# 山河岁月



## Romeo4755

I know the words! I know the expressions! I don't understand the meaning!
Is it "Mountains and rivers (the country) forever, for months and years" or what?
I see titles of books and tv shows the same as this 4 characters but it doesn't help.
Thank you if you can translate it properly.


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## ovaltine888

It's a coined word. Over.


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## SuperXW

Imagine the magnificent change of mountains and rivers throughout history. 山河 & 岁月 are actually poetic expressions of "space" & "time", and 山河 also often signifies the territory of the country.


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## henter

I don't recall anyone using 山河岁月 in China. Well, just ran a check and found a TV documentary with this title, which  seems to be a TV show  about historical events.  It has been aired on CCTV, I suppose.


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## henter

SuperXW said:


> Imagine the magnificent change of mountains and rivers throughout history. 山河 & 岁月 are actually poetic expressions of "space" & "time", and 山河 also often signifies the territory of the country.


有一个纪录片叫这个名字. 关于现代中国历史中的重要事件. 我也是刚刚才搜到的. 就像您说的，只是为了修辞而已.


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## retrogradedwithwind

Frankly speaking, I don't think it a good phrase...  It just means space and time.


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## ovaltine888

retrogradedwithwind said:


> Frankly speaking, I don't think it a good phrase...  It just means space and time.


As I said, just a coined word. Not every four character word in Chinese is a 成语 or in an elegant style. Sometimes it is just two two-character word stitched together.


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## zhg

ovaltine888 said:


> As I said, just a coined word. Not every four character word in Chinese is a 成语 or in an elegant style. Sometimes it is just two two-character word stitched together.


I do not understand how you came to this conclusion, just because it is a coined phrase does not mean it is not elegant or necessarily bad. In fact, both 山河(has a figurative meaning of a country or a nation) and 岁月(the past of something, in this context it is more like a history of a nation) are common collocations appeared in numerous poems and writings.


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## ovaltine888

How did you come to this conclusion that I was saying it is "necessarily bad"?

What I was saying is that non native speakers tend to have an obession of four-character words but sometimes such words are not really as fancy as they think, such as 居委主任，固定搭配，胶底跑鞋，国家安全，结婚年龄, etc--these are just ordinary compound words.

I see 山河岁月 as a stitched word which actually does not make much sense if without any context despite the literary style of "山河" and "岁月" respectively.


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## zhg

ovaltine888 said:


> How did you come to this conclusion that I was saying it is "necessarily bad"?
> 
> What I was saying is that non native speakers tend to have an obession of four-character words but sometimes such words are not really as fancy as they think, such as 居委主任，固定搭配，胶底跑鞋，国家安全，结婚年龄, etc--these are just ordinary compound words.
> 
> I see 山河岁月 as a stitched word which actually does not make much sense if without any context despite the literary style of "山河" and "岁月" respectively.


First, I apologize for any of my comments that made you feel offended.

Next, this is a thread where we answer questions raised by Romeo4755 regarding the "meaning" of "山河岁月". Romeo4755 did not ask if it was a stitched word nor about its style. What you wrote in your posts simply did not answer OP's questions, and a further discussion of it would lead us nowhere. Nevertheless, you are entitled to insist "山河岁月 is a stitched word and it makes no sense without context" regardless of what others have said.


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## Romeo4755

Thank you for the most informative discussion!
As far as I can understand, though the problem turned out to be not as easy as I imagined, the phrase as a title must mean something like "Country and centuries over it" / "Country and  its history" / "Country and time passing by"


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## ovaltine888

zhg said:


> What you wrote in your posts simply did not answer OP's questions, and a further discussion of it would lead us nowhere. Nevertheless, you are entitled to insist "山河岁月 is a stitched word and it makes no sense without context" regardless of what others have said.


The OP already knew about the literal meaning of the word according to his question and he wanted to know  if any further connotations are implied.

In my opinion there is nothing much to dig deeper because the word is a simply a compound word and actually does not give much information. 

