Thomas Chan wrote: > I've typed up my notes on the Vietnamese and Korean ones here, for you:
Many thanks, that is extremely useful, as I don't know either of these languages. Over night I added Persian (thanks to Roozbeh) and Japanese to the list, and so with Korean and Vietnamese it should be quite a good test of your browser and fonts ! I also added some pretty pictures of our furry friends from a C19 Mongolian MS. > > I don't know if any of these are bound forms, or if any are not the > everyday term for those animals, cf., the alternative Chinese term in > your list for 'dog', gou3, which replaces the quan3 vocabulary item in > almost all dialects. > Yes, I forgot to mention that quan3 is classical Chinese, whereas gou3 is vernacular Chinese. Another interesting semantic point is that the euphemism "little dragon" (xiao3 long2) is usually used for "snake" in contexts such as "I was born in the year of the Little Dragon". Regards, Andrew