Character etymology for Elementary - Checking Baggage 给

Hi mandarinboy,

The historical transition of the pronunciation of "给" is " giep ＜ gi ＜ ji ", and "gei" appeared relatively recently, perhaps within the past few hundred years. In short, "ji" is a formal pronunciation, and "gei" is a conversational one. When a Chinese character has a few pronunciations, the one that has double vowels is usually more colloquial, just like 得 (dei3, de2) or 色 (shai3, se4).

Thanks changyu! That where very nice to know. I have not thought about the colloquial part before. Very interesting. By the way, a big thank for you many interesting posts in so many groups and forums. How do you find the time for all this help to us less educated people? Is see your very interesting answers in so many places at CPOD. Can’t really figure out though if you really need to learn anything more:-)

Hi mandarinboy,

Good or bad, I have plenty of time to write comments both at home and at the office. As an overseas representative stationing here in a small city in China, I'm fully enjoying my current job simply because of abundant leisure time for reading, studying, and listening to music. 

I am NOT busy. I have nothing to do in the office except for simple working-capital control, quality check, translations, and eating/drinking with my Chinese boss. The people in the head office in Japan know about this, but nobody wants to replace me and enjoy such a "luxurious" life.

Teaching is the best way to learn. Thanks to intriguing questions, issues, and topics raised by Chinesepod and poddies, I have many opportunities to consult books, dictionaries and webpages. Actually, I don't know much about etymologies, but owing to your threads, my knowledge about them has been steadily increasing!

Thanks!

P/S. I never let my boss see "Rankings"...hehe.

Wonderful explanation of gei3.Lovely story.

I'd like to echo mandarinboys comments and thank changye even though most is over my head I always enjoy learning what I can from your wisdom.

It's fabulous the way you have set out these pages mandarinboy.I love in this word how it is broken down even further into radicals.

As a newbie,I don't want to be too tedious to you more advanced folk,but if someone could just point me in the right direction as to where I can find an explanation on the following it would be much appreciated:

What does frequency above refer to [in this case 212] ?

What does radical specifically mean?

What is the significance of stroke order;why is it so important?

What does HSK mean?

Thanks again

Ask what every questions you like to. I guess most users at Chinese pod are very willing to try to help.

As for your questions:

What does frequency above refer to [in this case 212] ?

This is how frequently used the character is in modern Chinese. We scan the Chinese newspapers on thenet, blogs, chats etc and index all teh characters. The reslut is an list with characters based on how often they are usind in those text. As expected this will vary dependingon the source. If you scan texts from teh chariman Mao period the word comrade will be very frequent and if you scan a modern news paper it will not be frequet at all. When we scan we try to use modern sources to get written chinese as it is used today. The lower number, the more  often the character is used. A character with numbers up to around 3000 are concidered to be frequent and well worth learning. One of many such lists is presented here: http://www.zein.se/patrick/3000char.html This is not the same as I am using but my list is only in one of my databses and not availabe on thenet yet.

What does radical specifically mean?

This is a little bit tricky. There is an explanation on Wiki about hits: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Radical_(Chinese_character) In short, "For the most common meaning of the term, the extracted parts of characters under which they are indexed in dictionaries" The radical lets us find an character in dictionaries. Every character has a radical.  In most cases the index tells us something about the meaning of the character. The metal radical tells us that the object is made of metal, the mouth radical that has something to do with the mouth like singing, eating etc. There are 214  radicals and a radical can be a character on its own or it can be combined with other radicals to build up more complex characters. Almost every character can be sub divided into smaller pieces and each of those pieces is a radical part. A list of radicals can be found here: http://www.yellowbridge.com/chinese/radicals.php. Note even though a character might have several radical parts, only one of them is the real radical.

What is the significance of stroke order; why is it so important?

Well, there are many opinions around this. I myself think this is very important. There are just a few stroke order rules to learn, by writing your character the same way all the time you will remember them easier. Since all characters is build up of the radicals the sub parts of characters will come back in many new characters so by learning them correct in one character will make it easier to learn a new character with that part. If you write calligraphy you can actually see the brush strokes if they are painted the correct way or not.

