Chinese character classification
Chinese characters are generally logographs, but can be further categorized based on the manner of their creation or derivation. Some characters may be analysed structurally as compounds created from smaller components, while some are not decomposable in this way. A small number of characters originate as pictographs and ideographs, but the vast majority are what are called phono-semantic compounds, which involve an element of pronunciation in their meaning.
The traditional six-fold classification scheme was originally popularized in the 2nd century CE, and remained the dominant lens for analysis for almost two millennia, but with the benefit of a greater body of historical evidence, recent scholarship has variously challenged and discarded those categories. In older literature, Chinese characters are often referred to as "ideographs", inheriting a historical misconception of Egyptian hieroglyphs, but some people[who?] assert that they do so only through association with the spoken word.[1]
Overview[edit]
Chinese characters have been used in several different writing systems throughout history. The concept of a writing system includes both the written symbols themselves, called graphemes—which may include characters, numerals, or punctuation—as well as the rules by which they are used to record language.[2] Chinese characters are logographs, which are graphemes that represent units of meaning in a language. Specifically, characters represent the smallest units of meaning in a language, which are referred to as morphemes. Morphemes in Chinese—and therefore the characters used to write them—are nearly always a single syllable in length. In some special cases, characters may denote non-morphemic syllables as well; due to this, written Chinese is often characterised as morphosyllabic.[3][a] Logographs may be contrasted with letters in an alphabet, which generally represent phonemes, the distinct units of sound used by speakers of a language.[5] Despite their origins in picture-writing, Chinese characters are no longer ideographs capable of representing ideas directly; their comprehension relies on the reader's knowledge of the particular language being written.[6]
The areas where Chinese characters were historically used—sometimes collectively termed the Sinosphere—have a long tradition of lexicography attempting to explain and refine their use; for most of history, analysis revolved around a model first popularized in the 2nd-century Shuowen Jiezi dictionary.[7] Newer models have since appeared, often attempting to describe both the methods by which characters were created, the characteristics of their structures, and the way they presently function.[8]
Structural analysis[edit]
Most characters can be analysed structurally as compounds made of smaller components (
A straightforward structural classification scheme may consist of three pure classes of semantographs, phonographs and signs—having only semantic, phonetic, and form components respectively, as well as four classes corresponding to each possible combination of the three component types.[10] Of the 3500 characters used frequently in Standard Chinese, pure semantographs are estimated to be the rarest, accounting for about 5% of the lexicon, followed by pure signs with 18%, and semantic–form and phonetic–form compounds together accounting for 19%. The remaining 58% are phono-semantic compounds.[11]
The Chinese palaeographer Qiu Xigui (b. 1935) presents "three principles" of character formation adapted from an earlier proposal by Tang Lan (1901–1979), with semantographs describing all characters whose forms are wholly related to their meaning, regardless of the method by which the meaning was originally depicted, phonographs that include a phonetic component, and loangraphs encompassing existing characters that have been borrowed to write other words. Qiu also acknowledges the existence of character classes that fall outside of these principles, such as pure signs.[12]
Semantographs[edit]
Pictographs [edit]
Approximately 600 characters are pictographs (
Over time, pictographs became progressively more stylized, with many losing their direct representational qualities—especially as the script evolved to the seal script form used during the Eastern Zhou, and then to Han-era clerical script. The table below demonstrates the evolution of several pictographs.
