Thomas Kinkade Golden Gate Bridge San Francisco painting

Thomas Kinkade Golden Gate Bridge San Francisco paintingThomas Kinkade Evening on the Avenue paintingThomas Kinkade Deer Creek Cottage painting
the entry for a syllable in Chinese dictionaries. A spoken Chinese syllable, hsing or lung, may have dozens of meanings; but it's still a word, even though its meaning depends to some extent on context, and even if it takes fifty different written characters to express the different meanings. Each different meaning of the syllable is in fact a different word, an entity, a pebble in the great riverbed of the language.
A Nna Mmoy syllable only has one written character. But it's not a pebble. It's a drop in the river.
Learning Nna Mmoy is like learning to weave water. I believe it's just as difficult for them to learn their language as it is for us. But then, they have enough time, so it doesn't matter. Their lives don't start here and run to there, like ours, like horses on a racecourse. They live in the middle of time, like a starfish in its own center. Like the sun in its light.
What little I know of the language—and I'm not really certain of any of it,