want and like a raging lioness when you cannot.12 Women are likened to many animals, but felines have the most constant association because they seem like feminine animals. The word pussy stands for both cats and female genitalia: most likely because they are both soft and strokeable. OED writes that pussy means a girl who is cat-like: Chiefly colloq. A girl or woman exhibiting characteristics associated with a cat, esp. sweetness or amiability. Freq. used as a pet name or as a term of endearment. Women are so sweet and amiable that it is no surprise they are easily duped, especially if they are uneducated. This is why they were kept hidden in ancient times (as women still are in some countries) until they were married off, and their potential value realized by the family. Unmarried and married women have been hidden in houses, burquas, and wimples; cloistered in nunneries, convents, and red tents. When all you see of a woman is the movement of the pupils through the slits of a chador, the eyes become the stand-in for the woman. Eyelids were the first veils; they are used to transmit shyness when they are batted or downcast, disinterest when closed. Eyes are the windows to the soulthis clich equates a human being to a house. An opening in a house allows one to see in; an opening in a human accesses the spirit. In theory, ones spirit animates a person. It is to be. To act. To do. Pinch writes, The Ancient Egyptian word for eye [irt] sounded like a word for doing or acting.... Since the word irt is feminine in gender, divine eyes were personified as goddesses.... The Eye of Ra was regarded as Ras daughter and protector. This Eye goddess was associated with both fire and water. Her fiery glance destroyed the enemies of the divine order while her tears created life....The pupil of the eye could be thought of as a womb...13 In Chinese, the pupil of the eye is represented by the same essence character that is found in semen (see above; to see more of these characters, go to the Rice-Semen analysis database here http://www. originofalphabet.com/2011/01/blog-post.html.) The second character in Chinese is often called the phonetic component, as I have shown on page 3, bottom right graphic; however, because Chinese has so many homonyms, many different phonetic components with the same sound could have been chosen. The choice of one 12 Egyptian Mythology, a Guide to Gods, Goddesses, and Traditions of Ancient Egypt, Geraldine Pinch, page 134-5. 13 Pinch, pages 128-129
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phonetic character over another is a key to aid the uninitiated when reading written Chinese. All words sharing the same phonetic component share a similar spirit that might not be clear until looking at them as a group. (I only know one website where this is possible: http://www. zhongwen.com.) An eye, a womb, an orificeboth Chinese script and Egyptian myth treated openings in the body similarly, as cloacae from which all things emanate. Pinch tells us that it is written in Coffin Texts spell 1130 says the Lord of All...created deities from his sweat and people from the tears of my eye.14 One hymn to the creator states that humanity came forth from the two divine eyes, which are the sun and the moon.15 The moon has always been associated with women. Even the sound moon is close to mu3, which is mother in Chinese and signifies for cow in American; mah meant cow in Sumerian 1,000 recorded times; when it comes to milk, women and cows were synonymous in early humanity. In Chinese mu4 means eye, look, see. The moon looks like an eye in the sky, and the word moon has oo, which looks like two eyes. Eye and I are homonyms, and I is the word that refers to ourselves singularly. We often think of eyes as our primary sense. Our identity is through our eyes. Mei2 means eyebrows and structurally resembles mei3 which means every. Both characters arch over their root word. The word Eve, the theoretical mother of all, is found in the first three letters of every. Everyone descends from a mother, and this would seem to be buried in the word every, yet who notices? In fact, this observation will seem mystical unless you consider that humans are very simple. We are automatons when it comes to our sex drive. The desire of the The character for dusk average male to have coitus with a variety of women has driven is black. The character for language. Eve is at the root of evening, and in Chinese, woman is pink. These are different font sizes in order to the shape of the character for dusk (see right) resembles the show how close in alignment shape of the character for woman; it looks like a piece of a woman is to dusk. When woman. Language is all about pieces of women. Dusk plus characters are depicted to divine means outside; relatives of ones mothers, sisters, similarly, they tend to have a
similar meaning.
eyebrows eye every mother
mei2 mu4 mei3 mu3
The relationship of eyebrow to eye resembles that of every to mother, both graphically and ideologically. The eyebrow is a result of the eye. Every[one] is a result of mothers. Eve is the theoretical mother of us all, and the shapes of these three letterse-v-eare found in both every and eye because eyes and mothers were very important in the beginning of man.
14 15
ibid, page 66 ibid, page 67 33

