Learn one Chinese Character a day - "马"

"马" is the simplified Chinese character as "馬" is the Traditional character. It is probably kind of hard to guess its meaning from its currently way of writing, let us check its evolution history - (image get from http://www.vividict.com)

Learn one Chinese Character a day - "马"

 Oracle script of "马" - is a drawing of "an animal with long face, big eyes, flying mane, long tail with hoof". I rotated the original picture by 90 degrees -which is more clear to above description. When we imagine an animal running fast with mane flying, the first jump into our mind is definitely - Horse, as the picture below.

"马" or "馬"   

Bronze script simplified the writing but with an empathize on Horse's major characteristics - Flying Mane, Seal script  and Clerical script followed the path of Bronze script and eventually we have what we are using now as Traditional Chinese character . During Regular script, also emerged and is now adopted as Simplified Chinese character.

"马" or "馬" now specifically means Horse. However when it is used as part of a " 会意 huìyì: Logical aggregates" character, it refers to its most primitive meaning "an animal with long face, big eyes, flying mane, long tail with hoof", like "驴" (Donkey,) which is an animal looks like "马" and works besides a house ("户").

There is a very famous painter in China whose name is 徐悲鸿 (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Xu_Beihong). He is well known of his wonderful Chinese Ink Painting of Horses. Below is one of his artworks.

马 - 徐悲鸿 

As usual, let us end our learning today with a Chinese Calligraphy with "马" or "馬" inside -

卧马居