round 2 - day 3 - 6 of 8
brought to you by: clarence
猫 (chinese) vs meoi (quenya)
which reigns supreme?
猫
meoi
info and propawganda under the cut!
猫 (māo) /mɑu̯˥/
It sounds like Meow! Also, Cantonese is a really cool language (that I can definitely not pronounce sadly)
Little ears and a tail 🥺
sounds like meow
BRO ITSLITERALLY THE CAT SOUND IRS LITERLALY WHEN A CAT GOES "MOW" ANNSJSYSSHSHSHH
Because it sounds like a cat <3
It sounds like the sound cats make.
māo sounds like the sound a cat makes
this word reads as "māo".
real pokemon moment. we chinese really saw a cat, asked it what it wanted to be named as, and then called it that. we even kept the same intonation (the dash over the a) to ensure that everyone else who knew chinese would talk to the cat in the exact same way the cat called to us.
it's got 3 radicals; the left (犭) for quadruped animal, the cap (艹) for grass, and the base (田) for field, like rice fields. that's basically the whole backstory of how we saw and met the cat. the kitty really was just coming in from the grass on his 4 lil paws to our field and introduced themselves as mao. ily cat
if you read the cap and base section only it looks like a cat's face and ears.
every time you want to write the word cat you have to draw them!!! wont you think of a lil babey kitty while drawing them? isn't it beautiful how every time we wanted to write cat in chinese we took the time to depict a cat? decided everyone should know how or what a cat looks like and devoted our time of remembrance to just a leetol creeture?
because it's literally onomatopoeic. the cat is named after the sound it makes (which is so cute)
simple, cute, direct, just like cat
It sounds like a cat sound, and also just really nice. If you interpret the radicals in the unintended way I'm deciding to, the leftmost bit of the character could look like a cat scratching their back on a fencepost behind them, or something. Overall, it is a very cat word
it sounds like cat sounds (cute) and its easy for me to remember as a chinese novice bc it has the same radical as dog and is easy to draw
sounds like the noise cats make. cute
猫 as a character is peak cat! It's been a while since I've been in Chinese school, so bear with me, but the left side uses the claw symbol, which shows it's an animal, and the right side (苗, pronounced miáo) helps explain its pronunciation. 苗 specifically means something along the lines of seedling/young/descendant and isn't really depictive of what it means, but when I was younger, I thought it looked a little like a cat with little ears and whiskers as well. (Chinese cats say "喵" (miāo) which ties back to the 苗 symbol as well!) Also, 猫 "māo" is kind of pronounced like a meow, which I think should give it bonus points. Overall, 猫 is the peak word for cat! :3
meoi - no IPA provided
no propawganda provided :(
