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IIUC Old Chinese was a much more “isolating” language, in that words were typically single characters - meaning that to make new words, you typically needed to
by nneonneo 4y ago
IIUC Old Chinese was a much more “isolating” language, in that words were typically single characters - meaning that to make new words, you typically needed to make new characters. As it evolved through the ages, “compound” words composed of multiple characters became more common. These days, new words are almost always combinations of multiple characters (often 2, occasionally 3-4).
- lazide 4y agoAny idea if it was due to things like the Confucian Official’s exam system (and corresponding increase in prioritization of education)? More complex characters require more education to understand is my guess. Some of the traditional ones are….. obscure, and crazy complex.
- R0b0t1 4y agoI'm not entirely sure what you mean to ask nor am I a Chinese speaker, but I have myself suspected that the massive variety of characters was a side-effect of having a middle class that was differentiated based on their ability to read. You see various in-group signalling systems similar to this in lots of areas. A good historical example is all the strangly specific words for groups of animals. A history I read of this indicated these terms were first found in books sold to nobility, and they were just made up. But you weren't hip if you weren't reading that literature.
- nneonneo 4y agoChinese has a lot of specific characters for various species of birds (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Radical_196 https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Radical_196), fish (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Radical_195 https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Radical_195), and "bugs" (which includes small reptiles and certain other non-warm-blooded animals) (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Radical_142 https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Radical_142). One of my favorite features of the language is the fact that every element in the periodic table gets its own character - and the characters have radicals that indicate their usual state of matter (钅 for metal, 石 for non-metal solids, 氵 for liquids, 气 for gases) - see https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Chemical_elements_in_East_Asian_languages https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Chemical_elements_in_East_Asia.... There are also lots of specific words for species of trees (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Radical_75 https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Radical_75) and other plants (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Radical_140 https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Radical_140), but characters under those radicals also include botanical terms, medicines, things made of wood and plants, etc.
- duskwuff 4y ago> These days, new words are almost always combinations of multiple characters (often 2, occasionally 3-4). Yep! For example, the most common Chinese term for "Internet" is 因特网. This is composed of three characters: 互: "mutual" 联: "join", "coupled", "allied" 网: "net" -- carrying both the meaning of a woven net and a computer network
- nneonneo 4y agoI think your comment got a little mixed up - fairly sure Internet is 互联网 (因特网 seems to be a much less common term, a hybrid of phonetic "Inter" and semantic "net")
- lazide 4y agoHaving been around before Unicode (and having to deal with a lot of the early growing pains of getting it working when dealing with non-Latin character sets in production), I have to say. Despite all it’s problems, the fact these two messages ‘just worked’ is really awesome. I heart Unicode, despite all that.
- duskwuff 4y agoWhoops, yeah. Copy/paste error.