Chinese-Characters.doc

Chinese Characters - The Way They Are.
To those who have not learned the language (even to some with Chinese ancestry), written Chinese seems like a myriad collection of random strokes and squiggles. To the uninitiated, Chinese characters are formidable. This article demystifies some of these misconceptions.

An educated person in English can still read and understand English of 200 years ago, such as the US Constitution or the Gettysburg Address. The difficulty starts when encountering the works of Shakespeare, some 500 years ago. Still, it is not indecipherable. Going back further, we would be unable to read - let alone understand - such literary pieces as Beowulf or Chaucer’s Canterbury Tales without special training. 

Chinese people, on the other hand, have no difficulty reading and understanding works that were written 2000 years ago. Only in cases where the authors used seal characters or variants from before the Empire was first unified would special training be required. This is because the semantics and concepts are encoded in the character itself. 

Alphabetic languages use sound to define semantics. One can pronounce words in Latin-based western languages quite easily, but understanding them is another story. On the other hand, to one who knows the written Chinese characters, languages such as Japanese or Korean can be easily understood even if one cannot pronounce the Kanji or Hanja. Chinese characters are as easily interpreted as icons on a computer screen or the universal signs found on restroom doors.

There are three main groups in which Chinese characters are formed. 
1. Direct from the pictogram.
2. Combining pictograms to form abstract concepts.
3. Using a character for its sound but combining with a radical to differentiate its semantics.

From each group, I shall give a few examples. The other well known pictogram-based language (though dead) is the hieroglyphic system of ancient Egypt. Just as English has root words, so does Chinese. Linguists call such root characters as radicals. 

Characters in group one are the easiest to understand. For example, the character for the sun is written as日. Originally it was written as a circle with a dot in the middle with 7 radiating strokes to represent the rays. This is how ancient Chinese saw the sun with its sunspots. To this day, this is how the sun is depicted in children’s art. Chinese love to square things because it is easier than to draw a perfect circle. To differentiate the moon from the sun, the crescent moon is used instead. After squaring it, the pictograph became月. The two horizontal lines represent the clouds floating across it in the original pictogram. So is the horse – after squaring and abstracting - 馬. Those three horizontal strokes represent the mane and the hooves are transformed into those 4 dots below. The character for man is nothing more than a figure stick with his head and arms cut off for simplification to become人. Because of its fundamental meaning, most became radicals on which more complex characters are built upon. For example, the word “big” 大 is a man with outstretched arms represented by the horizontal stroke. As you can now infer, the character for “small” is a man with its arms and legs squeezed closely to the body: 小. The legs are coalesced into one stroke. For the radical for female, a rounder figure is rendered with outstretched hands to give it a flair for elegance - 女. It is not difficult to imagine an image of woman by adding a circle to represent her head.

The most interesting group in forming Chinese characters is the second. For example, the character for river is川 which has been straightened and stylized to give it some aesthetic form. It is actually the picture of two banks with the middle stroke representing the flow of water. Picture in your mind 3 elongated “s” at an angle of 45 degrees from the north. If you can squeeze the river, what you get is water. Hence the character for water looks something like >|< which is then styled into水. This root radical is combined with other characters to mean all things that are related to water or liquids. Hence words such as “float”, “sink”, “deep”, “shallow”, “oil”, “wet” etc have the liquid attributes. However when combining with other characters, 水 is too cumbersome and not as aesthetic looking. So it was abbreviated to just 3 drops of water. Therefore the previous words in their Chinese characters are浮, 沉, 深, 淺, 油 and 濕. 木 is originally a picture of a tree, with its roots and abstract drawing of its leaves removed. Since wood comes only from tree, the meaning is extended to mean wood. Therefore when you see this radical combined with some other, it is usually the name of a tree or things made from wood. Similarly for the fire and other radicals.

One must bear in mind that the way a character is formed is due to the times in which ancient Chinese lived, and that China was an agricultural society. Since semantics are encoded in the character, one can learn its culture through its writing. For example, in those times, what the ancient Chinese feared the most were fire and floods. Therefore the word “catastrophe” is composed of two characters, an overflowing river on the top with the fire radical in the bottom - 災. Notice how the character of the river, 川 is changed into 3 “<”. This is because of the aesthetic factor. In ancient times, the two most reliable sources of light were the sun and moon. Hence “bright” is the combination of the two characters: 明. Like with other languages, the meaning is extended to mean “understand”, “intelligent”. Remember the 7 strokes representing the rays of the sun? It has now being balanced and styled into an aesthetic form of, 光. In cartoons, to present something that is missing, some rays are drawn where the object is missing. Therefore, this character also means empty.

