Pictographic Meaning of Chinese characters (7) Moon (月）and Meat (肉）

Shell Bone Script of character Moon

This represents the moon.

Small Seal Script of character Moon

This also resembles the moon.

Clerical Script of character Moon

The outline is similar to the Small Seal Script, but most curves have been turned into straight lines, with only the left-falling stroke remaining curved.

Now let's look at the character for character Meat.

Shell Bone Script of character Meat

This character looks a bit strange. It consists of the character "刀" (knife) with a short vertical line in the middle.

Shell Bone Script of character Knife

This shows a knife with a handle at the top and a forked blade at the bottom. It likely represents a knife from over 3000 years ago, where the main blade is on the right, and the left side may resemble a small fork, somewhat like a crescent knife.

The Shell Bone Script for character Meat does not include the knife handle, likely emphasizing the meat rather than the knife. The vertical line in the middle represents the meat being cut by the knife. This character is a type of ideogram, highlighting the vertical line.

This image doesn't accurately convey the concept, but since we don’t have ancient knives, finding a precise representation is difficult. Essentially, the ancient depiction used the knife with a vertical line to represent the meat being cut, focusing on the meat.

Small Seal Script of Meat

This doesn't resemble the Shell Bone Script of Knife much. The outer part represents the knife, while the two short curved lines inside represent the meat. Compared to the Small Seal Script of Moon, they are almost indistinguishable. Thus, in the Small Seal Script, Moon and Meat look identical.

Clerical Script of Meat

It hardly resembles the Oracle Bone Script for Meat. It is symmetrical and upright, with two strokes indicating meat. This character differs significantly from the Clerical Script of Moon, so no one would confuse the two. This change likely aimed to resolve the "indistinguishable moon and meat" issue in the Small Seal Script by making Meat look very different from Moon.

However, this led to another problem: should the radical "月" (moon) also change? Historically, the "肉" radical did not change and remained as "月". People call the radical 月 as Meat-Moon radical, which means that the radical may mean Meat or Moon dependent on the different character.

It is a big topic, I won't discuss it further here.