r/shufa • u/Corvidae5Creation5 • Aug 24 '25

Historical Restoring blobs

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What are the characters supposed to look like if they hadn't bled together like that?

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u/SomeoneYdk_ Aug 24 '25 edited Aug 24 '25

李公麟（麐）仙（僊）山樓閣圖

The characters are written in a style called small seal script or 小篆. The above characters are the standard forms of these characters in regular script.

The third and fourth characters are written using a variant (non-standard) form or 異體字 which I have given in between the brackets.

If you look the individual characters up followed by 小篆 on google you can see how they’d look like without being bled together (e.g. look up “李 小篆” to see how 李 would be written in small seal script).

1

u/Corvidae5Creation5 Aug 24 '25

Thank you so much! Always wondered what that language was called. It's so hard to google stuff without the magic words.

Do you know of any seal script to traditional Chinese translator apps or sites? Google brought up this guy "https://m.gaokao.cn/gk-mb/304/95A3" but actually clicking on it here in America gave an error: access denied page.

3

u/niggchu Aug 25 '25

Search "篆書轉換", there are many sites. If you can read chinese, I recommend you to buy "說文解字". A Hanzi philology book, very useful.

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