Oh and check this out, I’m reading about the fubing (ordinary militia) and there are 5 types, so “bubing” are melee troops but archers and crossbowmen are, get this, “bushe.” It’s a loan word!
@Leucrotta oh chinese, it wasnt threaded with ur previous thing
@Leucrotta interesting that the loan word is for crossbow considering china invented everything
@daylight apparently crossbow is “nu” - if I ran into that reading about predynastic China I’d forgotten it. This book is awesome!
@Leucrotta whats the book :O
@daylight Karl Heinze Ranitzsch, The Army of Tang China, apparently it’s OOP and I got absurdly lucky.
@Leucrotta A loan word from where?
@Rosemary from Mandarin into Japanese!
@Leucrotta We're not familiar with either of those language, which would be why I didn't understand what you meant, then.
@Leucrotta wait, a loan...?
(not that "crossbowmen" is a common word one would come across in modern Chinese, but I'm really curious what the characters given for it are, now, because she/射 does ordinarily mean "shoot")
@verity loan word into Japanese; Google translate yields “nu” as crossbow, which makes sense given the concept’s age, and “nu shou” as crossbowman. So there’s your “she”!
@Leucrotta ahhh I see! I was a little confused, thought it was chinese to english
also 弩 is such a strange word, 奴 being slave and 弓 being bow... :P
@verity aha, finally was able to cut paste it; 弩手
@Leucrotta what language is this?