Sedge, hieroglyphic and Japanese

Sedge: hieroglyphic and Japanese

I came across hieroglyphic writing 𓇓¹ for sedge² while I had just learned the kanji for the same word in Japanese.

The reference is here.

It says that in hieroglyphic writing, the sign for the sedge plant functions as a triliteral (three consonants), used to write king.³

Japanese spelling is with the originally Chinese glyph 菅.⁴

The actual Japanese word is suge /sɯge/. The more friendly spelling is kana spelling すげ or スゲ but I’m looking at the kanji spelling now.

The word suge is unrelated to the Chinese word 菅. That word might have been, in transcription, something like kaen (for its original meaning, see below).

In Classical Chinese the bottom element 官 in the glyph 菅 gave a hint at the pronunciation of the word (sounds something like kwan) while the top part 艹 (the semantic element or determinative) told the reader: the word is some kind of plant (艹 is an abbreviation of grass 艸)

How did a Chinese reader in the Middle Ages know that 官 gave the hint kwan? Because 官 was a word that one was supposed to know.

官 itself does not contain a hint for its pronunciation. It does contain a determinative (宀, indicating a building) but the element below that is ambiguous. Today, the bottom part of 官 is often taken as buttocks because the modern meaning of the word 官 is government official and those officials are supposed to sit on their buttocks in a building.

In practice 官 is somewhat arbitrary as a sign. One simply has to learn that it is pronounced guān (in modern Chinese).

Speculatively, a Chinese reader might guess that 菅, because it contains 官, has some semantic relation to the Classical Chinese meaning of 管, another Chinese character that uses 官 as a phonetic hint.

管 is used for a word with meanings like hollow tube, pipe, or flute, with the modern Chinese pronunciation guǎn. This might suggest the the shape of sedge (tube-shaped). This association is today less likely because the graph 管 is now mostly used⁵ for the word administer.⁶

In Japanese, 菅 is even more arbitrary as a writing symbol than it is in Chinese, because the phonetic hint kwan is useless for the Japanese word suge. In this respect, the status of 菅 is comparable to the Hindu–Arabic numeral symbol 4, which is used in Japan today to write the number word yón.

Both 4 and 菅 are arbitrary foreign symbols imported to write native Japanese words.

And yet, 菅 is not quite the same as 4. It contains the upper component 艹, which functions as a determinative for plant-related words. And even in Japanese, there may be a chance that readers associate 菅 with 管.⁷

In hieroglyphic, the sign for sedge gives the reader the three consonants of the word king.

The readers of Classical Egyptian had of course to supply the vowels themselves, but that seems to have been a minor thing if Classical Egyptian was your mother tongue.

However, just as with Chinese characters, to avoid ambiguity, Egyptians might add a determinative to their symbols. In the case of the word king, a determinative indicating a king. In the case of the word plant, a determinative indicating a plant.

nzw, “King of Upper Egypt”, is written with the “sedge” sign 𓇓, together with the phonetic complement 𓈖 n, the sign 𓏏 t with a grammatical function⁸, and the determinative 𓀯 indicating “king”.

sw, “sedge plant”, written with the stroke 𓏤 indicating that 𓇓 is used as a pictograph, followed by 𓆰 as the plant determinative and 𓏥 as the plural sign:

Resources

The Classical Chinese word 菅 was has this description in MOEDict:

菅 jiān [also guān]

Noun
A plant name. A perennial herb of the grass family (Poaceae, 禾本科), genus Jiān (菅屬). Stems and leaves grow in dense clumps from a persistent rootstock. The leaves are slender, long, and pointed, often with fine hairs. From the upper leaf axils of the stem arise racemose inflorescences arranged in a panicle. The roots are short and tough, and can be used to make brooms.

Verb
Figurative: to treat lightly or with contempt; to regard as insignificant. Example: 草菅人命 — “to treat human life as worthless.”

A guess at equivalents in English would be: sedge, reed grass, coarse grass, thatch grass, broom grass, wild grass.