Chinese character: Encyclopedia II - Chinese character - Classification

Chinese character - Classification

See also: Chinese character classification

Chinese character - By etymology

Chinese scholars have traditionally classified Han characters into six types by etymology (六書).

The first two types are 獨體 dútǐ single-body, meaning that the character was created independently of other Chinese characters. Although the perception of most Westerners is that most characters were derived in single-body fashion, pictograms and ideograms actually take up but a small proportion of Chinese logograms. More productive for the Chinese script were the next two, 合體 hétǐ compound, methods, i.e. the character was created from assembling different characters. Despite being called "compounds", these logograms are still single characters, and are written to take up the same amount of space as any other logogram. The final two types are rarer.

1. The first type, and the type most often associated with Chinese writing, are pictograms (象形字 xiàngxíngzì), which are pictorial representations of the morpheme represented, e.g. 山 shān for "mountain".
2. The second type are ideograms(指事字 zhǐshìzì) that attempt to graphicalize abstract concepts, such as 上 shàng "up" and 下 xià "down". Also considered ideograms are pictograms with an ideographic indicator; for instance, 刀 dāo is a pictogram meaning "knife", while 刃 rèn is an ideogram meaning "blade".
3. 會意字 huìyìzì (lit. "get-meaning-words"), radical-radical compounds in which each element (radical) of the character hints at the meaning.
4. 形聲字 xíngshēngzì are radical-phonetic compounds, in which one component (the radical) indicates the general meaning of the character, and the other (the phonetic) hints at the pronunciation. An example is 樑 liáng, where the phonetic 梁 liáng indicates the pronunciation of the character and the radical 木 mù ("wood") its meaning of "supporting beam". Characters of this type constitute the majority of Chinese logograms.
5. 轉註字 zhuǎnzhùzì changed-annotation characters are characters which were originally the same character but have bifurcated through orthographic and often semantic drift. For instance, 考 kǎo (to test) and 老 lǎo (old) were once the same character, meaning "elder person".
6. 假借字 jiǎjièzì are improvisational characters (lit. "improvised-borrowed-words") and come into use when a native spoken word has no corresponding character, and hence another character with the same or a similar sound (and often a close meaning) is "borrowed"; occasionally, the new meaning can supplant the old meaning. 自 zì used to be a pictographic word meaning "nose", but was borrowed to mean "self". It is now used almost exclusively to mean "self", while the "nose" meaning survives only in set-phrases and more archaic compounds. Because of their derivational process, the entire set of Japanese kana can be considered to be 假借字, hence the name kana (仮名; 仮 is a simplified form of 假).

The most productive method of Chinese writing, the 形聲字 xíngshēngzì, was made possible because the phonetic system of Chinese allowed for generous (homonymy), and because in consideration of phonetic similarity tone was generally ignored, as were the final consonants of the characters in consideration, at least according to theory following from reconstructed Middle Chinese pronunciation. Note that due to the long period of language evolution, such component "hints" within characters as provided by the 形聲字 are sometimes useless and may be misleading in modern usage. This is particularly true in non-Chinese languages (with Japanese being a notable exception for its phonological conservatism).

Chinese character - Radical system

In modern dictionaries, characters are generally classified based on their radicals (部首 bùshǒu), which normally indicate the general meaning of a character, or which may be a shared graphical feature with other characters. 按 àn "press" is classified under 手 shǒu "hand", which is its meaning radical, while 安 ān "peace" is classified under 宀, called 寳蓋頭 bǎogàitóu (lit. "covering-head of 寳", pictorially representative of a house), which conveys only part of the meaning—安 was derived from a picture of a woman in a house.

However, the classification of characters according to the radical system is sometimes problematic, as the origins of characters are often obscure, or more than one radical may be present in a character, etc. For example, the character for "East" (東; dōng), which combines the "tree" radical (木) and the "sun" radical (日), is usually considered a radical-radical compound. Though it appears to represent a sun rising through trees, which is both an evocative image and a useful mnemonic, the origin and classification of the character are disputed among scholars. While some agree with the radical-radical classification, others see it as a unique character in and of itself — some claim it as being derived from an early pictograph of bundled sticks.

Adapted from the Wikipedia article "Classification", under the G.N U Free Docmentation License. Please also see http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki