Looking for a translation/recognizing a character

[SergioWerner]

Hello

 

thank you for having my post. I live in Paris and we have a small martial arts association. My teacher's teacher left us the inscription below calligraphed, and I am trying to get hold of what it may mean. I did take some Mandarin classes in the past and could get to the first 3 characters (which I think are 友會武) but I cannot get hold of the fourth one. Any suggestions would be welcomed. Thank you.

[Jim]

Reads right to left, 以武会友 in full-form characters - make friends through martial arts. The more common set phrase is 以文会友: http://www.iciba.com/以文会友 and since 文 and 武 are a contrasted pair, it's a play on that I expect.

[SergioWerner]

Thank you, it does belong to a set of calligraphies that right-to-left it makes absolute sense. Many thanks.

[Enjune Zhang]

It is well impressed that Chinese calligraphy wins more and more attention worldwide. Ancient Chinese is normally written from right to left with characters in traditional form(會) rather than simplified(会). Calligraphy adopts these writing habits so knowing the sequence and written form of Chinese will make it easy to understand what is written.

Handwriting in different styles will be hard to recognize sometimes, and here is how Chinese people practicing calligraphy collect all the possible forms and styles of same character in different calligraphy works in a dictionary.

http://m.shufazidian.com/

You can type the character in searching box to check how it is written by different ancient calligraphers.

以武会友means making friends while practicing Chinese wushu. The character 武 could be replaced by anything you want, like 茶，画，书法，etc, anything you commonly share with each other is ok. It describes the occasion where people with talent or hobby alike get together for 相互切磋, exchanging views and ideas while comparing for mutual improvement, thus enhancing connection between them. It is exactly what we are doing in this forum, brought together by a certain topic and welcoming ideas and reply, seeking improvement by sharing with people with common enthusiasm on language

 

[Publius]

Traditionally, Chinese texts were written vertically, from top to bottom and right to left, like this:

ＩＥＡ

ＪＦＢ

︙ＧＣ

︙ＨＤ

so you see, "ＤＣＢＡ" is merely a special case in which the "line width (i.e., the number of letters per line)" equals 1.