Re: Etymology of "Ketzer"

"Neeraj Mathur" <neemathur@xxxxxxxxxxx> wrote in
news:e5t41i$7rv$1@xxxxxxxxxxxxx:


On the other hand, your original question was an interesting one (even
though the Dravidian bits of your posting present as given what is
100% speculation). If in Chinese, the character for 'bat' is used as a
totem or symbol of good luck because of its resemblance to another
word, that is interesting in itself; one can compare the way that
numbers containing 'four' are bad luck, because the words for 'four'
and 'death' differ only by one phoneme, the tone. Can anybody tell us
whether the characters for these pairs of words contain the same
phonetic element, or in other ways look particularly similar?


'Bat' and 'Fortune' (fu) are similar words, but have different radicals.
'Four' and 'Death' are completely different characters.

BTW, fourteen is considered very unlucky because it sounds like 'certain
death' in Cantonese (so no number 14 for houses or floors), but thirteen is
considered lucky because it sounds like 'certain to live'.


I don't know of anything like this happening in Indo-European
languages; based on what I know of their writing systems in history, I
would think that the most promising places to look would be the
Anatolian branch, Middle Persian (which, though using an alphabetic
writing system, used spelled-out Semitic words as logograms), and
perhaps runic or ogham texts.

I don't know if there is a name for this phenomenon in English. Is
there one in Chinese?


Puns?

In many Chinese homes (I suspect primarily Cantonese ones), you may see a
character for fortune 'fu' but written upside down, that's because the word
for 'upsidedown fortune' sounds similar to 'fortune comes'. I always
thought of it as a kind of visual pun.




Neeraj Mathur




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