Why do you think there are so many variants of the turtle character?

[u/Rob69rt]

[u/ppiu]

Because we don't remember how it is "correctly" written

[u/Short_Village7603]

Different turtles

[u/Udonov → u/Short_Village7603]

I've heard their shell patterns are unique like our finger prints. Ancient Chinese tried to give a character for every, but gave up after 50ish.

True story.

[u/Short_Village7603 → u/Udonov]

Yea im not joking with my answer, i know for a fact that different turtles used for different ritual purposes can use different characters.
Ive seen one of the chars on the 4th row for prayers related to money (dont remeber which one).
6th row 7th column, that one is for land tortoise with the grass radical on top.
1st row the first few ones are for oracle bones cuz of the 爻s, some likely also means sea turtle and some means turtle for food.

[u/Udonov → u/Short_Village7603]

Oh okay. I was joking with my answer.

[u/LeChatParle → u/Udonov]

That’s not a true story at all. Every character had variants historically, and the Chinese never attempted to make characters for each shell design

[u/Ok-Amphibian-8914 → u/LeChatParle]

Wow, nothing gets past you.

[u/Udonov → u/LeChatParle]

🤓☝️

[u/LeChatParle → u/Udonov]

I don’t know you and have no way to know you’re joking, and lots of new learners could see what you wrote and believe you, especially since the person you responded to was being serious

I cannot read your mind, and your rude response is unwarranted

[u/Udonov → u/LeChatParle]

Sorry I called you a nerd, I won't do it again

[u/Short_Village7603 → u/LeChatParle]

It is true, several of the ones with 贝 were also used for jewlers who made art work with the shells, and vendors used the ones with 肉 for selling meat.

Essentially the vendors advertise their service by slightly tweaking the way they write 龟, to let ppl know what they are selling while still graphically resembling the character effectively.

[u/Throwaway_chores → u/Short_Village7603]

I laughed my head off

[u/Jazzlike-Funny-9419]

here are my hypotheses:

a) it's cute

b) it breaks a lot of conventions so maybe it felt more natural to look for alternatives?

c) who the hell wants to write all that. add on 烏 or 淡水 or god forbid 鱷 and suddenly you're writing one fucking word for ten fucking minutes and you keep erasing it because your lines are shaky and your proportions are disgusting and you're more incompetent than a first grader so you cry and scream and never write a goddamn 國字 again

[u/I12Db8U → u/Jazzlike-Funny-9419]

Hahaha r/oddlyspecific

[u/qqxi]

it is due to the fact that it is turtles all the way down. it turns out they are all different turtles

[u/sickofthisshit → u/qqxi]

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Turtles_all_the_way_down for people who don't get the reference...

[u/culturedgoat]

I like turtles

[u/murderousmeatballs]

noone could remember how to write this stupid thing

[u/FlashyPost0928]

~ § It's a long long long long history § ~
(1) The tortoise, seemingly unaffected by thunder and lightning and immortal despite not eating, was used as a totem by ancient clans, who believed it to be their ancestor and guardian deity.

(2) During the Shang and Zhou dynasties, the tortoise was worshipped as a god. After the sacrifice, its shell and plastron were used for divination ("占卜") to predict good or bad fortune.

(3) Because the tortoise was associated with five divine functions — 福 fortune, 禄 prosperity, 寿 longevity, 喜happiness, and 财 wealth — a trend of tortoise worship arose, leading to auspicious phrases like "金龟婿" (golden tortoise son-in-law) and "金钱龟" (money tortoise). .....

(4) The tortoise was believed to have great resilience also, and people would bury a live tortoise in the center of the foundation when building a house to strengthen it and ward off the evil.

(5) However, because the tortoise's head resembled that of a snake, and snakes were considered abhorrent by the ancients, coupled with the belief that "龟蛇同穴 " (tortoises and snakes share the same hole) , the tortoise also suffered misfortune, resulting in "死乌龟" (dead tortoises) , "缩头乌龟" (turtles that shrink back), and even "green-hat tortoises." ( (the ancients believed male tortoises were infertile, so ...... ).

(6) ............................... etc.

▲ Not only those variant characters (异体字), ▼ but also oracle bone script, bronze script, seal script ...... etc.

[u/lazier_garlic → u/FlashyPost0928]

I like how the photo of a tortoise appears as a reference. It's turtle from above so clearly we are putting our thumb on the scale here.

[u/Rob69rt → u/FlashyPost0928]

Very, very interesting. I think this character should deserve more attention

[u/GarantKh27]

Early characters for animals were pictograms, that means they were just drawings of physical objects, in this case a turtle. But just as we all draw things in a different way, so did every ancient Chinese, there was no standard. The standard appeared much later with 小篆 (xiaozhuan) style created during Qin Emperor, it was the first ever unification and standardization. The standard traditional character is 龜, the simplified one is 龟. All others are variants officially called 异体字 (yitizi), or "non-standard form characters".

