3 ms·
I'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 h
by R0b0t1 4y ago
I'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.