No, the other kind of draw
I was looking over some things at work today, and realised that the word 画 (huà) had been used as the translation for both draw and paint. I brought it up with the author of the document, and she said that there was no difference in Chinese, and asked if there was a difference in English. I told her it was quite a big difference (draw being associated with pens, pencils, crayons, etc., and paint being done with, well, paint). She discussed this with another colleague for a while, and I looked up 画 in the dictionary.
It happens quite often in Chinese that one character means several different things, with the meaning usually worked out from the context or the other characters around it. In this case, the meaning, to Chinese people, is the same. It makes a lot of sense when you think about it, as traditional Chinese calligraphy was done with a brush, not a pen.
In the end, as I did want to distinguish the difference between the two English words, we compromised with 画 (油画), where the first character (yóu) is the noun paint, and 画 means…paint. And draw.
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Adrian Morgan said,
April 15, 2010 @ 3:01 am
Now that the commenting facility has been fixed (in mid April 2010), I can make some comments that I would have liked to make when this article was published.
Another difference between “draw” and “paint” is evident in the way these terms are used on a computer. Programs that let you create detailed pictures and save them in a bitmap-like (raster) format are often called “paint” programs. Programs that let you assemble illustrations out of simple geometric shapes and save them in a vector format are often called “draw” programs. The names of the programs often reflect this (e.g. Microsoft Paint is a paint program).
The 1992 software product “Fractal Vision” by Dick Oliver uses “draw” and “paint” to refer to two different functionalities. It’s hard to explain without making this comment a crash course in fractal geometry, but basically “draw” displays the first, second, third, fourth, etc, iteration of the shape whereas “paint” leaps straight to the final, infinite iteration. On page 279 of the manual, Oliver justifies his use of the terms with reference to the distinction I’ve described above.