Re: Seeking Chinese and Korean assistance with online Chinese character dictionary project


Dylan Sung wrote:

To save space, I'm going to roll several of your posts into this one.

Quite often, so called pictographs do relate to some concrete meaning for
which it is an abstract picture of. However, early pictographs also were
reused or borrowed for other concepts. The classic example is the shell and
bone character for wind, which derives from the pictograph of a pheonix. The
ancient sound for pheonix must be homophonous or close in sound to that for
the word for wind. Another is the complex character for 10,000 or "myriad"
which is a scorpion.

I’m with you.

For character compounds, which I understand you to mean characters which are
composed of a signific and a phonetic element,

Actually, as you know, there are two kinds of compounds: semantic and
phonetic. (Professional linguists may prefer other nomenclature.)
Semantic compounds are composed of two (rarely, three or more)
elements, both(/all) bearing upon the meaning. Phonetic compounds,
which outnumber the semantic compounds by far, have one element
suggesting the pronunciation.
As an example of a semantic compound that demonstrates a close
relationship between graphic form and meaning, consider 丸 (round,
circular etc.), which anciently showed a bending figure beneath a
curved line suggesting a cliff.
For the phonetic compounds, 患 (worry; suffer; ill; trouble) can
serve. Here we have 串 (a pictograph of two objects pierced and linked
together → pierce) the phonetic + 心 heart/emotions combining to
suggest piercing emotional distress (as opposed, for instance, to a
throbbing pain, nagging chronic pain etc.).

the borrowing was in the sound.

Right, if you what you are saying is that characters with borrowed
meanings obtained those meanings on the basis of their pronunciation
rather than on the basis of other conceivable sources.

The article I refered to you (Richard Cook's word family relating to
the character for waves) is the best example I can give you on this.

I have added Richard Cook to my “Must Read” list.

Many of the characters you listed had the same shape within them because
they were composed with the same phonetic.

True enough. Is this an observation or an objection?

"Lawrence J. Howell" <admin@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx> wrote in message
news:1152855225.481324.215180@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx

Dylan Sung wrote:

No, it's got nothing to do with the radical, but certain shapes in these
characters seem to recur in other characters. Some of the characters
share
the same phonetic element. But like the creationist approach, these
phonetic
elements seem to have been over decomposed into even more basic "shapes"
for
lack of a word.

I wonder if you would rephrase the parts about the phonetic elements.
I can't quite follow your drift, particularly the part about
decomposition of shape.


You were extracting the L shape from the characters in

"Word Family 1-2-3: Bend in an L-shape; hoarse; rough; faint"

By taking that element as a signifying element which you impart with meaning
and context, you have decomposed the character to make something significant
of something which ought to be part of something else that must be taken as
a whole. Hence over decomposed.

You are, I take it, referring specifically to 可, where I say we have
口 mouth + a bent hook. 可 is a semantic compound character. In
semantic compounds, as noted above, both/all elements within the
character bear upon the meaning. “Decomposed” or “over
decomposed” are empty notions in this context.

可河歌
可 in this case is seen as phonetic.
奇寄崎
奇 in this case is the phonetic
渇喝褐
曷 is the phonetic

Right again.

Picking smaller parts of these phonetic elements by decomposing the phonetic
into simpler elements is wrong, IMO, and this is what the creationists did
which resulted in a lot of flack. See Mike Wright's pages that I gave a link
to earlier.

可 and 奇 are separate characters, so there can be no question of
“picking smaller parts of these phonetic elements by decomposing the
phonetic into simpler elements.” If we want to talk about 可, we
talk about the semantic compound character 可. If we want to discuss
河, we treat 可 as an element in the phonetic compound character 河.
The same for 奇 on its own and when it appears in 寄, 崎 inter alia.
Seems clear enough to me.
Actually, Mike has been good enough to write me privately, much to my
benefit.

.

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