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Two hieroglyphs in the chat


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Posted

Hi everyone!

I've been playing with a guy in the QuizClash, and he messaged me these 2 hieroglyphs (in the attached file). I've tried to get him to tell me what they mean, but he just avoids answering. Honestly, I have a suspicion he is swearing at me when I win :lol:

I've tried to use the recognition systems, but either they are not in the dictionary (???), or I'm very bad in drawing hieroglyphs (that's the most likely answer). Tried to use dictionary and search by the initial, but to no avail as well.

Sorry for the bad quality, had to make a screenshot from my phone.

post-60784-0-49584100-1427914465_thumb.png

Posted

觎 and 霸

 

觎 is found mainly in the word 觊觎, 'to covet'. 霸 means 'hegemon, master'. I have no idea why he used these words.

 

Note that hieroglyphs were used by the ancient Egyptians, Chinese writing is referred to as 'characters'.

Posted

Thanks to everyone for the help, and sorry for mis-naming the characters - English is not my native language, and in my native language that's how they are called.

Posted

It's Russian. And if you check the Russian wikipedia for Chinese writing system (for example), you'll find the word "иероглиф" (hieroglyph) a lot. So it just didn't came to my mind that the word might be different in English.

  • Like 2
Posted

That's very interesting! I had no idea that in some languages, Chinese characters were called hieroglyphs.

I suspect that it's not the official name used by linguists, even the wikipedia article mentions "знак" which is more correct.

The confusion comes from the idea that Chinese writing is ideographic, and it's not.

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