Pioneer Plaque

 

Hi, alien friends! I am from the blue planet far away from your homeland–the Earth. After reading the book ‘the story of your life’, I have a basic understanding of you and your linguistic system. I am so curious about your characters. Thus, based on that, I made a pioneer plaque to introduce our characters, more specifically, Chinese characters to you.

According to the description by the author, your written language is more like several logos which represent different meanings joining together to create an image instead of writing from one side to the other. Therefore, we apply your mode of writing to our Chinese characters. We separate 4 characters in one sentence which are ‘家’, ‘国’, ‘天’ and ‘下’ and reunite them together to make a logo in your way. As you can see, the outcome is shown in the middle of the plaque. Different from your words which mostly are pictographic characters, this is an associated compound. The meaning of the associated compound is that it is not made by the appearance of a specific object but by people’s understanding of the concept. Thus, from my point of view, it is quite interesting to introduce this to you since, in this way, not only can you get to know our written language but also get to know how we perceive the world. Besides, you can also have access to our values.

The first word ‘家‘ which should be pronounced as ‘Jia’ in the Chinese language represents family. The upper part is ‘宀’, which should be pronounced as ‘Mian’ stands for the physical structure of a house. And the lower part ‘豕‘ stands for ‘pigs’ which in the past in the main source of meat. So with the meat and the house, it becomes the family. And the second word is ‘国’ (Guo). The rectangle stands for the meaning of domain. And the middle part shares a similar meaning of territory. The third words ‘天’ is representing a man who stands straight. People in the past considered the sky the part above the top of a human’s head. And the last word ‘下‘(Xia) is simply two lines. The upper line is the zero line and the location of the other line compared to the zero lines is the meaning of ‘下‘. Nowadays we combine ‘天’ and ‘下’ to show the meaning of the whole world.

So the overall meaning of the four characters is the unity of every stage of units in the society. However, when we refer to the word, we always think of the whole country or the whole earth. However, when we meet you, friends from the mystery space, it is time for us to expand this concept to a broader range–the universe. A bigger unity–the unity of the whole universe.