deer in the forests of Tainan, or not

In fact, Tainan’s Shanshang Township (山上鄉), is not literally “on a mountain” as its name implies, but is described as being in the 麓 (lü, “foothills”).

This is a fairly uncommon Chinese word, at least in speech. But composed of the words for deer (鹿) beneath the trees of a forest (林), at first sight it looks like a lovely compound pictograph making use of complex imagery.

Perhaps it is, for one thing it is in the dictionary under the 鹿 radical (whereas the similar character 簏 composed of deer under bamboo is found under the 竹 bamboo radical), but characters were not always categorized "correctly".

Furthermore, 鹿 is pronounced lu4, which is similar enough to the lü4 of 麓, so perhaps it is just a regular radical-phonetic compound after all.

on the mountains but not (perhaps) on the sea

Today I was researching Tainan township place name origins (cos that’s the kind of boring guy I am on vacation, though actually they’re pretty interesting because they reflect Aboriginal, Dutch, Zheng, Qing, Japanese and ROC language and history).

I got as far as Shanshang Township (山上鄉), which clearly means “On/in” the “Mountain(s)”, or according to Chinese word order, “Mountains On”.

This set me thinking about China’s Shanghai (上海), which is generally explained/translated as “On the Ocean” (for example see Asia Times Online, which translates it as “Above the Ocean”.

Probably this is correct, but perhaps not. After all, Shandong (山東) means “East of the Mountains” (unlike Tainan’s Dongshan 東山, which means “Eastern Mountain”) so we might expect 海上 (Haishang) for “On/above the Ocean”.

Chinese grammar far from being “non-existent” as many native speakers claim, or “simple” as many foreign learners claim (not having to worry about conjugations/declensions/tenses/plurals &c. perhaps), is complex because of its ambiguity. 上, for example, has a multitude of grammatical functions including prepositional “on/above ...”, adjectival “upper/last (week) ...”, adverbial “upwards”, verbal “go up” and so on.

Before the noun 海 (“ocean”, which elsewhere could also be adjectival “oceanic”, of course), 上 would normally be adjectival, making Shanghai mean “Upper Ocean”, or verbal, giving “Onto the Ocean”. For a river, 上 most commonly occurs in 上游 “upstream/upper reaches”, which might fit with Shanghai being slightly up the Huangpu River (黃浦江) from the East China Sea (東海).

Or have I been on vacation too long and the sun is addling my brain? In any case, one thing my studying of place names is teaching me is that “everything is possible” (see Bejing 北京 “Northern Capital” compared with Taipei 台北 “Taiwan North [Part?]”). So I guess Shanghai is just an unusual way of saying “on the ocean”.