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[jazzychad]

[jazzychad]

Ok, so I've been trying to figure out what the characters are...
We know from BBuck that

[ramsfan]

I wondered if it was something to do with the

[BBuck]

[devjoe]

Well I'd like to believe that the missing character is something in tone 3, so that we have a full set of tones. That probably isn't very helpful for those trying to identify it, though. But that would assign a color to each of these words (though again, we don't know that the colors are really meaningful, as opposed to some arbitrary colors they used to highlight the lines).

On another tactic, the first meaning listed for shi on wikipedia is poetry. Is it possible there is a famous chinese poem that has all 4 of these characters in it? I'm pretty sure there's no poem that consists ONLY of these characters (as our puzzle does).

In English, it sounds like the kind of poem Homer Simpson would write. Mmm... beer, food, taste beer, taste food, beer beer beer, food food food, taste, taste beer, taste food. Mmmm..

[yggdrasila]

Jazzychad - I had ruled out Mandarin from Wikipedia's image of its tone contour, but you are correct, it looks like a precise match.

Also, I really wanted the key tones for the language to match up with the number of glyphs we have, but sadly that doesn't happen (not that I am saying that it's not Mandarin - I think it must be, based on that tone contour you posted the link to)...I noted earlier (I think?) the fact that Mandarin has 5 total "base" syllables/tones, 4 + 1.

I am posting a drawing of the 7th character, bereft of elegant calligraphy but hopefully it will get the job done

...still pondering what this could all mean. Not real sure yet where to go with the combination of the characters/meanings produced + Mandarin + tone contour.

ygg

[doublecross]

Going with the 'shi' idea and the four tones, I have found that there was a Chinese poet who wrote a poem consisting entirely of 'shi's. See this link

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lion-Eating_Poet_in_the_Stone_Den

[mobius]

Hence my previous post, I had similar ideas but I'm not convinced it's the right track but you can eliminate a couple of the answers anyway.

[Agent Lex]

Has anyone tried

[mobius]

Tried it AgentLex, no luck I'm afraid.

[yggdrasila]

I think we're still missing the tie-in to the title of the card with these guesses. I strongly believe that we're going to get to somewhere clinical, somehow...I just don't know how yet

[jazzychad]

BBuck, you're right, that character does kinda look like zhe3 or zhu4... but still different enough for me to think it's something else....

Does anyone know what the radical of our mystery character is? I have tried searching many different radicals with additional strokes to try to find it, but no luck so far.... I can't tell what radical this character has, so I've just been guessing.

Anyone know the radical and/or how many strokes the character is (*excluding* the strokes needed for the radical)?


...still trying to figure out the meaning of the differently shaded characters...and why the extra character in the top row...

[BBuck]

yggdrasila, many thanks for posting the character.

[doublecross]

My current thinking - it is a sentence made by a shi with each of the four tones. The answer only has two words, which makes this a bit difficult, but not impossible.

shi1 can mean dead body and shi3 can mean to cause, which is looking a bit like a clinical explanation, but shi2 is ten and shi4 is city or right (among other things).

[jazzychad]

For what it's worth... I went to http://www.mandarintools.com/chardict.html and tried all 24 combinations of "shi1 shi2 shi3 shi4" and got nothing. I then tried the 24 combinations of subsets of 3 (4 permute 3) and got nothing... then I tried the 12 combos of 4 permute 2 and got: