>What's the definition for the above character? I guess it's pronounced the same as horse. I
>couldn't find the character at Unicode. They've improved the look-up feature and definitions
>a great deal.
It's U+7341.
I didn't know you used Mojikyou 文字鏡. Since the first fifty thousand or so Mojikyou numbers are the same as those in the _Dai Kanwa Jiten_ 大漢和辭典, you can sometimes use that information to find the Unicode codepoint using the unihan.txt[1] file, which is the data behind the web-based material, and contains a bit more information that presented in web form, too). In this case, "U+7341 kIRGDaiKanwaZiten 20595" is the relevant line in the file.
[1] Get it from http://www.unicode.org/Public/UNIDATA/ . It's huge, though--22.8 megs.
(Using Mandarin below unless otherwise specified…)
The _Hanyu Da Zidian_ 漢語大字典 (hereafter "HYDZD") gives two uses for {犬馬}, of which the second is as the second syllable of meng3ma3 猛{犬馬} 'mammoth' (meng3 is written as 猛), so I'll omit that entry. The first use I quote below (vol. 1, p. 1361):
ma4 《集韻》莫駕切﹐去禡明。
獸名。《集韻．禡韻 》﹕鉄犬馬}﹐獸名。椣m類篇．犬部》﹕鉄犬馬}﹐獸名。似
獾﹐長尾。
Based on the fanqie 反切 given by the _Jiyun_ 集韻, I'd construct an artificial *ma6 reading for Cantonese for the non-mammoth usage. (I know you can read the definition, but for the benefit of other readers, both the _Jiyun_ and _Leipian_ 類篇 say it's the name of an animal--the latter source says its like a badger and has a long tail.) Doesn't sound like a dog, mammoth, nor monkey!
I should add that the same source where I found {犬馬}{犬留} for 'monkey', which was Samuel Wells Williams' _A Syllabic Dictionary of the Chinese Language_ (1874/1909), also said that in Shandong 山東 it meant 'wolf'.
I think the {犬馬} character is simply used to write any syllable like "ma" in an animal name.
>I did find the second of your characters at Unicode. The link to the information about it, at
>chinalanguage, are below. They don急 have a Jyut Pin pronunciation for it. I guess it would be
>lau4 as the one with the horse radical is.
{犬留} lead me on a wild chase, as the HYDZD says it旧 the same as {鼠卯} and {鼠留}, but its still some kind of rodent (lots of description omitted here). Under the {鼠留} entry is the following pronunciation information (vol. 7, p. 4777):
liu2 《集韻》 力求切﹐ 平尤來。
From that, I'd construct an artificial *lau4 reading for Cantonese. I think like {犬馬}, these characters might simply be used to write any syllable like "liu/lau/lao" in an animal. (Don't be bothered by the use of 卯 as a phonetic for a l- sound--if you look at it and the top half of 留, these two components are often used inconsistently and interchangeably for m- and l- in a number of characters.)
I think we are just spinning our wheels trying to chase down the characters for 'monkey', when the word might not even be of Chinese origin.
>What is the definition of no^m? Are they characters created by the Vietnamese for words in
>Vietnamese that are not derived from Chinese? Are they like the kokuji of Japanese? If not what
>do the Vietnamese call their kokuji? The Koreans?
There's no^m (short for chu+~ no^m), and chu+~ ha'n. chu+~ no^m is written as {字字}{喃}, 'characters' + 'southern'[2]. chu+~ ha'n is written as 字漢 (i.e., same as the Chinese 漢字, but with the modifier after the modified). Nom are basically the characters created to write native Vietnamese words (and in some cases, early Chinese loans that have become assimilated) as well including some characters that are used in Chinese but used to write native Vietnamese words. I guess you could said they are the Vietnamese counterpart to kokuji 國字 in Japanese, except that Japanese use of characters from Chinese to write native Japanese words is not considered kokuji. chu+~ ha'n, then,
are just the characters used in writing Chinese.
[2] Some other variant ways to write the term exist, since some Vietnamese were aware that 喃 means 'to mumble' in Chinese.
As for Korean, I'm not sure what they call characters peculiar to Korean for writing native Korean words. I've heard them referred to as gugja 國字 (same term as Japanese), but I've also heard that this 'national characters' term is ambiguous--it could also refer to hangul. I have the impression that there aren't many as Japanese or Vietnamese--perhaps the concept of making a distinction never really developed?
>How many of these characters are there? Japanese? Korean? Vietnamese? >Approximately?
Perhaps Vietnamese numbers in the thousands, Japanese in the hundreds, and scores for Korean. Characters peculiar to Cantonese numbers somewhere in the hundreds. But its not always easy to say if a character is specific to a region or language sometimes.
Thomas Chan
tc31@cornell.edu