| 88. | 乃 | 八 | 音 | yield the eight musical sounds. | |
| Nai3 | pa1 | yin1 | |||
| Then | eight | sounds |
Nai see line 6.
Pa is explained as to separate, to divide, being a picture of two persons separating, turned back to back (line 162). It may well have been adopted as the symbol for 8 in reference to the obvious and easy divisibility of that unit; the Chinese however occupy themselves less with its origin as a numeral than with its fanciful position, a climacteric of the female numbers (line 75).
Yin is a corruption of 言 yen words (line 118) with a stroke inserted, and means regulated noise, i.e. musical sounds. These are arranged under eight heads. The gourd furnishes such instruments as the mouth-organ, earth the ocarina, skin the drum, wood the castanet, stone the hanging musical-stone, metal the gong, silk the guitar, and bamboo the flute. [Eitel wrongly renders this line "By these then we produce the eight tones of the scala."]
| 89. | 高 | 曾 | 祖 | Great great grandfather, great grandfather, grandfather, | |
| Kao1 | tsêng1 | tsu3 | |||
| High | add | ancestor |
Kao is used of height in both material and immaterial senses. It is supposed to present to the eye the semblance of looking up from a terrace or belvidere, and is here an adjective qualifying tsu ancestor understood. See line 215.
Tsêng is composed of 八 pa to divide (line 88) above, and 曰 yüeh to speak (line 57) below, a middle portion which is said to be the phonetic. It is defined as a stretcher-out of language, from which we can understand its sense of past, finished, especially as applied to time, thus imparting a tense-value to
