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Four-character idiom
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Four-character idioms or chéngyǔ (traditional Chinese: 成語; simplified Chinese: 成语, literally "set phrases") are a set of traditional idiomatic expressions, most of which consists of four Chinese characters. Chengyu were widely used in Classical Chinese and are still common in Vernacular Chinese writing and Spoken Chinese today. According to the most stringent definition, there are about 5,000 chengyu in the Chinese language, though some dictionaries list over 20,000.
Chengyu are mostly derived from ancient literature. The meaning of a chengyu usually surpasses the sum of the meanings carried by the four characters, as chengyu are often intimately linked with the myth, story or historical fact from which they were derived. As such, chengyu do not follow the usual grammatical structure and syntax of the modern Chinese spoken language, and are instead highly compact and synthetic.
Chengyu in isolation are often unintelligible to modern Chinese, and when students in China learn chengyu in school as part of the Classical curriculum, they also need to study the context from which the chengyu was born. Often the four characters reflect the moral behind the story rather than the story itself. For example, the phrase "破釜沉舟" [Listen ] (pò fǔ chén zhōu) literally means "break the woks and sink the boats." It was based on a historical account where General Xiang Yu ordered his troops to destroy all cooking utensils and boats after crossing a river into the enemy's territory. He won the battle because of this "no-retreat" policy. Similar phrases known in the West as "burning bridges" or "Crossing the Rubicon". This particular idiom cannot be used in a losing scenario because the story behind it does not describe a failure.
Another example is "瓜田李下" [Listen ] (guātián lǐxià) which literally means melon field, under the plums. It is an idiom that has a deeper meaning that implies suspicious situations. It is derived from an excerpt from a poem (樂府詩《君子行》 yuèfǔ shī《jūnzǐ xíng》) from the Han Dynasty. The poem contains two phrases "瓜田不納履，李下不整冠" [Listen ] (gūatián bù nà lǚ, lǐ xià bù zhěngguān) which describe a code of conduct that says "Don't adjust your shoes in a melon field and don't tidy your hat under the plum trees" in order to avoid suspicion of stealing. The literal meaning of the idiom is impossible to understand without the background knowledge of the origin of the phrase. However, some idioms such as "空穴來風" (kōngxué láifēng, literally "an open hole draws the wind") which means to lay one's self open to criticism, and "素面朝天" are so widely misunderstood that their literal meaning are used despite their original meaning.
However, that is not to say that all chengyu are born of an oft-told fable; indeed, chengyu which are free of metaphorical nuances pervade amidst the otherwise contextually-driven aspect of vernacular Chinese. An example of this is 言而無信 (yán ér wú xìn, literally "speaks yet (is) without trust"), which refers to an individual who cannot be trusted despite what he says, or essentially a deceitful person. The idiom itself is not derived from a specific occurrence from which a moral may be explicitly drawn; instead, it is succinct in its original meaning and would likely be intelligible to an individual learned in formal written Chinese. Note that the only classical-vernacular discrepancy present in this chengyu lies in the fact that the character 言 (yán) is no longer used as a verb in modern Chinese.
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The following three examples show that the meaning of the idiom can be totally different by only changing one character.
一 日 千 秋 : "One day, a thousand autumns."- Usage/Moral: implies rapid changes; one day equals a thousand years
一 日 千 里 : "One day, a thousand miles."- Usage/Moral: implies rapid progress; traveling a thousand miles in a day
一 日 三 秋 : "One day, three autumns."- Usage/Moral: greatly missing someone; one day feels as long as three years
Other examples in Chinese:
Four-character idiom is a common technique to make a memorizable phrase or idiom. In Japanese, the term 四字熟語 (yojijukugo) (四字 yoji four Chinese characters + 熟語 jukugo idiom) itself is a four-character idiom. Many of these idioms were adopted from their Chinese counterparts and have the same or similar meaning as in Chinese. The term 故事成語 (koji historical + seigo idiom) refers to an idiom that comes from a specific text as the source. As such, the overwhelming majority of kojiseigo comes from accounts of history written in classical Chinese. Some example idioms:
傍 若 無 人 : "As if there were nobody beside (you)."- Source: Liezhuan from Sima Qian's Records of the Grand Historian
- Originally: Acting with impunity as though no one is around.
起 承 転 結 : "Start, Continue, Change, Conclusion"- Source: Traditional structure for composing Tang poetry.
花 鳥 風 月 : "Flower, Bird, Wind, Moon"- Source: Folk
- Simplified Chinese Idioms (Wiktionary)
- Traditional Chinese Idioms (Wiktionary)
- Simplified Chinese Proverbs (Wiktionary)
- Traditional Chinese Proverbs (Wiktionary)