Is this a Chinese or Japanese character?

April 10, 2013 11:02 PM

I'm fairly sure this thing I saw this morning is going to be a vertical growing tower for plants. Is it also a Chinese or Japanese character? If it is, what is it?

For what it's worth, it's in a laneway in Parramatta, NSW, Australia.

posted by Fiasco da Gama to Writing & Language (3 answers total)

Best answer: 買

In Japanese it means "buy".
posted by Chocolate Pickle at 11:04 PM on April 10, 2013

Best answer: It's also a traditional Chinese character meaning "buy" as well (Japanese traditional characters were originally Chinese). The simplified version, used on the Chinese mainland, is 买， but the traditional characters are still used in Taiwan and Hong Kong (they also still used sometimes for stylistic or aesthetic reasons on the Mainland)

Therefore, it's not necessarily Japanese in this context.
posted by bearette at 11:38 PM on April 10, 2013

PS: "traditional" and "simplified" when referring to Chinese characters refers to the way they are written; the meaning and pronunciation don't change (well, pronunciation changes in Cantonese or other dialects of Mandarin); and of course, the pronunciation would be different in Japanese.
posted by bearette at 11:41 PM on April 10, 2013