Apparently it’s 乌斯河 same pinyin but different first two characters. Wusi seems to be a transliteration (i.e. phonetic, not primarily lexical meaning) of some place name or something. He means river. I’ll keep reading.
Edit:
发现于四川省乌斯河铅锌矿床
Discovered in the Wusihe zinc and lead beds (deposits) in Sichuan province. So its name Wusiheite comes from that
Wushihe township, formerly known was Woshihe, changed its name to Wusihe in 1964 after a railway station was established there, sitting on the repaired Kunming line
Woshihe means ‘the river cradling stones’ and is a pretty standard Han demonym, afaict, the article does not mention Yi etymology. The change to Wusi may have been one to make the standard Mandarin characters better match the local pronunciation, rather than the meaning, which is where the Yi pronunciation/influence could be coming in
No worries! It was fun to do a bit of desktop research. I’m only iffy on my translation of the Kunming railway repair bit, I’m assuming the 昆铁 means that the township is on the Kunming route. I don’t use LLMs or machine translation, just a dictionary when I get stuck
I usually use machine translation but pull up some dictionaries later it’s not very foolproof but speeds up the process when I don’t know what I’m looking for lmao. I know far more about indo european languages I’m trying to branch out into Arabic and Chinese. I probably wouldn’t die in china if I got dropped there but it wouldn’t be possible for a detailed conversation yet 😅
加油! My main translation tool, if you could call it that, is Pleco dictionary phone app. You can paste text into it the Clip Reader and tap on individual words for a popup translation when getting your head around longer texts. I’m predominantly a phone user for reading/watching Chinese stuff so I unfortunately don’t have any desktop programs or web apps to suggest
Its Zhongguonium now
Seems to be named Wusihe which from what I can tell means “Five Silk River Rock”
Apparently it’s 乌斯河 same pinyin but different first two characters. Wusi seems to be a transliteration (i.e. phonetic, not primarily lexical meaning) of some place name or something. He means river. I’ll keep reading.
Edit:
Discovered in the Wusihe zinc and lead beds (deposits) in Sichuan province. So its name Wusiheite comes from that
Interesting 🤔
I read that the name may be from Yi and would just mean Dark River or maybe Crow River (dark like a crows feathers?)
It’s always interesting to read up on place name etymology
https://baike.baidu.com/item/乌斯河镇/1941990
Woshihe means ‘the river cradling stones’ and is a pretty standard Han demonym, afaict, the article does not mention Yi etymology. The change to Wusi may have been one to make the standard Mandarin characters better match the local pronunciation, rather than the meaning, which is where the Yi pronunciation/influence could be coming in
Really cool thanks for the source!
No worries! It was fun to do a bit of desktop research. I’m only iffy on my translation of the Kunming railway repair bit, I’m assuming the 昆铁 means that the township is on the Kunming route. I don’t use LLMs or machine translation, just a dictionary when I get stuck
I usually use machine translation but pull up some dictionaries later it’s not very foolproof but speeds up the process when I don’t know what I’m looking for lmao. I know far more about indo european languages I’m trying to branch out into Arabic and Chinese. I probably wouldn’t die in china if I got dropped there but it wouldn’t be possible for a detailed conversation yet 😅
加油! My main translation tool, if you could call it that, is Pleco dictionary phone app. You can paste text into it the Clip Reader and tap on individual words for a popup translation when getting your head around longer texts. I’m predominantly a phone user for reading/watching Chinese stuff so I unfortunately don’t have any desktop programs or web apps to suggest