Character Points Reprised

mark

December 30, 2009, 05:02 PM posted in General Discussion

I am sure I am not the first to make this discovery, but it is something that has gradually dawned on me as I study 汉字 more carefully. Most characters are constructed like molecules from atoms. It seems that if someone needed a new character, they took an existing one and added a radical (部首）to the left, top, bottom, or right of an existing character, and off they went.

It also seems to me that these add-on bits are mostly what is used for character classification. For example, 讠is a fairly frequent add-on bit. If I see," 讠X", it is a pretty good bet that "X" itself is another character. In fact, if X is composed of multiple radicals, those radicals are often characters on their own. The exceptions seem to be either if somewhere along the way someone started simplifying the method for writing "X", or if "X" used to be a character and fell into disuse to an extent that it isn't included in modern dictionaries and doesn't have a unicode representation. Current Simplified characters versus Traditional Characters don't seem to be the only source of X's getting simplified beyond recognition.

The problem for studying characters is that there are about a billion characters with 讠on their left side, or at least way more than I am going to memorize in one sitting. The same goes for most other radicals that are used for character classification, most likely by intention more than accident. Also, the X's are the more complicated parts of these characters, and don't have any obvious relationship to eachother.

However, if I focus on a particular X and look at what has been added, left, top, bottom or right of it, I typically get a list that is short enough for memorizing in one sitting, and all the characters have the complicated X in common, plus a relatively simple addition.

For example, the character for temple, 寺 ,with some bamboo on top means etc or waiting, with a cow beside it means special, with a hand beside it means to support, and with steps beside it means to deal with or to wait. There are probably some others that I haven't located yet, but my point is this seems a fairly manageble set to wrap my head around. BTW, I haven't figured out why a temple would be associated with these meanings, but I am actually not too concerned about that. I can also note that 土 and 寸, which make up 寺， are themselves both used in a bunch of characters, but because they are rather basic, too many for one sitting.

http://huamake.com/web2_0.htm?chardef=on&charpro=on&theChar=%25u5BFA

I intend to use this thread to make other observations about specific X's, as intriquing ones occur to me.

simonpettersson

December 30, 2009, 07:18 PM

More often than not, the X is related to pronounciation, not meaning. In the case of the temple, however, the pronounciations differ a bit. But it's possible it has had several pronounciations, or the characters are so old that their pronounciations have shifted significantly. Or, more likely, a combination of the two.

Oh, and if you add a speech radical, you get poetry. Here I'd bet it's pronounciation: 寺 sì becomes 诗 shī. Also, adding a mountain gives you 峙 zhì, "peak". Also pronounciation, I'd bet. As is probably 持 chí.

Possibly 待 dài, 特 tè and 等 děng used to share a different, now unused, pronounciation of 寺. They sound relatively similar. That's my theory, anyway.

(Edited for typo)

mark

February 05, 2010, 06:33 AM

At least for the time being, I have run out of general observations about written Chinese. So, I will try to make a small story to make another semi-useless character/often used radical more memorable.

This is my 卑（inferior) story. Our hero spotted a 牌子（sign) which informed him where to get his 啤酒 (beer). Unfortunately, he got into an accident on the way home and ruptured his 脾 (spleen). After he succumbed to his injuries he required a 碑（memorial plaque).

waiguoren

December 31, 2009, 03:52 AM

Yes. Interesting observations, people!

I am a long, long way from being able to read and write effectively, but have noticed a few idiosyncrasies of the written form of the language.

Like Mark said, 'there about a billion characters with 讠on their left side'. One that always intrigues me is 课 (ke4). But if we take away the讠 it becomes 果 (guo3).

Here, the sound/meaning relationship illudes me.

tingyun

December 31, 2009, 05:43 PM

waiguoren - the side-word radical is pretty much never phonetic, rather it gives meaning, in both your examples the other part gives a phonetic clue. for example, compare 课 with 颗，棵，窠，骒，髁， all either ke4 or ke1, and 果 with裹，猓，蜾，馃， all guo3. Sometimes there are multiple paths for the phonetic part to give a hint to.

