卢 rice vessel

[yuechu]

大家好！

I recently learnt that the character 卢 means "rice vessel". I tried doing a Google search but couldn't find a picture for it. Would anyone know what this type of rice vessel looks like? Also, is this just an old meaning of 卢 or is it something that most people still associate it with nowadays as well?

Thanks!

 

[skating-in-bc]

It is probably a wicker bucket that can hold approximately 5 liters of rice.

《說文解字注.盧》凵盧, 飯器, 以桺爲之 ==> It is made of wicker (桺).
《說文.凵》張口也, 象形 ==> It has an "open mouth" (張口).
《說文解字注》筥, 𥬔籚二物相似, 𥬔籚卽凵盧也 ==> It resembles 筥 in appearance, which is a cylindrical open container.
《說文.筥》䈰也;《說文.䈰》飯器, 容五升 ==> It probably can hold 5 liters of rice.

is it something that most people still associate it with nowadays as well?

No. 盧 is now largely restricted to proper nouns (e.g., 盧溝橋, 盧先生) and transliterations (e.g., 盧布, 盧森堡, 滑鐵盧). The sense of "rice vessel" (飯器) was probably dialectal or short-lived even in ancient times.

 

[yuechu]

Thanks for all the info, Skating!

 

[kategogogo]

The character in its oracle script form is deemed a stove with a wide opening, somewhat similar to a modern oven, or something along the lines. Scholars believe that the upper part is a simplified version of 虎. I’m more inclined to visualise it as a tiger’s head with a wide-open mouth. Either way it’s supposed to depict the opening of the stove. The lower part represents the stove where food is placed and roasted. Note the trays for holding charcoal or wood and leveling legs. During the Yin and Shang dynasties only the monarchs were privileged to hunt animals like bears and tigers. The way I see it, there’s a good chance that a top notch cooker like this were reserved for royal members. Not bad as a BBQ grill.

By the time of the Zhou, the character had undergone several changes in its bronze scripts (金文). The tiger at the top is still there. The bottom part changed into the oracle scripts version of vessel (皿). A teeny-tiny dot was put into the stove to depict food, for example some cooked rice would be nice.

The character in small seal script (小篆) is quite different from the 甲骨文 version and 金文 version. It shows how much a change in medium can affect a character visually. Casting on bronze makes it much easier to include more details than scratching on animal bones or turtle plastrons. The vessel opening at the top is further stylized into the earliest form of 虍（hu1, or 虎字头 as an indexing component). Also note that the little dot in the middle has been replaced by a component which looks like 由. Over time this character in clerical scriptn (隶书) still bears much similarity to the small seal script form, except that 虍 at the top has corrupted and become less time-consuming to write.

Since oracle script, bronze script and even seal script aren’t standardized writing systems and they coexisted over the long term, it’s not uncommon to encounter multiple symbols which share the same meaning. From 甲骨文 to 隶书, the characters are visually quite different, but the connections between the forms are equally visible.​

 

[Sanchuan]

@kategogogo 哇~ 书法就多么精妙呢！

 

[yuechu]

Wow! Thanks for the in-depth analysis, Kate! Did you write those characters? They look very beautiful!

 

[skating-in-bc]

Just as the river 弓閭 (从門呂聲) was also called 弓盧 (从皿𧇄聲) by 班固 (扶風安陵人, 今陝西咸陽--capital of the Qin dynasty), so was 筥 'rice vessel' (从竹呂聲) also called 盧 (从皿𧇄聲) in the Qin dialect, on which 許慎's analyses and explanations of the 小篆 characters in his book《說文》were based.《說文》clearly states that 盧 'rice vessel' is a phono-semantic compound (形聲, 从皿𧇄聲) composed of the semantic radical 皿 "vessel" and the phonetic radical 𧇄. Since it is NOT a pictogram, we are unable to infer what this type of rice vessel looks like from the graph 盧. The dialectal morpheme 盧 'rice vessel' is probably etymologically unrelated to the 'oven' originally written as a pictogram (象形字) in oracle script and as a phono-semantic compound (形聲字) 盧, 鑪, or 爐 in later dynasties. We can nonetheless infer the appearance of the rice vessel 盧 from its cognates, for instance, 𥰠/筥 'bread/rice basket' of the common tongue then.