What does HSK mean?

Hanyu Shuiping Kaoshi, known as HSK or the Chinese Proficiency Test is a standardized test at the state level. More or less like the TOEFEL  test in English. More info about this at their home page: http://www.hsk.org.cn/english/intro_summ.aspx. There are tests for beginners as well as for intermediate up to advanced. There are list with words for each level (4 levels) that you need to know to pass the test. Those tests are very good to have as study goal. You can also get scholarship by doing well on those tests. Most books for students in Chinese are built on the words from the HSK levels.

mandarinboy,

What can I say? You are a champion ! Thankyou so much for explaining the above so well.Thanks for the link to the character frequency list.A very useful and interesting exercise going down the list.It helps me guage where I'm at and also ,understanding the frequency will help me know how relevant a character is.I noticed towards the bottom of the list of 3000 ,several numbers were skipped.Thanks for explaining the radicals and the link to the 214 radicals.That's great.This is exactly what I've been looking for;the breakdown of the characters.Are there really only 214 radicals? Are all Chinese characters made up of single or combinations of those radicals?If so,learing the radicals seems possible and should give a good grounding on clues to the characters and ways of remembering them.The only thing I didn't understand in your explanations was :"Note even though a character might have several radical parts, only one of them is the real radical." What is meant by the real radical? Yes,I see the importance of stroke order now,and I know what you mean with Chinese calligraphy.It's beautiful,and the end of a stroke usually gets thinner as it tails off.I'd love to have the time to get right into calligraphy.A wonderful art form.Thanks also for the HSK explanation and link.This also helps with motivation and goal setting.Breaks it down into more reachable goals.Your posts are highly valued mandarinboy.Thankyou.

The radical system where used before to look up characters in dictionaries. There are actually tens of thousands of characters even though most of them today are hardly never used. To find an unknown character in the dictionary it where needed to have a system to organize them after. Radicals is this system. I have written a short explanation around that here: http://www.euroasiasoftware.com/english/chinese/learn/grundstreckeng.html#Radikaler

If we break it all down to the smallest pieces there is also just a very limited number of possible strokes: http://www.euroasiasoftware.com/english/chinese/learn/grundstreckeng.html#Streckordning

By combining the strokes we get radicals, by using single radicals or combining them we get simple or complex characters. In many cases a character can be divided into one part that is the meaning and one part that is the sound. E.g. 禾 hé (grain) + 口 kǒu (mouth) = hé to give. For me it makes sense to learn the meaning of the radicals since that helps me to remember the character.  Today the characters are often indexed based on the pinyin system but in most dictionaries you still find both the radical + strokes index and the pinyin index side by side. Since many do not care of learning to write characters by hand (it is easier to use an computer to write Chinese) the need for learning radicals might be less great but I still strongly feel that it helps me so I will stick with it.

I find the whole notion of Chinese character 'etymology' rather puzzling. I can relate to the evolution of pronunciation over time, but I have always wondered about character interpretation and the supporting narrative. Assuming there it helps memorizing characters, which to me it doesn't and would be of limited use beyond a few 100s, this still very much seems like reconstruction. 

In his article Why Study Chinese Etymology, Richard Sears refers to those as significs, of which he identifies about 400, and abstraction of the signific. He says that it is often not clear that a character is a signific because either the meaning has changed so much or we can not get in the mind frame of the person who invented the character. 

There is no doubt that character components are quite useful, even with electronic dictionaries, but there is no need to limit it to radicals, Wenlin for instance allows search on pretty much any part, or combination thereof. In addition, since the majority of modern characters are ideo-phonograms or phonetic compounds (形声字 xíng-shēngzì) i.e. combination of radical plus phonetic, I strongly recommend learning the 800+ phonetics components too...

Hi goulniky,

As you said, the etymology of Chinese characters is rather confusing, but let me just say that the most important thing in 汉字 etymology is to enjoy the process of reaching “your” conclusion, but not a conclusion itself, since there are often several “plausible” etymologies for one character, and nobody knows the correct answer. I completely agree with Richard Sears, who cleverly said, “We can not get in the mind frame of the person who invented the character.”