In general, I'd point out that this kind of analysis is what www.zhongwen.com (despite being organzed around traditional charecters, even if using simplified those wonderful charts the author built, showing pieces being added to each charecter, are too valuable to pass up) is built on, and is also what the book Reading and Writing Chinese by McNaughton(there are both simplified and traditional versions) is organized around. If you find that method of learning and analysis useful (I certainly did), then looking into those resources would probably be a very good idea - might as well take advantage of these extensive works.

mark

January 01, 2010, 02:19 AM

I am skeptical. Almost every text I have looked at has mentioned something about characters being composed of a meaning component and a pronounciation component. To me, this seems unsatisfying on a couple levels.

meaning: since the meaning component is usually associated with a large number of characters, the meaning it conveys can't be terribly specific.

pronounciation: in most cases, using modern pronounciation, this component usually sounds like a second cousin of the pronounciation of the character it is part of. I also think that China is as close as it has ever been to having a standard dialect, now, and language drift would make the pronouciation component less relevant over time.

So, I think there is probably a more complete explanation of how charaters were composed, but I haven't seen any more in depth exploration of this question.

changye

January 01, 2010, 08:28 AM

Hi guys

It's very important to look into ancient pronunciations of Chinese characters when talking about etymologies of Hanzi. Below is very rough (and not accurate!) history of pronunciation change, from old Chinese to modern Mandarin.

寺 zio > zio > sy > si
持 dio > dio > chi > chi
诗 tio > tio > shi > shi
特 dok > dok > te > te
待 dog > doi > dai > dai

等 deng > deng > deng > deng

果 guar > gua > guo > guo
课 kuar > kua > kuo > ke

Please be noted that these sounds are NOT completely accepted ones in academic circles, they vary from scholar to scholar, as is often the case with reconstructed old sounds. The same often holds true for etymologies of Chinese characters.

Right parts of Chinese characters are generally a phonetic part, but some of them are both phonetic and semantic part. For example, "寺" is the original character of "持", and this means that the right part of "持" naturally represents both sound and meaning.

mark

January 01, 2010, 11:53 PM

Ok, I am still trying to get a little deeper into the head of whoever woke one fine morning, thousands or hundreds of years ago, and decided it would a fine day to invent a new character. To that end, I have found five characters that contain, 次. (Six counting itself.)

http://huamake.com/web2_0.htm?chardef=on&charpro=on&theChar=%25u6B21

None of them have a side radical. So, I am not clear whether the radical on top is supposed to be the phonetic component, or the one on bottom is, or if something else entirely is going on. It is fairly easy to believe that 次 is the phonetic component of 资,姿 and 瓷. 羡 is a bit more of a stretch, and 盗 is a great big leap, which makes it hard to come up with any hypothesis that the radical on top or bottom is always the phonetic component.

Is an up down layout choosen for asthetic reasons; to keep the layout of the character reasonably square, for example?

I imagine there would be lots of choices for characters with approximately similar sounds and meanings to the ones chosen to compose these characters. What makes the ones chosen the most suitable choice?

Are some characters better as phonetic components and others for contributing meaning?

Once you have invented your new character, how do you persuade others that its composition is the right choice?

As a side note, the two components of 次 appear independently in other characters, as in turn, do the two components of 欠.

changye

January 02, 2010, 04:07 AM

Hi mark

The etymology of "次" is "a man spitting/watering", and "盗" means "皿 (dish) + 次 (mouth watering) = I want eat the dish (> steal)". "羡" naturally means "I want to eat sheep > envious". This typd of characters are called "会意字" (ideogrammic compounds).

http://chinese-characters.org/meaning/6/6B21.html

> Is an up down layout choosen for asthetic reasons; to keep the layout of the character reasonably square, for example?

Chinese characters are not industrial products, so there was no strict rule for making them, although I think there was some tendency/trends based on asthetic reasons or something like that.

