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Four Types of Kanji (2019)
- z2 6y agoThere are arguably three to six types, depending on how deep one wants to get into the etymology of it! On the higher count, two categories missing are (1) phonetic (false) loans where another character was arbitrarily adopted for a different meaning due to pronunciation similarities, forcing the original word to be reinvented to disambiguate, and (2) derivative cognates, where a common ancestor character may have branched out over time into multiple characters. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Chinese_character_classification https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Chinese_character_classificati...
- dwohnitmok 6y agoThat Wikipedia article's decision to label 转注 as "derivative cognates" is entirely speculative. 转注 is closer to "mutually defined" i.e. mutually recursive definitions (or potentially sounds, it's not really clear as I explain later). There is no reason to think this referred to any notion of derivative cognates. Indeed if it were derivative cognates there would be way way more characters in that category than are put there (e.g. 手 and 又). Basically nobody really knows what the intended purpose or meaning of 转注 was. This is because, although the Wikipedia article mentions 考 and 老, it fails to mention that this pair is the only commonly agreed upon instance of 转注 in the entire Shuowen Jiezi. Xu Shen (the author of the Shuowen Jiezi) writes, "转注 consists of those characters forming a single category with the same radical. The same meaning is mutually given among them. 考 and 老 are examples." (转注者建类一首同意相受考老是也）。Indeed if you go to the entries of 考 and 老 they simply refer you to the other. That is the entirety of what we know about 转注 (barring later interpretations by other scholars trying to make sense of that). No other character is listed as 转注 in the Shuowen Jiezi's 10516 catalogued characters (to be clear not every character is necessarily categorized by Xu Shen among them, many are categorized by later commentaries). As a result scholars mostly ignore 转注.
- bohadi 6y agobut how would 许慎 categorize biang biang mian [0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Biangbiang_noodles https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Biangbiang_noodles
- howlgarnish 6y agoThat would fall in the rarer category of 虚假字, or bogus characters.
- dwohnitmok 6y agoThe usual classification is to call it a 会意字 because its structure is popularly given various semantic-based explanations.
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- dnautics 6y agoI'm not certain about some of these. Change (化) is a combograph? Its meaning derives from an upside-down person and right-side-up person, as is (仲) relationship. 母 is a pictograph, although rotated 90 degrees.
- dwohnitmok 6y agoYeah I'd also class 足 as a pictograph. It is a category error to put something like 足 (foot) or 母 (mother) as a 指事字 (what the article calls an indicator). 指事字 are abstract things, like "up" (上), rather than concrete nouns.
- 4cao 6y agoAbsolutely. 足 is an augmentation of 止, which itself originated as a drawing of a foot. 母 is a picture of female breasts. Both are pictograms.
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- 4cao 6y agoI'd classify 化 as a simple ideogram (part of group 2, called "indicators" in the article) because it conveys the abstract idea of 'change' by showing one person upside down from the other. It isn't a compound ("combograph", group 3) to me because it doesn't build upon the meaning of its individual components. However, this is a fuzzy categorization. In the top-level comment I wrote, I listed 三 'three' as an example of an ideogram but it could be argued instead that it is a compound of three separate 一 'one' characters. Then there's the character 廿 'twenty', which consists of two 十 'ten' characters, that is probably better explained as a compound. So at a certain point it all becomes quite subjective.
- kace91 6y agoI wonder if the distribution in categories is different to that of Chinese hanzi.
- slmjkdbtl 6y agoThere's no such categories in Chinese hanzi, or at least not generally taught.
- fireattack 6y agoWhat? This is totally a thing in Chinese, and at least mentioned in primary school/ middle school. https://zh.wikipedia.org/wiki/%E5%85%AD%E6%9B%B8 https://zh.wikipedia.org/wiki/%E5%85%AD%E6%9B%B8 or https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Chinese_character_classification https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Chinese_character_classificati... https://baike.baidu.com/item/%E5%BD%A2%E5%A3%B0%E5%AD%97 https://baike.baidu.com/item/%E5%BD%A2%E5%A3%B0%E5%AD%97 https://baike.baidu.com/item/%E4%BC%9A%E6%84%8F%E5%AD%97 https://baike.baidu.com/item/%E4%BC%9A%E6%84%8F%E5%AD%97 Also, for it's worth, I don't think this is generally taught in Japan or in Japanese language class either.
- slmjkdbtl 6y agoSorry for the ignorance.. I was just speaking from experience, I wasn't personally taught with these in the Chinese education system
- dwohnitmok 6y agoBut you've probably heard of 形声字 and 象形字 right?
- slmjkdbtl 6y agoActually yes, but not 指事文字 and 会意文字
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- SoSoRoCoCo 6y agoThis is a really interesting read for me as a non-Japanese (non-Chinese, non-Korean). I learned that the idea of pictograms is largely misunderstood after reading "The Chinese Language: Fact and Fantasy" by John DeFrancis. It is quite a fun read to start, although it drags at the end due to my lack of knowledge.
- mholt 6y agoA few that I love are: - 森 (forest) not only looks like a forest, but is a bunch of 木 (tree/wood). - 众 is a crowd of people, and 人 is person. - 火 is fire, and 焱 is flame or extremely hot. - 石 is stone, and 磊 is many stones or great pile of rock. - 水 is water, 淼 describes a larger body of water.
