The Chinese Writing System (3)THE FORM OF CHARACTERS
The original forms of letters in English is not normally regarded as important. It may be interesting that the letter 'A' derives from the ancient Phoenician letter aleph, which is derived from the Egyptian character for 'ox', but it's not highly relevant. For Chinese characters, form is very important. Without some attention to form, learning thousands of characters would be impossible. Characters as pictures (graphic representation of meaning): Many people are under the impression that characters are 'pictures' or 'symbols' of objects or concepts. There are, indeed, some straightforward pictorial or symbolic representations. Some well-known examples:
The meaning of such 'graphic' characters is not always evident to the untrained eye. The original form may have been distorted or ignored during the character's evolution, and can only be rediscovered through painstaking scholarly research. Sometimes the origins are simply unknown. However this kind of pictographic character now forms only a small proportion of the total stock of Chinese characters. The phonetic element (the role
of sound in creating characters): From the very beginning, sound
has played a vital role in Chinese characters. The classic example
in ancient times was the character This method of adding a meaningful element (or 'radical') to indicate the character's general meaning became one of the most important ways of forming new characters. Such characters indicate a combination of meaning and pronunciation. (See Note: The addition of a meaning element (radical) in creating new Chinese characters.) For instance, the character
While not as consistent as an alphabet, there is a certain system about
the way characters of this type are created. There are whole families
of characters with a common phonetic element. For instance,
Despite a drift in pronunciation in the two thousand odd years since many of these characters were created, the phonetic element still provides a fairly effective crutch to reading and writing the characters, and one that is consciously used by Chinese speakers. The semantic element, on the other hand, gives only a broad hint of
the meaning, like a thesaurus category -- a general indicator of the
area of knowledge referred to, e.g. 'human affairs', 'water-related',
'botany', 'manual actions', 'emotions', etc. Unless the word is already
known, the meaning cannot usually be guessed purely from looking at the
character. Some radicals include:
The mastery of Chinese writing has always been a formidable task, achieved
in the past only by an educated elite. To make them easier to learn,
the Mainland government has simplified many characters since the 1950s.
For example, As part of the simplification, the government also:
The existence of two character standards, traditional and simplified, complicates things for learners. Computers also have to deal with two character sets, GB for simplified characters and Big5 for traditional characters. (This problem has largely been solved with Unicode). On the printed page, the two different standards are not difficult to tell apart. The traditional characters, using more strokes and thus more ink, have a heavier blockier look and tend to bristle off the page. The simplified characters have a cleaner look and leave more open space. The traditional characters in Taiwan and Hongkong are often printed in the traditional format, with lines running down the page. The first line is at the right side of the page, meaning that pages are read from right to left. Under this system, books have their front cover at what we would regard as the back of the book. On the Mainland, the old Chinese format has been abandoned: Simplified characters are printed across the page from left to right and the page is read from top to bottom, as in English. Understandably, the simplified characters are not universally liked, especially outside the Mainland. People in Taiwan and Hong Kong find them ugly and difficult to read. Even in Mainland China, many people profess to find the older forms more attractive. But despite a resurgence of traditional characters on the Mainland, the simplified forms are well established and have the advantage of being convenient and economical to write.
For more information on the Chinese writing system, see Links. See also the Japanese Writing System and the Vietnamese Writing System. |
resting
under a tree 
.
under
a roof 
.
ji1,
originally a type of bamboo basket or dustpan. Based on the similarity
of sound, this character was borrowed to write the more abstract (and
less easily representable) word qi2 meaning
'other'. 
was
added to create a new, separate character for 'dustpan': 
ji1.
(For convenience I've used the modern pronunciations. Scholars have
reconstructed the sound system of ancient Chinese, but no-one is really
sure how it was actually pronounced.) 
consists
of 
meaning
'white'. Contrary to what you might expect, this character does not mean
'white person'. The 
'boat' 
'walk,
move' 
'hand' 
'water' 
'heart (emotion)' 
'mouth', 
'child', 
'fire', 
'tree', 
(simplified 
)
'speech', 
(simplified 
)
'vehicle', 
'grass', 
chuan2 or zhuan4 is
a simplification of the original character 
.
Many other examples can be found on this page, marked with an asterisk.
The simplified characters are standard in Mainland China and Singapore
while the traditional characters are used in Taiwan and Hongkong. 
li3 'mile,
neighbourhood', 
li3 'inside'
and 
li3 'inside'
were amalgamated into the character 
zhun3 'standard,
accurate' and 
zhun3 'allow,
grant' were amalgamated into the character 
'wave'
was traditionally read bo1 or po1,
and still is on Taiwan. On the Mainland, only bo1 is
now recognised.
