I recently bought an old wooden item that shows 5 traditional (?) Chinese characters. I tried my very best to translate them by researching all kind of pages, but cannot find some parts I need. Can someone help me translate? And now that I learned a little bit about how signs work I would also be very curious about the meaning of the single parts of them.
Here are the pictures (I believe the signs are mirrored, as with stamps for cookies.)
The left two should be 壽富, from top to down. The right ones, from top to down again, are likely to be 富貴X. I am sure about the last character, 屋?
The last one is '居'. 富贵居.
I don't how to translate it, but not everyone's home can be called 居. Usually belong to an educated man.
First four characters should be 喜福富贵, although the last one is a bit tricky.
As @Jacob mentioned, the last character is「居」, and is quite tricky to identify.
「居」(Baxter-Sagart: /*k(r)a/, /*k(r)a-s/, to dwell/reside) is composed of semantic「尸」(squatting person > body) and phonetic「古」(Baxter-Sagart: /*kˤaʔ/). In turn,「古」was originally composed of semantic「盾」(shield) and a distinguishing mark「口」. The word originally represented by「古」is now written as「固」(solid, sturdy). For reference:
Glyph evolution of「古」
Glyph evolution of「盾」
In the third form, the shield is reduced to a side view, and「目」(eye) was added, representing a person peeking out from under the full-body cover of a shield.
In the question photo, the「古」in「居」takes the form where the distinguishing mark「口」has not been added and the full frontal form of the shield has not yet been reduced to a shape like「十」.
from upper left to bottom right. first one is富, second one is 贵, 3-己丑, not sure? 4-寿, 5-福
