AW
Andrew West 魏安
@babelstone.bsky.social
Independent researcher of Tangut, Khitan, and Jurchen. Developer of BabelPad and BabelMap. Maintainer of BabelStone Han font. Responsible for adding over 10,000 characters to the Unicode Standard.
360 followers207 following283 posts
In the translation of Æsop's Fables by Lín Shū 林紓 et al. (published by the Commercial Press in Beijing in 1903 as 《伊索寓言》), the word 'mole' in "The Mole and his Mother" is translated with the otherwise unattested (and as yet unencoded) character ⿺鼠如
Oh wow — wouldn’t have expected to see a hapax character in the lithography era!
Moles have a perfectly good name in Chinese (鼹鼠 yǎnshǔ), so why did Lín Shū invent a new character here? My theory is that Lín Shū, who famously did not speak English, asked the person interpreting the story what a 'mole' was, and got the reply 如鼠也 "it's like a rat", so he wrote the character as 如鼠.
AW
Andrew West 魏安
@babelstone.bsky.social
Independent researcher of Tangut, Khitan, and Jurchen. Developer of BabelPad and BabelMap. Maintainer of BabelStone Han font. Responsible for adding over 10,000 characters to the Unicode Standard.
360 followers207 following283 posts