Chinese is a remarkably logical and consistent language, perhaps the best-behaved of all the languages I've studied.
Yet there are a few quirks here and there that irritate me, and I'll document those as I go along.
The first one is about 下 xià (down) and 上 shàng (up).
下 xià is nice and logical. There's a frame of reference - a horizontal baseline and a vertical "wall", and then there's a downward stroke that unambiguously denotes "down".
So far, so good. Let's now see what the Chinese character for "up" is.
It's 上 shàng.
OK, it's got the horizontal baseline, and it's at the bottom. Very good. It also has the vertical "wall". Excellent. Now for the upward stroke, right?
Oh no, how disappointing! It's a horizontal stroke, not an upward stroke. Now this is going to irritate me throughout my life whenever I transact in Chinese. Part of my mind is going to keep striking at that horizontal stroke from below in a vain attempt to get it to point upwards.
And the tone could have been upwards too (sháng).
This is what I think it should have been:
I don't think I'm being unreasonable in my expectation. You know what the Chinese word for table-tennis is, right? It's 乒乓 pīngpāng ("ping-pong"). Notice how the two characters are almost exactly the same, but the stroke below is leftwards for pīng and rightwards for pāng?
Why not do that for "up" and "down" then?
Grrr!
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