Oracle |
Seal | Clerical | Semi- |
Cursive | Regular | Pinyin | Gloss | |
---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|
Traditional | Simplified | |||||||
rì | 'Sun' | |||||||
yuè | 'Moon' | |||||||
shān | 'mountain' | |||||||
shuǐ | 'water' | |||||||
yǔ | 'rain' | |||||||
mù | 'wood' | |||||||
hé | 'rice plant' | |||||||
rén | 'person' | |||||||
nǚ | 'woman' | |||||||
mǔ | 'mother' | |||||||
mù | 'eye' | |||||||
niú | 'cow' | |||||||
yáng | 'goat' | |||||||
mǎ | 'horse' | |||||||
niǎo | 'bird' | |||||||
guī | 'turtle' | |||||||
lóng | 'dragon' | |||||||
fèng | 'phoenix' |
Indicatives [edit]
Indicatives (
Character | |||||||
---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|
Pinyin | yī | èr | sān | shàng | xià | běn | mò |
Gloss | 'one' | 'two' | 'three' | 'up' | 'below' | 'root'[b] | 'apex'[c] |
Compound ideographs [edit]
Compound ideographs (
武 ; 'military', formed from戈 ; 'dagger-axe' and止 ; 'foot'信 ; 'truthful', formed from人 ; 'person' (later reduced to 亻) and言 ; 'speech'
Other characters commonly explained as compound ideographs include:
林 ; lín; 'forest', composed of two trees[14]森 ; sēn; 'full of trees', composed of three trees[15]休 ; xiū; 'shade', 'rest', depicting a man by a tree[16]采 ; cǎi; 'harvest', depicting a hand on a bush (later written採 )[17]看 ; kàn; 'read', depicting a hand above an eye[18]- 莫; mù; 'sunset', depicting the sun disappearing into the grass, originally written as 茻; 'thick grass' enclosing
日 —later written暮 .[19]
Many characters formerly classed as compound ideographs are now believed to have been misidentified. For example, Xu's example
Peter A. Boodberg and William G. Boltz have argued that no ancient characters were compound ideographs. Boltz accounts for the remaining cases by suggesting that some characters could represent multiple unrelated words with different pronunciations, as in Sumerian cuneiform and Egyptian hieroglyphs, and the compound characters are actually phono-semantic compounds based on an alternative reading that has since been lost. For example, the character
While compound ideographs are a limited source of Chinese characters, they form many kokuji created in Japan to represent native words. Examples include:
働 hatara(ku) 'to work', formed from人 'person' and動 'move'峠 tōge 'mountain pass', formed from山 'mountain',上 'up' and下 'down'
As Japanese creations, such characters had no Chinese or Sino-Japanese readings, but a few have been assigned invented Sino-Japanese readings. For example, the common character
Loangraphs [edit]
The phenomenon of existing characters being adapted to write other words with similar pronunciations was necessary in the initial development of Chinese writing, and has continued throughout its history. Some loangraphs (
The process of characters being borrowed as loangraphs should not be conflated with the distinct process of semantic extension, where a word acquires additional senses, which often remain written with the same character. As both processes often result in a single character form being used to write several distinct meanings, loangraphs are often misidentified as being the result of semantic extension, and vice versa.[28]
As with Egyptian hieroglyphs and Sumerian cuneiform, early Chinese characters were used as rebuses to express abstract meanings that were not easily depicted. Thus, many characters represented more than one word. In some cases the extended use would take over completely, and a new character would be created for the original meaning, usually by modifying the original character with a determinative. For instance,
Loangraphs are also used to write words borrowed from other languages, such as the various Buddhist terminology introduced to China in antiquity, as well as contemporary non-Chinese words and names. For example, each character in the name
Loangraphs (
Character | Rebus | Original | New character |
---|---|---|---|
sì 'four' | sì 'nostrils' | 泗 | |
枼 | yè 'flat', 'thin' | yè 'leaf' | |
běi 'north' | bèi 'back (of the body)' | ||
yào 'to want' | yāo 'waist' | ||
shǎo 'few' | shā 'sand' | ||
yǒng 'forever' | yǒng 'swim' |
While the word jiajie has been used since the Han dynasty (202 BCE – 220 CE), the related term tongjia (
According to Bernhard Karlgren, "One of the most dangerous stumbling-blocks in the interpretation of pre-Han texts is the frequent occurrence of loan characters."[32]
Phonographs[edit]
Phono-semantic compounds[edit]
Phono-semantic compounds (
- a phonetic component via the rebus principle, with approximately the correct pronunciation.
- a semantic component, also called a determinative or signific', one of a limited number of characters that supplies an element of meaning. In most cases this is also the radical under which a character is listed in a dictionary.
As in ancient Egyptian writing, such compounds eliminated the ambiguity caused by phonetic loans. This process can be repeated, with a phono-semantic compound character itself being used as a phonetic in a further compound, which can result in quite complex characters, such as
As an example, a verb 'to wash oneself' is pronounced mù, which happens be homophonous with 'tree', which was written with the pictograph
Determinative | Rebus | Compound |
---|---|---|
氵; 'water' | 沐; mù; 'to wash oneself' | |
氵; 'water' | 淋; lín; 'to pour' |
However, the phonetic is not always as meaningless as this example would suggest. Rebuses were sometimes chosen that were compatible semantically as well as phonetically. It was also often the case that the determinative merely constrained the meaning of a word which already had several.