> What makes the ones chosen the most suitable choice?

I don't think that's necessarily true.

> Once you have invented your new character, how do you persuade others that its composition is the right choice?

For example, in the era of Oracle bone scripts, only a small number of people such as national leaders and diviners used Chinese characters, so these people didn't need to persuade ordinary people to use them.

Later the situation changed. A lot of characters were (arbitrarily) invented by ordinary people (mainly intellectuals) and the number of Chinese characters dramatically increased, but most of them didn't become popularly used. "Natural selection" worked. It was not a matter of "persuation".

康熙字典 (1716) contains about 50,000 characters (including a lot of variants), and 中华字海 (1994) more than 80,000 characters, but most of the characters listed in these dictionaries haven't been popularly used until now.

On the contrary, some of them only exist in dictionaries. Of course, there were tons of characters that were not listed in dictionaries.

mark

January 11, 2010, 07:21 AM

A tale of three radicals.

Changye, thank you for your explanation. I found it very helpful. I probably should have known there wasn't a completely rational explanation, just the usual human forces of fashion, happenstance, politics, etc.

Speaking of which, some of the simplifications in Simplified Chinese strike me as haphazard. For example, the six characters: 话警龙咙经 and 巠, can illustrate my point.

The 讠in 话 is a simplification of 言， but it wasn't simplified in 警. The 龙 in 咙 would stand as a counter example to any theory that simplifications were limited to left side radicals. And while the right hand portion of 经 is a simplification of 巠, it doesn't seem to exist as an independent character in the simplified character set (e.g. there doesn't appear to be any unicode representation of the simplified form by itself.)

Go figure.

RJ

December 30, 2009, 08:59 PM

Simon is correct,

Over 90% of chinese characters are radical - phonetic types. The X is the phonetic part. Im sure changye could tell us much more.

mark

January 16, 2010, 11:15 PM

@chengye, some of the invented bits did end up as independent characters. Take, 龙， for example, which gives me a feeling that some of the decisions about what to simplify were more art than science, to put it charitably.

Anyway, my next epiphenette is that sometimes when an already composite character is used as a radical, only one component gets distorted in the new character. For example, there is a fang (放) in 激. I didn't spot it though, because only the 方 got squashed to accomodate the 白 in the new character.

I have run into a few other of these types of cases, but I don't remember which characters, at the moment. Anyway, this phenomena once again forces me to expand my thinking about the structure of Chinese characters.

changye

Hi mark

That's a very good observation. I've never noticed that.

As you pointed out, the character "激" is made up of three parts, 三点水 (three dots), 白, and 放, and the shape of 放 is distorted under the "pressure" of "白", hehe.

In 《说文解字》 (100 AD), the right part of "激", 敫 (jiao/yue), is categorized under the 部首 of "放", and the combination of "白" and "放" indicates "sun light scatters".

Here is another example, 敖 (ao). The combination of "出" and "放" indicates "出游" (go on a sightseeing tour).

In modern dictionaries, these characters are all shown under the radical "攵", but not under "放" anymore.

bababardwan

哇，多谢Mark为你的说明的“激”。。很有趣

changye

January 17, 2010, 06:41 AM

Hi mark

That's a very good observation. I've never noticed that.

As you pointed out, the character "激" is made up of three parts, 三点水 (three dots), 白, and 放, and the shape of 放 is distorted under the "pressure" of "白", hehe.

In 《说文解字》 (100 AD), the right part of "激", 敫 (jiao/yue), is categorized under the 部首 of "放", and the combination of "白" and "放" indicates "sun light scatters".

Here is another example, 敖 (ao). The combination of "出" and "放" indicates "出游" (go on a sightseeing tour).

