The Name Bishan
Bishan
碧山
碧山
The Chinese sign on the right is shan, meaning mountain. It is one of the radicals or root signs which appears in a group of two or more to create many other words. (Just like we use the English root word mountain to create words such as mountainous and mountain top.)
How do you remember the sign. It helps to know how it would originally have been drawn before it was simplified. You have to imagine the line connecting the three points of the top of the three upright lines. The central upright represents the top of the peak.
The Singapore station name Bishan incorporated the word shan which is Chinese (Mandarin - as spoken in the modern capital of China, Beijing). Shan means mountain. The wikipedia website gives a Cantonese origin of the name.
Shan becomes San in Cantonese. However, Chinese writing is usually the same (except in rarer cases of copying phonestics) in all the dialects and Japanese. Rather like the no smoking sign being a cigarette with a line through it, although the words you say are different in European countries.
If you look at the Chinese writing you can immediately spot the sign for mountain or hill which is three verticals, the middle one highest, on a base line or solid ground. (The same sign is in the Chinese for the station with the English name, Hillview.)
I have two friends called Shan, short for Shan Shan. In Chinese and in Malay and probably some other languages you create a plural by saying a word twice. So hill or mountain is shan. Shan shan means mountains or hills.
Hillview
山景The sign on the left is the sign for hill or mountain.
Useful Websites
Facbook Polyglots
Wikipedia chinese
simple wikipedia Chinese
Duolingo
duolingo.com
Singapore Airlines
singaporeair.com
Angela Lansbury, travel writer and photographer, author and speaker. Please share links to your favourite posts.