dusk
outside; relatives of ones mothers, sisters, or daughters
or daughters.16 Women and darkness have often been equated. Eve and eye are very close in spelling, especially when you consider that the letters V and Y look similarly, plus they are neighbors at the end of the alphabet. The Egyptians used the y sound to mean two, and structurally, V and Y have two clear arms (or legs). Women are constantly associated with the number two: we are the second sex, we have two breasts and two sets of two lips, and when women replicate they create another from their ovaries. Ovum and ovine both begin with ov. Sheep, cows, womenlanguage implies a relationship. Bovine is ovine fronted by that B which linguists say comes from house but oddly enough has the same shape as the character which means breasts in Chinese. House is a euphemism for the milk container that resides inside. Many Russian names end in ov or ova, and this signifies possession. Impregnating someone is the biggest kind of possession. The sound of ov isnt far from of, which is a term for belonging to someone or something, or being from somewhere. F and V swap often in language: wife, wives; knife, knives; life, lives. Of and ov would seem to mean the same thing. The related sound off can mean offal which is excrement that comes out of the body, or offspring which is genetic material that the body expels after nine months. In cuneiform, lum meant excrement and fruit both. There was no one around to tell early humans what pregnancy was, or pooping. If it seems like written language has too many associations with women and sex, consider that no one dictated that there was a one-to-one correlation between the constituents of language and the things that motivate humans. If something motivates humans, its going to be all over language. Male eyes see breasts, breasts produce milk, milk allows humans to exist. Milk comes from a variety of mammals, and those animals play an important role in language. The Chinese have four characters that describe the sound a sheep makes (see page 22). A sheep was more than just a source of wool. Theres a reason that the boy who takes care of the sheep gets beaten in Waiting for Godot (and the one who takes care of the goats doesnt) because sheep are so docile, they are easy to take advantage of. A ewe is a female sheep. Ewe is a very similar word to Eve and eye. And it sounds like you, which is second person singular. The Sumerian word 16 Reading and Writing Chinese, William McNaughton and Li Ying, page 54 34
for ewe was u 4,255 times according to the Pennsylvania Sumerian Dictionary. Our letter U represents a sack similar to a uterus, or the universe for that matter, which is the whole of creation (OED). Women are the ultimate creators: they create milk and people. Milk is another mi word (like rice in Chinese) that represents whiteness. Milt is the sperm of fishes, often whitish. Milk, being such an important commodity, goes by many names. In Ancient Greek, its gala and we have words like galaxy which describe the Milky Way. Ga was the word for milk in Sumerian, according to the Pennsylvania Sumerian Dictionary. The oldest recorded and decoded language is Sumerian, which used the cuneiform you see at right. Wikipedia says, The cities of Sumer were the first civilization to practice intensive, year-round agriculture, by 5000 BC....The surplus of storable food created by this economy allowed the population to settle in one place instead of migrating....It also allowed for a much greater population density, and in turn required an extensive labor force and division of labor. Sumer was also the site of early development of writing, progressing from a stage of proto-writing in the mid 4th millennium BC to writing proper by 3000 BC. Ga meant milk, and gala meant vulva (see above). These might seem like different things until you realize that they come in the same package. And we wonder why a gala is so festive. Even laga meant vulvaand the milk symbol is there, bottom rightwhich shows that in the early days, it was the sound that mattered, and not always the order of the consonants. Funny that gal still kind of implies vulva. Laga and lac of lactate have similar sounds, especially when you consider that G was the third character of the alphabet in the beginning. The word for milk in the hieroglyphs is irtt, to make tt. Could lactate be two forms of milk, Sumerian and Ancient Egyptian, that came together in one word? Laga-tt: lactate. Milk is important now. Imagine living in a desert. In Sumerian, the concept of cat was represented by three different sets of cuneiform, and the pronunciations were sua (71 times), suari (two times), and gullum (one time). Breaking these words down to their component parts demonstrates that the Sumerians did not revere cats when they were alive, only the parts of them they could use. The first example, sua, is shown to
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the right. Think of it as an addition problem: catgut + progeny = cat catgut
progeny
destroy
In the word
+
cat
fruit (fertile)
+
cat
gullum we have: destroy + fertile = cat. Gullum is only attested for one time, but it looks like a cat from the aerial view. A related word is kigula, which meant destitute person. According to John Halloran, who maintains a Sumerian lexicon, gullum means cat (to fall upon, destroy, extinguish + fertile; cf., ki-gul-la).17 The related word, ki-gul-la: waif (ground + to fall upon + nominative; cf., gul-lum), suggests that cats and waifs were equal. A waif, says OED, is a piece of property which is found ownerless and which,
17 The lexicon of 1,255 Sumerian logogram words and 2,511 Sumerian compound words (no cuneiform depictions) can be found on the Internet at http://www.sumerian.org/sumerlex.htm
36
if unclaimed within a fixed period after due notice given, falls to the lord of the manor; e.g. an article washed up on the seashore, an animal that has strayed. Equating women with cats is not ultimately a good thing. It makes women seem expendable. This means that if one impregnates a woman, its of less consequence because shes no different than a cat. The human male desires sex more consistently than the female because they have less physical involvement in the outcome. They wont have that baby growing in their bodies for nine months. Women are much bigger stakeholders in the act of sex because they will live with the decision for a much longer time, whatever choice they make about the future of the entity growing inside them, and that choice has even affected whether they live or die. No wonder women were cloistered, but they werent necessarily protected. They were used as pawns, often marched in front of the battles as a form of distraction in order to avoid massacre or married to pay off debts. Women were chattel once records started to be kept. Written language was created in order to control human and non-human commerce. Knowing languages origins help us understand ourselves. Its not easy looking at our violent past, but it is necessary in order to recognize why divisions still exist between what men want and what women expect. The fact that cats have been depicted reverently in ancient scriptsand that they still signify for womenshows that women have had a huge effect on language, even if the majority of women did not read or write during most of written languages existence.
Three different cultural depictions of cats: Sumerian, Chinese, Ancient Egyptian. For the record, I have never owned a cat because I am allergic to them. Language brought me to want one because they are obviously important to humans.
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Meow Is Just Another Name For Cat