In modern dictionaries, these characters are all shown under the radical "攵", but not under "放" anymore.

bababardwan

January 17, 2010, 07:02 AM

哇，多谢Mark为你的说明的“激”。。很有趣

mark

January 22, 2010, 06:30 AM

I have found a few, otherwise pretty useless characters, that show up as radicals within other characters at a surprising frequency. There are several of these but 隹 seems to be one of the more itriguing ones. It seems to be defined as, "a short tailed bird"; not exactly something I think about once every 3 minutes, and not super simple to write. However, it shows up in medium to high frequency characters like, 谁、准、推、堆、维、罐、催、雄、焦、集、难 and several others. (who, standard, push, pile, to maintain, jar, to urge, hero, burnt, gather, difficult)

Perhaps, this particular bird has a cultural significance that I am not aware of, or it was once used as primarily a phonetic character like， say 斯 and 尼 are often used today. I don't know.

Anyway, it seems like a useful group of characters to memorize together.

henning

And yet 隹 helps a lot for memorizing characters. See how that bird collects wood for his nest in 集? Or how it gives the guy on the left the feeling of being crushed by a mountain in 催?

user76423

You'll find 18 characters with this small birdy "隹", that are quite important, here (explained in German).

隻推售雀進集雅焦雇維誰雕應雖雙難離躍

bababardwan

Great stuff.I love those 2 examples and well explained thanks mate.Looking at Mark's list there I can't help but wonder if at least half of them are indeed acting as the phonetic as half look like they rhyme with zhui.Interesting that if that's the case the phonetic may just give you something that rhymes.I'm sure I've seen changye give examples of this sort of thing before and how it goes back to some old pronunciation in ancient Chinese.I wonder what percentage of phonetics give the exact pronunciation and what percent just something in the ballpark.

henning

January 22, 2010, 06:36 AM

And yet 隹 helps a lot for memorizing characters. See how that bird collects wood for his nest in 集? Or how it gives the guy on the left the feeling of being crushed by a mountain in 催?

user76423

January 22, 2010, 08:45 PM

You'll find 18 characters with this small birdy "隹", that are quite important, here (explained in German).

隻推售雀進集雅焦雇維誰雕應雖雙難離躍

mark

January 29, 2010, 09:25 PM

There is yet another method of character formation that I have not mentioned in this thread before. It appears to be somewhat rare, but definitely seems to be in the character inventor’s toolbox. Specifically, it seems some characters are composed of a left and right radical, not always a repeated radical, but similar in stature and girth. Occasionally, another radical will climb between them, somewhat like a pet or small child joining its parents in bed. 街 and 辩 seem to be results of this process. It also seems that once a character has let on that it is a permissive pair of parents, other characters come along to snuggle up. 行 and辡being the permissive parents in my example，衡 and 瓣 would be examples of other interlopers.

Some of you may know some history and something of deeper significance about this method of character formation, than I do. To me it is just kind of a mystery and yet another thing to watch out for when decomposing characters. I have no idea if the motivation is phonetic, based on meaning, or just happenstance. However, it definitely does seem that some paired radicals are re-used this way and others are not. For example, to my knowledge, 林 is not used this way, even though sticking something between a couple of trees would seem like it aught to be an apt metaphor for something. 木鸟木 might be a handy wait to write some word that meant 林子大了什么鸟都有。

changye

Hi mark

Your perspective about Chinese characters always amuses me, thanks.

It seems to me that radicals which are (or were) bilaterally symmetrical and consist of two part, such as 行 and 辡, are often separated into right and left and have other part between them, probably partly for an aesthetic purpose (balancing included).

That said, some characters obviously have an etymological reason to split a radical of this kind. For example, 班 originally means "cut something in two", and 辦 means "make a dish with a knife", which also connotes "cut something in two".

Actually, the same holds true for "林". I just found some characters of which 林 part is divided into right and left, i.e. 楙 (mao) and 棥 (fan), although they are practically not used in modern Mandarin. Other good example would be the upper part of "攀" (pan).

changye

January 30, 2010, 04:33 AM

Hi mark

Your perspective about Chinese characters always amuses me, thanks.

changye

January 11, 2010, 08:02 AM

Hi mark

A lot of parts were newly created for simplified characters, and this is the reason you can't find the right part of 经 in any unicode lists.