The addition of a meaning element (radical) in creating new Chinese characters

(This is a side note to the page The Chinese Writing System)

The ancient case of the character for 'dustbin' ( ji¹ in modern pronunciation) being borrowed to write the word for 'other' (qi² in modern pronunciation), and the subsequent attempt to disambiguate the two words by creating the character ji¹ specially for 'dustbin', is a telling one.

Originally, the rebus principle was applied, whereby a character was pressed into service to write another, phonetically similar form. An example from English would be to write 'I' with the picture of an eye , or to write 'belief' with the picture of a bee and a leaf -- the only common element is the pronunciation. By applying this principle, Chinese started on the path towards representing speech phonetically.

However, when the bamboo radical was added to distinguish ji¹ from qi², the trend was reversed. Huge numbers of characters were eventually created through the use of radicals as semantic markers. The result was, in effect, a 're-semantification' of Chinese characters.

Interestingly, some words preserve both stages of the process -- a phonetic form, and a form consisting of a phonetic element plus a semantic element. The word cang¹geng¹, meaning 'oriole', is one such word. Cang¹geng¹ can be written either *, which represents the sound only, or *, where the character for 'bird' * is added to both characters to clarify the meaning.

The two different ways of writing cang¹geng¹ are a graphic illustration of what must have been a historic transition. The older writing, *, seems to indicate a trend towards a phonetic representation. The addition of the bird radical ( *) restores the semantic element, reviving the idea that all characters should show a meaning.

Cang¹geng¹ is interesting for another reason. It is one of the relatively small class of words in Chinese that is inherently polysyllabic (see the Chinese Writing System). This includes words like pu²tao² 'grape' and mei²gui⁴ 'rose'. Both characters in each pair share the same meaning radical, 'grass' in the first, 'jade' in the second. The case of cang¹geng¹ suggests that the split into two syllables may initially have been purely phonetic. That is, double-character representations may have started out simply showing the pronunciation in two syllables, and identical radicals added later to show the meaning. (It is possible to conceive of the two stages being rolled into one: words being phonetically written in two syllables and matching radicals added as a matter of course). As noted elsewhere, these individual syllables were then taken as minimal meaningful units with a life of their own.

It has been suggested that many of the inherently polysyllabic forms (including both pu²tao² and mei²gui⁴) were originally loanwords from foreign languages. The creation of special characters for these words contrasts with the purely phonetic representation of foreign loanwords in modern Chinese (see Chinese Writing System). Were foreign loanwords to be given meaningful radicals in modern Chinese the results might be very interesting.

For example, the word tan³ke⁴ '(military) tank', borrowed from English, is normally rendered phonetically as tan³ke⁴. The two characters literally mean 'broad and flat / calm of heart' + 'conquer'. If, say, the 'vehicle radical' / were added to each character, the result would be *. Like the traditional examples above, each character would thus express a meaning in itself. If so, the word fan³-tan³ (anti-tank), which literally means 'counter flat' or 'overturn composure', would take on an indentifiable meaning as * 'counter tank'.