There are some universal truths which cannot be viewed differently by other cultures. It is like 1 + 1 = 2 (at least in base 10!). Every sharp object has a point. How does one represent it? Very simple – just combine the small character on top of a big character - 尖, an attribute shared by all sharpness. What does a man do under the shade of the tree. He rests! Therefore the character to rest is休. Notice how the人 is now up righted to make the combined form look better and to conserve space. The character for mother is derived from the character female, 女 with a bigger and rounded torso to represent pregnancy with swelling breasts. This is a universal fact that she is the mother of what she is bearing within her - 母. Add a man to the top for the universal fact that in order for man to exist, a mother must be present first. Hence the word for every is 每! This is the same in other languages, i.e., changing the shape of the letter in certain combinations for stylistic reasons. For example the Greek lower case letter, sigma. It can be written either as σ or ς in word-final position or Arabic. Add 3 drops of water to it is another universal fact that every ocean must have water in it - 海. Some may argue what about lakes, ponds and rivers. Well, this is the Chinese thought and rules, just as why we must use “an” in front of words beginning with a vowel or a silent “h” whose 2nd letter is a vowel. In any case the characters are 湖, 池 and 河. Notice the water radical on the left. These words are borrowed sounds from the characters on the right. The radical is used to differentiate the homonyms. This we shall see in Group 3.

In English we have the words for bark, neigh, meow, bleat, chirp etc. What more logical that in Chinese, the creature is appended to the mouth radical? Thus we have 吠, 嗎, 喵, 咩 and鳴 respectively. Using the same kind of logic, all characters combined with the hand denotes some kind of action while those with the foot is associate with movement; with the fish radical denotes some kind of sea creature not necessary means that it is a fish. For example a whale is not a fish but in Chinese, it has a fish radical. By know the meaning of the radicals, half of the complexity of Chinese ideograms is solved.

Not everyone including many native Chinese may know that Chinese culture is extremely sexist, and this is encoded into their characters. They may know that males are more important than females; that baby girls are drowned as most recently when China instituted one child per family policy! Ancient China was an agricultural based society. Therefore to cultivate the fields, manpower was needed. Hence a woman producing sons is good and so the character for good is a woman and her son - 好! A woman’s mouth on the other hands bears no weight or importance and therefore it is iffy - 如. A woman under a roof means peace to the man since she does all the work for him! This is the character安 where the top is a roof radical. She is not even important to be part of the family. The pig has more important status than her. A pig is a commodity since pork is the favourite meat of the nation. Without a pig, a family does not exist! Thus 家 is family. The word for “sexy” is 媚. Ancient Chinese believe that the eyebrows of women are indeed sexy just as ancient Japanese has the woman’s nape as some kind of fetish. This is why the kimono always showed the nape of the woman. What do women do when they get together? Well their favourite past time in the eyes of Chinese men is gossip. Hence the original meaning of姦 means to gossip. However it meaning is now changed to something else. However we can see its vestigial meaning in another character. If 3 women together is gossip, therefore having a thousand women together means that gossip is multiplied by a thousand times. Ancient Chinese believe that the root of evil is not money but from gossip. Thus the thousand women character is evil - 奸.

Ancient Chinese believe that wind is caused by the beating wings of insects. Hence the character is written as the composition of a wave front, an insect and its wing - 風 where 虫 is the insect radical. Simplification removes all such cultural beliefs and reasons where it is now represented by an X - 风, one aspect of simplification that I do not like. Finally a character comes from a story. The best example is 孽. This character means “sin” – a Buddhist sin. It contained the characters Xue薛 and the character for son子. This comes from the story of “The rebellion of Xue Kang against the Tang Dynasty” (薛剛反唐). The Xue family had helped the Tang founders in establishing the empire. They were ennobled for their merits. When the scion of the family rose against the rule of Empress Wu Zetian, they were defeated and the entire family was then slaughtered upon her orders. Stories went that this scion was an enemy killed by the forefathers of the clan and therefore the spirit came into their reincarnation for revenge. A thoroughly Buddhist concept. Buddhism was the rage at that time, especially under the rule of the female Emperor.

Just as English invents new words by combining letters, Chinese can also make new words by combining existing characters. First choose a character that is the homonym of another character and combine it with an appropriate radical. Voila – a new character comes into being. This is most obvious in naming newly discovered elements. For example, aluminum, manganese, radium, oxygen, nitrogen, radon etc are all unknown in ancient Chinese. New characters were formed by adding the appropriate metal and gas radicals to form 鋁, 錳, 鐳, 氧, 氮, 氡 which are approximate English sounds to Chinese ears.

In conclusion, Chinese characters are easy to understand once you break it down into components. For me the more difficult part is distinguishing the four different tones of Mandarin.