冬 : Winter sounds
After discussing the character for ‘autumn’ in the previous article, today we venture onto thin ice. The radical (the part of the character that indicates its meaning) for water (or ice), 冫, although not present as such in the character for winter, the two strokes at the bottom convey the same meaning and can therefore be seen as the radical in this context. Winter is pronounced as dōng tiān, or ‘doong-tyen’, with a flat, high tone slightly above the normal speaking voice. For the writing method of Chinese characters, I refer back to the first article in this section, which discussed the character for autumn. The same stroke order can be followed.
Words containing 冬:
冬天/冬季: winter, winter season
冬菜: preserved cabbage, winter vegetables
冬衣: winter clothes
Just like with the character for autumn, many words can be formed with 冬. It becomes more interesting when we look at the history of the character 冬.
Sound vs. Season: 冬 versus 咚
Anyone who looks up the character 冬 using, for example, the (very useful) Pleco app, will discover that this simplified character corresponds to two different traditional characters. This is because the character 冬, besides the already mentioned ‘winter’, can also have the meaning of an onomatopoeia used to represent the sound of rolling drums (dōngdōngdōng). The onomatopoeia and the word for ‘winter’ are therefore the same character in the simplified form, and coincidentally also the same in pronunciation. However, they have different origins. In the meaning of ‘winter’, the character in its traditional form is the same as the current simplified form. For the onomatopoeia, it’s different; its traditional form is 鼕. The upper part of this character symbolizes a drum.
So why the title ‘Winter sounds’?
Poetic license, I love it. The sound of drum rolls in the word for ‘winter season’. And although I haven’t found any examples of this yet, it seems conceivable to me that some poets might have intentionally written 鼕天 somewhere as an image of a hail-like winter day.
