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>I would never have to read or hear any more popular misconceptions about Chinese characters—that they’re like little pictures, that they represent ideas direct
by Nadya 10y ago
>I would never have to read or hear any more popular misconceptions about Chinese characters—that they’re like little pictures, that they represent ideas directly, that the Chinese word for “crisis” is “danger” plus “opportunity.” That, at least, would be a relief.
But... they are? They're ideograms and there is at least some reasoning to many of them. Things written with a part of "fire" tend to have a relation to..well...fire and heat.
火, 烧 炊. You might see the relation 秋 shares with fire. But don't fall into the trap that it is 100% consistent because you'd be wrong about 約.
And the last statement isn't even (technically) wrong. I'm not sure if the Chinese word is the same [0] but for Japanese it is 危機. With individual readings of "danger" and "opportunity" although a more reasonable 1-to-1 equation would be "danger" and "occasion". A crisis is a dangerous occasion. 機 happens to have several meanings and one of those is "opportunity". It is probably intentionally misleading but not incorrect to say it is danger + occasion.
You can't have your cake and eat it too. For most compound words the individual meanings of the hanzi/kanji are very relevant - maybe not always relevant but more often than not.
[0] Google Translate tells me it is, so my confidence is >0% but not by much.
- gizmo686 10y agoMost of the time (In Japanese, at least), the Kanji do not map to meaning per-se, but to roots. For example, in English, we have words like "lap-top", "uni-cycle", "roof-top", "blue-berry", that clearly have multiple semantic components within them. In these cases, in Japanese, the words would be written with the kanji for their roots. In more linguistic terms, the kanjis often refer to morphemes, not ideas. There are some exceptions. For example, in Japanese, today (kyou) is written as "今日”, even though it is a single morpheme. In cases such as this the kanji are used for their meanings. In cases such as this, is is not clear how much the kanji actually help, because the sementic information provided is precisly the information that you would get from knowing the roots, and you (or rather a native speaker) does not have to be taught roots (or at least those roots that still have semantic meaning).
- Nadya 10y agoI'm not sure what you mean by separating "meaning" from "roots". To myself they are one in the same (the root word or a meaning of the root "word", there is no difference in my opinion). Could you provide some examples of what you mean? Maybe I'm thinking too literally or you meant "root" (as in radicals) different from "root" (as in root word). 「自転車」, 「図書館」, 「作家」, 「日光」,「棋士」. You even have witty ones like 「親子丼」. Just have to be careful about ones like 「多少」. The reason I would say not to rely on such literal meanings to define words is because some require some stretch of the imagination like「子宮」 and my rule of thumb is if it it requires a stretch of the imagination it's because it doesn't actually mean that. But literal translations can still be useful as mnemonics to learn new words/kanji. Like a pair of training wheels that eventually get removed.