Re: Japanese "good", consonant clusters etc.

Adam writes:

>--- Nik Taylor <yonjuuni@...> wrote:
>>  The kanji for "beauty" is rather interesting.  :-)
>>  "sheep" + "big"  A
>>  big sheep was a desirable thing, thus the
>>  combination was used for
>>  "desirable", which came to mean "beautiful"
>>
>
>Really?  The kanji is sheep+big?  I find that an
>interesting mangling since the hanzi is sheep+woman!
Eh?

No, Nik is right here. No mangling -- it's the same character.
"Sheep" (yang2) on the top and "big" (da4) on the bottom: the "mei3"
of "Meiguo".

"Sheep" (yang2) on the top and "woman" (nv3) on the bottom renders
"jiang1", a Chinese surname; it is also used in simplified characters
for "ginger" (which I'm really not into!).

Kou