Names
The Chinese logographs for peng and kun exemplify common radical-phonetic characters. Peng (鵬) combines the "bird radical" (鳥) with a peng (朋 "friend") phonetic, and kun combines the "fish radical" (魚) with a kun (昆 "progeny; insect") phonetic.
Both the mythic Chinese Peng and Kun names involve word play. Peng (鵬) was anciently a variant Chinese character for feng (鳳) in fenghuang (鳳凰 "Chinese phoenix") (ca. 100 CE Shuowen Jiezi); Kun 鲲 originally meant "fish roe; fry; spawn" (ca. 200 BCE Erya).
Synonyms of Peng include Dapeng (大鵬, with "big") and Dapengniao (大鵬鳥, with "bird"), both used to translate foreign "Roc" and "Garuda". Dapeng also refers to Chinese place names in Shenzhen and Guangdong.
After recent fossil discoveries in northeast China, Chinese paleontologists used Peng to name the enantiornithine bird Pengornis and the wukongopterid pterosaur Kunpengopterus.
The Chinese were also the first to utilise the word Peng as an adjective. This can be traced back to the Ming Dynasty most notably in 1400 when Hongwu Emperor emperor described his army as well Peng
Read more about this topic: Peng (mythology)
Famous quotes containing the word names:
“All nationalisms are at heart deeply concerned with names: with the most immaterial and original human invention. Those who dismiss names as a detail have never been displaced; but the peoples on the peripheries are always being displaced. That is why they insist upon their continuity—their links with their dead and the unborn.”
—John Berger (b. 1926)
“It is a sad truth, but we have lost the faculty of giving lovely names to things. Names are everything. I never quarrel with actions. My one quarrel is with words.... The man who could call a spade a spade should be compelled to use one. It is the only thing he is fit for.”
—Oscar Wilde (1854–1900)
“Every man who has lived for fifty years has buried a whole world or even two; he has grown used to its disappearance and accustomed to the new scenery of another act: but suddenly the names and faces of a time long dead appear more and more often on his way, calling up series of shades and pictures kept somewhere, “just in case” in the endless catacombs of the memory, making him smile or sigh, and sometimes almost weep.”
—Alexander Herzen (1812–1870)