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Chapter 2

Meow is just another name for cat

21 June 2013 8:54 PM Jennifer Ball, Sept. 3, 2010

To hear this sound, go to http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Voiced_pharyngeal_fricative

Meow is just another name for cat

Meow is just another name for cat

function: phonetic component

"Cat" in Ancient Egyptian

function: radical phonetic component

sprouts legengrowing in dary field (implies beast fertility) (zh) (miao)

Meow is just another name for cat

Meow is just another name for cat

21 June 2013 8:54 PM Jennifer Ball, Sept. 3, 2010

21 June 2013 8:54 PM Jennifer Ball, Sept. 3, 2010

21 June 2013 8:54 PM Jennifer Ball, Sept. 3, 2010

The Stability of Mio

animal woman hand metal

pretty girl women reproduce

reproduction produces progeny which = stability metal + stability = anchor

steady eye = aim

21 June 2013 8:54 PM Jennifer Ball, Sept. 3, 2010

Meow is just another name for cat

Reproductive organs found only in females.

hatch, sit on eggs

pretty; charming girl

21 June 2013 8:54 PM Jennifer Ball, Sept. 3, 2010

Meow is just another name for cat

pretty; charming girl

(same as ) good looking, a prostitute

Meow is just another name for cat

21 June 2013 8:54 PM Jennifer Ball, Sept. 3, 2010

Meow is just another name for cat

little girl (she has no milk)

mother, female elder (she has milk)

21 June 2013 8:54 PM Jennifer Ball, Sept. 3, 2010

(non-classical form of ) a girl; a little girl

male, man, son, baron

cave; hole turbulent till land, cultivate; hunt

21 June 2013 8:54 PM Jennifer Ball, Sept. 3, 2010

Adultery through the ages

Meow is just another name for cat

A Small Sampling of Triple Radicals

Meow is just another name for cat

21 June 2013 8:54 PM Jennifer Ball, Sept. 3, 2010

Meow is just another name for cat

hulled or husked uncooked rice

grain still on stalk; rice plant

21 June 2013 8:54 PM Jennifer Ball, Sept. 3, 2010

Mi through the centuriesalways bilaterally symmetrical.

A whole lot of white riceseven (type) faces of mi.

21 June 2013 8:54 PM Jennifer Ball, Sept. 3, 2010

Meow is just another name for cat

Meow is just another name for cat

21 June 2013 8:54 PM Jennifer Ball, Sept. 3, 2010

Cats vs. Sheep

21 June 2013 8:54 PM Jennifer Ball, Sept. 3, 2010

essence; semen; spirit

seed, pip, pit, stone

Meow is just another name for cat

rice between field and sprout

a fetus inside the belly

rice as a fetus inside stomach

21 June 2013 8:54 PM Jennifer Ball, Sept. 3, 2010