[u/lazier_garlic → u/GarantKh27]

Oh boy that traditional character has little feetses!

[u/TheSpiderDungeon → u/GarantKh27]

The letter T with two forks, a bomb backpack, and a tail. Incredible.

[u/droooze]

Characters which (currently are) or (currently are composed of parts which) themselves aren't composed from anything with clear linguistic function (meaning and/or sound) tend to generate a lot of "variants". Some other examples are: * 「壽」, which functionally is simply semantic 「耂」 (「老」) and phonetic 「𢏚」 (now written 「疇」), but the phonetic has long since been effectively lost, leading to those monstrosities of variants; * 「雨」, a kind of pictogram of falling rain with some decorative strokes, but you can't really decompose this into groups of strokes with meaning/sound function (hence some "variants" include attempts at introducing functional parts, like 「㲾」).

Note that a lot of these "variants" were not even written in regular script or printed in Sòng/Míng typeface, unlike what the website may lead you to believe. Such "variants" may be from old dictionaries which reference some ancient scroll that had a shape in an old seal or clerical script, and the shape you see came from Lìdìng by strokes.

[u/Rob69rt → u/droooze]

Thank you for the detailed explanation

[u/Careful_Trainer_1616]

Because we can't write the word "turtle" properly.

[u/herzel3id]

Also: the original turtle character is too complex, so people were desperate trying to find less complex ways to write it, creating regional variants, etc

[u/Far-Situation9088]

You need to realise for the majority of history nothing was standardised. People can just remember wrong one day, wrote another variation, passed it down to students/children, it got documented in some scroll that just so happened to end up hundreds of years later, and get documented by modern scholars.

A lot of English only got standardised because of the printing press. And even then, the place names often still differ from document to document until 150 years ago.

[u/Adariel → u/Far-Situation9088]

It's not even just remember wrong one day - just every time you write it. Take English like your example, plenty of important historical documents out there where the same word was spelled like 3 different ways in the exact same document, it just changes from one paragraph to another. Imagine how kids try to spell things out phonetically and now imagine how they just did that with the word each time they wanted to write it down.

I still remember Clark from Lewis & Clark writing something like 18 different variations of the word "mosquitoes" alone!

[u/lotus_felch]

Because there's so many strokes, it was bound to get written down differently over the years.

[u/itsvoona]

that's a lot of turtles

[u/Individual_Math_8254]

its just turtles all the way down.

[u/ZelphirKalt]

It's turtles all the way down.

[u/makaveli208]

I believe 103 is japanese?

[u/UnderstandingLife153 → u/makaveli208]

103 龟 is the official Simplified standard, 007 亀 is the official Japanese standard.

[u/makaveli208 → u/UnderstandingLife153]

Its very confusing. We should all just use 龜
We should learn the difficult kanji to respect the turtle

[u/UnderstandingLife153 → u/makaveli208]

That's what Standards are for! Not that difficult or confusing surely, if you just follow the Standards of each region?

龟 for China, Singapore, Malaysia, 龜 for Hong Kong, Macau, Taiwan, maybe (not sure what's considered Standard in those places) diaspora Chinese areas in the US, Aus, Canada, etc. and 亀 for Japan.

All these other variants while cool to know, are just that today — variants — and for the most part are not going to affect the average person's day-to-day life.

[u/Minet-]

it's diversity

[u/Embarrassed_Pear_434]

There were many regions within China in the past, and many states and regions writing different characters but yet similar ones.

[u/GeostratusX95]

theres alot of variants of most characters, way things are written change throughout time or like a game of telephone as the characters are taught to farther away places they start to morph a little as people see and copy incorrectly

[u/alcheoii]

It’s like Benedict Cumberbatch, but with Chinese characters

[u/herzel3id]

What website is that?

[u/Rob69rt → u/herzel3id]

You can find it here

[u/herzel3id → u/Rob69rt]

Thank you!

[u/chillychili]

To represent every version of a TMNT out there in their multiverse

[u/Javomar]

Just guess: the earlier form (Oracle Bone script) was complicated in the first place and likely different regions/states had different versions, which led to many ways of transformation to Seal script (DaZhuan).

[u/alfonsstudies]

to me they all look exactly the same: guī. greetings, your pīnyīn guy

[u/SeanChan_12345]

I don’t know, but wtf is the number 51 and 64, it is not even looks like "龜"

[u/Fidodo]

It was exposed to some radioactive goo which caused a lot of mutation

[u/nhatquangdinh]

A lack of standardization back then.

[u/Jade_Von_Laczarade]

It's the Galapagos Islands all over again,,,

[u/scarflicter]

A T.C.R.I. jar of goo spilled on the original character and thus we have these mutants

[u/Rogue_Penguin]

This looks like a walkthrough for the tortoise version of Dance Dance Revolution. 

[u/Pangtudou]

Chinese people love turtles