Determinative | Rebus | Compound |
---|---|---|
艹; 'plant' | ||
扌; 'hand' | ||
Sound change[edit]
Originally characters sharing the same phonetic had similar readings, though they have now diverged substantially. Linguists rely heavily on this fact to reconstruct the sounds of Old Chinese. Contemporary foreign pronunciations of characters are also used to reconstruct historical Chinese pronunciation, chiefly that of Middle Chinese.
When people try to read an unfamiliar compound, they will typically assume that it is constructed on phono-semantic principles and follow the rule of thumb to youbian dubian "read the side, if there is a side", and take one component to be the phonetic, which often results in errors. Since the sound changes that had taken place over the two to three thousand years since the Old Chinese period have been extensive, in some instances, the phono-semantic natures of some compound characters have been obliterated, with the phonetic component providing no useful phonetic information at all in the modern language. For instance, 逾 (yú; /y³⁵/; 'exceed'), 輸 (shū; /ʂu⁵⁵/; 'lose', 'donate'), 偷 (tōu; /tʰoʊ̯⁵⁵/; 'steal', 'get by') share the phonetic 俞 (yú; /y³⁵/; 'agree') but their pronunciations bear no resemblance to each other in Standard Chinese or any other variety. In Old Chinese, the phonetic has the reconstructed pronunciation *lo, while the phono-semantic compounds listed above have been reconstructed as *lo *l̥o and *l̥ˤo respectively.[33] Nonetheless, all characters containing 俞 are pronounced in Standard Chinese as various tonal variants of yu, shu, tou, and the closely related you and zhu.
Simplification[edit]
Since the phonetic elements of many characters no longer accurately represent their pronunciations, when the Chinese government simplified character forms, they often substituted phonetics that were simpler to write, but also more accurate to the modern Standard Chinese pronunciation.[citation needed] This has sometimes resulted in forms which are less phonetic than the original ones in varieties of Chinese other than Standard Chinese. For the example below, many determinatives have also been simplified, usually by standardizing existing cursive forms.
Determinative | Rebus | Compound | |
---|---|---|---|
Traditional | ⾦ 'GOLD' | ||
Simplified | 钅 'GOLD' | 钟; zhōng |
Signs[edit]
Some characters and components are pure signs, whose meaning merely derives from their having a fixed and distinct form. Basic examples of pure signs are found with the numerals beyond four, e.g.
Traditional Shuowen Jiezi classification [edit]
The Shuowen Jiezi is a Chinese dictionary compiled c. 100 CE by Xu Shen. It divided characters into six categories (
While the traditional classification is still taught, it is no longer the focus of modern lexicography. Xu's categories are neither rigorously defined nor mutually exclusive: four refer to the structural composition of characters, while the other two refer to usage. Modern scholars tend to view Xu's categories as principles of character formation, rather than a proper classification.
The earliest extant corpus of Chinese characters are in the form of oracle bone script, attested from c. 1250 BCE at the site of Yin, the capital of the Shang dynasty during the Late Shang period (c. 1250 – c. 1050 BCE). They primarily take the form of short inscriptions on the turtle shells and the shoulder blades of oxen, which were used in an official form of divination known as scapulimancy. Oracle bone script is the direct ancestor of modern written Chinese, and is already a mature writing system in its earliest attestation. Roughly one-quarter of oracle bone script characters are pictographs, with rest either being phono-semantic compounds or compound ideographs. Despite millennia of change in shape, usage, and meaning, a few of these characters remain recognizable to modern Chinese readers.