I said I agree with retrogradedwithwind as it is not a good title because people can't really understand what it is really about from the word itself.

I am reassured when I see the screenshot posted by OP. The word 风云岁月 in the subtitle is again a hollow phrase with big words 风云 and 岁月stitched together while giving little information to audience. Personally, I don't think it is a good style of writing because  it looks a bit tacky despite the seemingly "poetic feeling".


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## Flaminius

Maybe we can distinguish what 岁月 means metaphorically and if the metaphorical language is effective in conveying what it intends to.  Metaphorically;
山河: nature, landscape
岁月: time, history
风云: turbulent, eventful


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## Lamb67

" an advertising fluff-speech"
, borrowed from the post 
"  What's 印象 mean really? This word's popping up everywhere. "  from our sister forum,  the Chinese-forum 😘


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## ovaltine888

Lamb67 said:


> " an advertising fluff-speech"
> , borrowed from the post
> "  What's 印象 mean really? This word's popping up everywhere. "  from our sister forum,  the Chinese-forum 😘


I take "fluffy" as "empty". So it's not only me who think the word is all but pointless, right?

I'm quite sure that I was taught in school to avoid such language in writing because it is inefficient in conveying information and usually hard to understand. But I believe in certain spheres, say advertising, sales pitches are often deliberately full of obscurity. You see a bunch of fancy descriptive words but you get nothing useful out of it. I am not able to write like that, and I do badly in marketing.


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## Romeo4755

ovaltine888 said:


> I take "fluffy" as "empty". So it's not only me who think the word is all but pointless, right?
> 
> I'm quite sure that I was taught in school to avoid such language in writing because it is inefficent in conveying information and usually hard to understand. But I believe in certain spheres, say advertising, sales pitches are often deliberately full of obscurity. You see a bunch of fancy descriptive words but you get nothing useful out of it. I am not able to write like that, and I do badly in marketing.


I understand your point.
However, language is a living being and all expressions which are thousands of years old can be used today in real speech. Do you think that a 4-character saying, including 2 ancient metaphors, necessarily sounds pompous? Isn't it a good combination, esp. to be a title of a historical show? "Mountains and rivers. Years and months" (with all possible meaning even better)
Of course, I am a poor judge as far as Chinese is concerned.
In English, for example, I would say a name for a historical novel like "Fog of war and broken sword" sounds romantic and beautiful - something maybe about a desperate time full of rage and battles.


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## ovaltine888

I did not mean it is neccesarily pompous to use 4-character words.

4-character 成语 are known as "idioms". For all their remote origins, they are well known and widely accepted by modern people. Few would raise an eye brow if they saw a real 成语 like "峥嵘岁月" as we know the 4 characters as a whole means "extraordinary or eventful years", though not everyone can tell the original meaning of "峥嵘".

But it is a bit off to say "山河岁月" or "风云岁月". They are not "idiomatic" to native speakers. That is why _henter _said in the first place in his reply "_I don't recall anyone using 山河岁月 in China_." . It is just a coined word. As a native speaker, I don't really understand this word more than you do. Literally "Your guess is as good as mine". And you have seen other people who replied to this post also have to fall back on websearch to find out the source of this word.

Of course, coined words or compound words are part of the language especially when introducing new concepts. But they should be straightforward and easy to understand.

It's true that paralleling nouns, like "Fog of war and broken sword", as you said, are often used in the titles of books or movies. But you cannot easily leave out the conjunction 和 or 与 in between. In this case, if you consider it a parrallel structure, "山河与岁月" or simply "山河，岁月" seems much better as a title for my part. However, when you put it as "山河岁月", I don't know if other Mandarin speakers feel the same way, I would naturally take it as "山河（的）岁月", which means "山河" is considered the modifier of "岁月". But such a combination is not "idiomatic" at all and as a compound word it is not "straightforward" enough to understand either, giving me a cheesy feeling of a poorly-stitched word.


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