word SHI

[simonn]

hello dears.

 

i found some translation in internet of chinese word SHI, but as we know words in chinese have many meanings.

so asking a service to write ALL meanings of this word SHI.

 

thank you very much.

[hoshinoumi]

Hi Simonn,

 

"shi" is a romanization, a way of writing the pronounciation of one chinese syllable using latin letters; but this syllable can be attached to many characters, so "shi" can have hundreds of meanings depending on the character. As an ilustrative example, this is what comes up when you search for "shi" in a Chinese dictionary.

 

[roddy]

Why?

[Lu]

38 minutes ago, simonn said:

so asking a service to write ALL meanings of this word SHI.

You mean a dictionary? Pleco is a good one.

[roddy]

PLECO IS NOT A DICTIONARY

[Publius]

SHI is not a Chinese word. It is an incomplete romanization of many Chinese words. It's like trying to find all the meanings of all English words that rhyme with 'right' -- a pointless exercise in futility.

It is incomplete because Chinese is a tonal language, The difference between the first tone SHI1 and the second tone SHI2 is as great and real as the difference between 'right' and 'light'.

Even if the romanization is complete, there are more homophones (meaning words that sound exactly the same) in Chinese than in English. Just like 'wright', 'write', 'right', 'rite' are totally different words, there are dozens of completely unrelated words in Chinese that have the same pronunciation SHI1.

To indicate which word you mean, you need to spell it out in its native script, like 詩 (=poem), 師 (=teacher), 獅 (=lion), 濕 (=wet), or put it into a sentence that can eliminate the ambiguity, like 'U R RITE'.

 

[Shelley]

1 hour ago, roddy said:

PLECO IS NOT A DICTIONARY

How would you describe it?

[roddy]

A dictionary engine, on which you can load the many many dictionaries listed here. That said, I'm not sure how they refer to their own dictionary. I hope they call it PlecoDict or something to avoid confusion.

 

It's not entirely pedantic to make the distinction. Every couple of months this happens:

A: Well, I looked it up in Pleco and it said swede, so you're wrong.

B: Well, I looked it up in Pleco and it said turnip. Weird.

 

It's not weird. One's looking at the 21st Century English-Chinese Dictionary and the other at the Duogongneng Chengyu Cidian.

[Shelley]

I understand your distinctions, I also understand about the variety of dictionaries available.

 

So Pleco -  a Dictionary engine and Flash card app.

[lips]

OK.  I've done the hard part.  These are all the Chinese characters, simplified and traditional, with "shi" as the pinyin romanization, regardless of tone:

 

http://www.chinese-tools.com/tools/sinograms.html?p=shi

 

Just copy and paste each Chinese character into a dictionary to find the meaning.  Some characters would need some searching as they are archaic and uncommon.

[simonn]

Oh thank you very much!

especially lips, bless you!

[Shelley]

Interestingly one of those "it seems so obvious" pointers advised against learning words in alphabetical order because you will end up with different "shi"s running around your head and "shi" was the example used.

Once it was pointed out it made good sense.

 

Be wary of mega confusion with all this churning around in your head.

[somethingfunny]

I need that Duogongneng Chengyu Cidian.  Doubt it even has turnip in it.