Over 90% of the characters used in modern written vernacular Chinese are phono-semantic compounds. However, as both meaning and pronunciation in the language have shifted over time, many of these components no longer serve their original purpose. A lack of knowledge as to the specific histories of these components often leads to folk and false etymologies. Knowledge of the earliest forms of characters, including Shang-era oracle bone script and the Zhou-era bronze scripts, is often necessary for reconstructing their historical etymologies. Reconstructing the phonology of Middle and Old Chinese from clues present in characters is a field of historical linguistics. In Chinese, historical Chinese phonology is called yinyunxue (
Derivative cognates[edit]
Derivative cognates (转注;
Comparison to other systems[edit]
See also[edit]
- Chinese calligraphy
- Stroke order
- Ateji – Characters used as phonographs in Japanese
- Man'yōgana – Characters used as syllabograms in Japanese
- Transcription into Chinese characters
- Phonetic series (Chinese characters)
Notes[edit]
- ^ According to Handel: "While monosyllabism generally trumps morphemicity—that is to say, a bisyllabic morpheme is nearly always written with two characters rather than one—there is an unmistakable tendency for script users to impose a morphemic identity on the linguistic units represented by these characters."[4]
- ^ A tree (
木 ) with the base highlighted by an extra stroke. - ^ A tree (
木 ) with the top highlighted by an extra stroke.
References[edit]
Citations[edit]
- ^ Hansen 1993.
- ^ Qiu 2000, p. 1; Handel 2019, pp. 4–5.
- ^ Qiu 2000, pp. 22–26; Norman 1988, p. 74.
- ^ Handel 2019, p. 33.
- ^ Qiu 2000, pp. 13–15; Coulmas 1991, pp. 104–109.
- ^ Li 2020, pp. 56–57; Boltz 1994, pp. 3–4.
- ^ Handel 2019, p. 51; Yong & Peng 2008, pp. 95–98.
- ^ Qiu 2000, pp. 19, 162–168.
- ^ Qiu 2000, pp. 14–18.
- ^ Yin 2007, pp. 97–100; Su 2014, pp. 102–111.
- ^ Yang 2008, pp. 147–148.
- ^ Qiu 2000, pp. 163–171.
- ^ a b Wilkinson 2013, p. 35.
- ^ Qiu 2000, pp. 54, 198.
- ^ Qiu 2000, p. 198.
- ^ Qiu 2000, pp. 209–211.
- ^ Qiu 2000, pp. 188, 226, 255.
- ^
- Shuowen Jiezi, 睎也。从手
下目 。 - Shuowen Jiezi Zhu,
宋 玉 所謂 揚 袂 障 日 而望所思 也。此會意 。
- Shuowen Jiezi, 睎也。从手
- ^
- Shuowen Jiezi,
日 且冥也。从日在 茻中。 - Duan claims that this character is also phono-semantic, with 茻 mǎng as the phonetic: Shuowen Jiezi Zhu, 从日
在 茻中。會意 。茻亦聲 。
- Shuowen Jiezi,
- ^ a b Sampson & Chen 2013, p. 261.
- ^ Qiu 2000, p. 155.
- ^ Sampson & Chen 2013, p. 264.
- ^ Boltz 1994, pp. 106–110.
- ^ Sampson & Chen 2013, pp. 266–267.
- ^ Button 2010.
- ^ Seeley 1991, p. 203.
- ^ Qiu 2000, pp. 261–265.
- ^ Qiu 2000, pp. 273–274, 302.
- ^ Taylor & Taylor 2014, pp. 30–32.
- ^ Ramsey 1987, p. 60.
- ^ Gnanadesikan, Amalia E. (2011). The Writing Revolution: Cuneiform to the Internet. Wiley. p. 61. ISBN 978-1-444-35985-5 – via Google Books.
- ^ Karlgren 1968, p. 1.
- ^ Baxter & Sagart 2014.
- ^ Qiu 2000, p. 168; Norman 1988, p. 60.
- ^ Norman 1988, p. 69.
- ^ Baxter 1992, pp. 771, 772.
- ^ Sampson & Chen 2013, pp. 260–261.
