"Firefly" character on ship

POSTED BY: Reveal
UPDATED: Thursday, August 26, 2004 23:24
VIEWED: 2322
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REVEAL

Thursday, August 26, 2004 11:17 PM

Here's an obscure and completely useless bit of trivia. The Pinyinary notes that the character used for "firefly" on the ship (qian-) is obscure and not commonly used. It's obscure indeed -- I have yet to find it in my dictionaries or dictionary sites. (Admittedly, I'm a long way from knowing the Yale 1,020, but I'm getting pretty good at looking characters up.) "Firefly" seems to be normally translated as "ying/ huo~ chong/" ("glowing fire bug," more or less).

It's somewhat interesting that they would use an obscure character for the ship model. Of course, it could simply be for graphics reasons, one character perhaps being better than three. But while I was looking through the various meanings of "qian-", I found some homonyms that apply rather well to the show: crime; all (together); move, migrate; and leader (in the character, a person leading a thousand).

Meaningful? Probably not. But it's amusing to me that the themes of leadership, community, migration, and crime are all encapsulated in a single name.

EMBERS

Thursday, August 26, 2004 11:24 PM

Thank you for that, I really found it interesting...
I'm not likely to investigate the Chinese myself, but I find it very interesting when someone else looks into it and gives us a real analysis as you have!

I just arrived in Oakland at a Buffy convention, but Jonathan Woodward will be here...one of the famous 'hat tricks' of Joss' shows.