I am reading this set of poems for my humanities class. One of the lines is:
Supposedly, the last character is xiang with a third tone and it means to "sound" or "echo".
But I thought this character means "want", as in 想.
Can someone clarify what xiang (third tone) means?
響 (xiang3) is the traditional form of 响, which means to "sound" or to "echo". It is not the same character as 想, which means to "think" or to "want". It is not uncommon for different characters to have the same pronunciation and tone. Examples off the top of my head include:
zhong1: 中 (中国), 钟 (两点钟), 终 (终于)
ying1: 应 (应该), 英 (英雄), 鹰
sha1: 杀 (杀死), 沙 (沙滩), 莎
diao4: 调 (调查), 钓 (钓鱼), 吊 (吊着)
Somewhat tangentially, it can be difficult to determine what character a spoken syllable is supposed to correspond to with absolutely no context. One consequence of this is that people often will indicate the characters for their names when speaking by giving examples of terms or phrases with the component characters (e.g. 谢谢的谢，英雄的英). (Character(s) in "given names" rarely form combinations that would be permissible in normal usage, even in cases where a coherent meaning for the whole name is obvious: e.g. 马英九, 崔世安, 周杰伦, 刘博.)
The full sentence should be "空山不见人，但闻人语响。", in which “响” is the simplified version of "響".
Obviously, it should mean "sound or echo" for in the first sentence the author said that he did not see anybody in the mountain and in the second sentences there is a turning point marked by "但", which can be understood as "but". After this turning point he said he could hear the "sound or echo" of words of people.
(You can replace "sound or echo" with "want" and the sentence will not make sense if you do) I guess you may confuse "响" with “想” as their sound are the same.
By the way, I prefer "echo" than "sound" as he did not see the people but just caught the words in the wind and this poem tends to create an atmosphere of serenity.