- 4cao 6y agoAlso check out 女 and 姦 for a slightly different story.
- nullsense 6y ago姦 always cracked me up.
- reustle 6y agoFor the curious: https://jisho.org/search/%E5%A7%A6 https://jisho.org/search/%E5%A7%A6
- tasogare 6y agoIt means rape.
- howlgarnish 6y agoNot necessarily, eg the famous Japanese saying 女三人寄れば姦しい (three women will be noisy). Most Chinese characters are not limited to a single meaning.
- tasogare 6y agoI know, I have a master degree in Japanese and I work with dictionaries daily. The thing is 姦 is first and foremost associate with sex, in particular bad kind of sex. It’s obvious from the compounds listed by Weblio: adultery 姦通, rape 強姦, incest 血族姦通. Now in Pleco (Chinese dictionary): to fornicate, adultery, rape. So do your homeworks and stop spreading bullshit on the web: if the average Japanese or Chinese people stumble upon this character out of the very very restricted contexts it can mean something else, his first idea will be very bad. And in this case, in absence of okurigana, it’s clearly not one of those contexts. Edit: I queried the BCCWJ Corpus with Shonagon, and there is not. a. single. use of 姦 as 姦しい over 673 results. Everything there is is compounds like 姦通、強姦罪、視姦者、姦淫、姦婦.
- 4cao 6y agoFrom my experience with Chinese, the classification in the article follows the established convention but seems to use non-standard terminology for each category. Arguably, it's much more straightforward to categorize the characters as: 1. Pictograms: 人 'person', 木 'tree', 日 'sun, day', 月 'moon, month' 2. (Simple) Ideograms: 上 'up', 三 'three' 3. Compound Ideograms, or Meaning-Meaning Compounds: 休 'rest' (人 'person' next to a 木 'tree'), 明 'bright' (日 'sun' and 月 'moon') - note that the pronunciation of the compound character is unrelated to either component 4. Phonetic-Meaning Compounds: 晴 /qíng/ 'clear (weather)' (日 'sun' as a meaning cue, and 青 /qīng/ as a pronunciation cue) - the vast majority of Chinese characters belong in this last category More categories can be (and historically were) distinguished, such as when an additional component was added to a character to clarify its meaning, even though the original character already had that meaning, but that primary meaning became overshadowed by a secondary meaning it acquired later; however such distinctions are mostly useful for understanding the evolution of Chinese characters rather than the way they currently are. Of course the above classification, even with only the basic four categories, is still largely subjective, for example 娶 /qǔ/ 'to marry (a woman)' can be thought of either as a meaning-meaning compound (取 'to take' a 女 'woman'), or as a phonetic-meaning compound with the phonetic component 取 'to take' pronounced /qǔ/ as well. It also has to be said the pronunciation cue is often not very helpful anymore, as the sounds in Mandarin Chinese have shifted, and guessing the pronunciation from similar characters can end up being hilariously wrong. Besides, sometimes it is not even clear which component of a character is supposed to be the phonetic cue. Now I don't know about Japanese but I imagine these pronunciation cues must be even less helpful than in Chinese.
- howlgarnish 6y agoChinese also has the additional problem that character simplification in the PRC broke quite a few pronunciation cues. With 廣, you can correctly guess it'll sound similar to 黄. Simplified to 广, you have no idea.
- dwohnitmok 6y agoIt's a wash. It broke some and restored others, often by following variant characters already in use, e.g. 闆, which has no pronunciation similarity to 品, became 板 (following cues of e.g. 版). Chinese hasn't had consistent phonetic components for a long long long time.
- Timpy 6y agoMy point is more related to kanji learners than it is kanji etymology. I understand that some things have etymological meaning, but it's much more useful to me as a learner to just see it as a pictograph. It's pretty common for learners to make a mnemonic out of the kanji and tie it to the kanji's meaning. 木 is a great intro kanji because it simply means "tree" and if you let yourself believe it looks like a tree it's easier to remember. You can start playing with combos like 林 meaning "woods" and 森 meaning "forest". 相 is a combination of 木 and 目, tree and eye. The article pinpoints its meaning as "physiognomy". 相 is an extremely common kanji. My translations may be a little awkward, but these words are more frequent in Japanese than my translations might suggest: 相手 Tree-eye, hand: "the person you're talking to" 相談 Tree-eye, conversation: "consultation, getting advice from someone" 首相 Neck, tree-eye: "Prime Minister" 相撲 Tree-eye, slap: "Sumo wrestling" It's really hard to pin down the meaning of this particular kanji. Eventually I realized I was missing the 森 for the 木. "Physiognomy" is basically meaningless to me as an English speaker/Japanese learner because now I have to work to remember the English meaning as well. I decided to stop thinking of this kanji "physiognomy" and start thinking of it as "tree-eye". Tackling large problems systematically is exciting for me but I have to remind myself "making mnemonics for each kanji" is not the goal, "being able to enjoy myself while immersing in Japanese text" is.
- tanjtanjtanj 6y agoI learned 相 as 'mutual'. That seems to work for all the listed examples (a stretch for prime minister but I can still see it working) and most of the other words that contain it from a cursory look.