Works cited[edit]
- Baxter, William H. (1992), A Handbook of Old Chinese Phonology, Berlin: Mouton de Gruyter, ISBN 978-3-110-12324-1
- ———; Sagart, Laurent (2014), Old Chinese: A New Reconstruction, Oxford University Press, ISBN 978-0-199-94537-5
- Boltz, William G. (1994), The Origin and Early Development of the Chinese Writing System, New Haven, CT: American Oriental Society, ISBN 978-0-940-49078-9
- Button, Christopher (2010), Phonetic Ambiguity in the Chinese Script: A Palaeographical and Phonological Analysis, Munich: Lincom Europa, ISBN 978-3-895-86632-6
- Coulmas, Florian (1991), The Writing Systems of the World, Blackwell, ISBN 978-0-631-18028-9
- DeFrancis, John (1984), The Chinese Language: Fact and Fantasy, Honolulu: University of Hawaiʻi Press, ISBN 978-0-824-81068-9
- ——— (1989), Visible Speech: The Diverse Oneness of Writing Systems, Honolulu: University of Hawaiʻi Press, ISBN 978-0-824-81207-2
- Handel, Zev (2019), Sinography: The Borrowing and Adaptation of the Chinese Script, Language, Writing and Literary Culture in the Sinographic Cosmopolis, vol. 1, Brill, ISBN 978-9-004-35222-3, S2CID 189494805
- Hansen, Chad (1993), "Chinese Ideographs and Western Ideas", The Journal of Asian Studies, vol. 52, no. 2, pp. 373–399, doi:10.2307/2059652, JSTOR 2059652, S2CID 162431686
- Karlgren, Bernhard (1968), Loan Characters in Pre-Han Texts, Stockholm: Museum of Far Eastern Antiquities
- Li, Yu (2020), The Chinese Writing System in Asia: An Interdisciplinary Perspective, Routledge, ISBN 978-1-138-90731-7
- Norman, Jerry (1988), Chinese, Cambridge University Press, ISBN 978-0-521-29653-3
- Qiu Xigui (裘锡
圭 ) (2000) [1988], Chinese Writing, translated by Mattos, Gilbert L.; Norman, Jerry, Berkeley: Society for the Study of Early China and The Institute of East Asian Studies, University of California, ISBN 978-1-557-29071-7 - Ramsey, S. Robert (1987), The Languages of China, Princeton University Press, ISBN 978-0-691-01468-5
- Sampson, Geoffrey; Chen, Zhiqun (2013), "The Reality of Compound Ideographs", Journal of Chinese Linguistics, vol. 41, no. 2, pp. 255–272, JSTOR 23754815
- Seeley, Christopher (1991), A History of Writing in Japan, Brill, ISBN 978-9-004-09081-1
- Su Peicheng (苏培
成 ) (2014), 现代汉字学 纲要 [Essentials of Modern Chinese Characters] (in Chinese) (3rd ed.), Beijing: The Commercial Press, ISBN 978-7-100-10440-1 - Taylor, Insup; Taylor, M. Martin (2014) [1995], Writing and Literacy in Chinese, Korean, and Japanese, Studies in Written Language and Literacy, vol. 14 (Rev. ed.), John Benjamins, ISBN 978-9-027-21794-3
- Tranter, Nicolas (2009), "Graphic Loans: East Asia and Beyond", WORD, 60 (1): 1–37, doi:10.1080/00437956.2009.11432591, ISSN 0043-7956
- Wang Hongyuan (
王 宏 源 ) (1993), The Origins of Chinese characters, Beijing: Sinolingua, ISBN 978-7-800-52243-7 - Wilkinson, Endymion (2013), Chinese History: A New Manual, Harvard-Yenching Institute Monograph Series, Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Asia Center, ISBN 978-0-674-06715-8
- Woon Wee Lee (
雲 惟 利 ) (1987),漢字 的 原始 和 演 變 [Chinese Writing: Its Origin and Evolution] (in Chinese), University of Macau - Yang Runlu (杨润陆) (2008), 现代汉字
学 [Modern Chinese Characters] (in Chinese), Beijing Normal University Press, ISBN 978-7-303-09437-0 - Yin Jiming (
殷 寄 明 ); et al. (2007), 现代汉语文字 学 [Modern Chinese Writing] (in Chinese), Shanghai: Fudan University Press, ISBN 978-7-309-05525-2 - Yong, Heming; Peng, Jing (2008), Chinese Lexicography: A History from 1046 BC to AD 1911, Oxford University Press, ISBN 978-0-191-56167-2
Dictionaries[edit]
- Xu Shen (
許 慎 ) (c. 100), Shuowen Jiezi說 文 解 字 (in Literary Chinese) – via Chinese Text Project - Duan Yucai (
段 玉 裁 ) (1815), Shuowen Jiezi Zhu說 文 解 字 注 (in Literary Chinese) – via Chinese Text Project