4 ms·

There 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) phon

by z2 6y ago

There 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 ago
That 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 ago
  but 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 ago
    That would fall in the rarer category of 虚假字, or bogus characters.
  - dwohnitmok 6y ago
    The usual classification is to call it a 会意字 because its structure is popularly given various semantic-based explanations.

by z2 6y ago

dwohnitmok 6y ago

That 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 ago
but 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 ago
  That would fall in the rarer category of 虚假字, or bogus characters.
- dwohnitmok 6y ago
  The usual classification is to call it a 会意字 because its structure is popularly given various semantic-based explanations.