16 Happy Year of the Water Rabbit 🐰
16 Happy Year of the Water Rabbit 🐰
May you hop your way into ever more prosperous puddles this year
The Lunar New Year began on the 22nd, but for some of us, the celebration (and family obligations) continue for a while yet. In this week’s issue, we unpack one of the most common things we say to one another during this holiday season.
This is Hanmoji Puzzles, your bi-weekly dose of emoji word puzzles inspired by The Hanmoji Handbook. And don’t worry — you don’t need to speak Chinese at all in order to play along. You just need a love for emoji and be curious about how language works!
🧩 This week’s puzzle
If you’ve been around Chinese people or places this past week, you’ve probably heard them say “gong hay fat choy.” That’s the way it’s often written in Roman letters. What you’re hearing is gōngxǐ fācái (in Mandarin) or gung1 hei2 faat3 coi4 (in Cantonese). Written 恭喜發財 and 恭喜发财 (Traditional and Simplified respectively).
This four-character greeting wishes a prosperous new year unto others. But if you take the phrase apart into its two-character halves, the saying is literally 1) celebrating (恭喜), 2) getting rich (發財/发财). It’s as if, during Lunar New Year, we greet each other by saying “I am celebrating your future wealth!”
Now onto the puzzle! Which character from 恭喜發財 (Traditional) or 恭喜发财 (Simplified), do you think the following emoji pair represents?
🐚🧠
Hint: One of the emoji relates to its meaning, while the other relates to how it’s pronounced in Chinese.
⏳
⏳
⏳
🫢 Answer (spoilers ahead!)
It’s the final character: 恭喜發財 🧧 恭喜发财.
🐚🧠 stands for 財 or 财, which means money, wealth, riches, property or valuables. It’s pronounced cái in Mandarin, and coi4 in Cantonese. As we said in our hint, one of the parts (the left radical specifically) relates to its meaning, while the other part (the right radical) relates to its sound.
🐚 represents 貝 or 贝 (bèi/bui3), which means shellfish or cowrie. Wait what is a cowrie anyway? According to Wikipedia: “Cowrie or cowry (pl. cowries) is the common name for a group of small to large sea snails, marine gastropod mollusks in the family Cypraeidae, the cowries.”
More importantly though, their shells were used as a very early form of currency in many cultures… including in ancient China. This makes the 🐚 a prime candidate for describing money, wealth and riches.
🧠 represents 才 (cái/coi4), which usually means ability, talent or capable person. (It can also be used as a sort of adverb to say “just now” or “only,” but we’ll save that little bit for a more complicated grammar lesson.) While it may be tempting to imagine that ability and talent led to riches, it’s probably more apt to note that its pronunciation is exactly the same as the 財/财 (cái/coi4) from gōngxǐ fācái/gung1 hei2 faat3 coi4. As we explain in our book, it’s more likely a phonetic radical, because it helps indicate the sound.
🥳 Updates from our parent project, The Hanmoji Handbook
The Texas Library Association put us on the 2023 Texas Topaz Reading List.
Kirkus has named us as one of their Best Middle-Grade Nonfiction of 2022 picks.
We’ve been nominated for a Forest of Reading Yellow Cedar Award. Tell your Canadian grade schoolers (and teachers and librarians) to take a look at the books and vote for their favorites!
Our book is now out — order it now on IndieBound 🇺🇸, Shop Local 🇨🇦, Blackwell’s 🌏, Barnes & Noble 🇺🇸, or Indigo 🇨🇦.
Hanmoji Puzzles is a spin off of The Hanmoji Handbook: A Guide to Learning Chinese Through Emoji, which you should absolutely order today 😗. This newsletter is a project by Jason Li, An Xiao Mina and Jennifer 8. Lee.