Loss of tǐng

Today we are going to look at . Surprisingly this character is not included in most fonts, so don't be alarmed if you cannot see it on your computer. I will be using an image instead of the actual character to avoid any problems.


is pronounced tǐng. It is made up 丿(piě) and 土(tǔ, earth). Originally, this character was made from 人(rén, man, human) and 土(tǔ, earth) as you can see below.
(人) + (土) = ()


So why are we talking about this character? Well, it usually serves as a phonetic component for characters. However, since most people no longer recognize it, they now see it as 壬(rén) or 王(wáng,wàng), which is incorrect. Let's look at a few characters where is used.



Be sure not to write these with 王 or 壬, the differences are very slight, but they are nonetheless there.


Here are the same 4 characters in 小篆.


They were even harder to spot the differences back in the day.


Here is the rule as stated by the Taiwan Ministry of Education（台灣教育部）



※CNS11643 shows several pronunciations, however I believe they are all based on similar-looking characters, e.g., 正(zhēng)、壬(rén)、王(wáng,wàng)、and 玉(yù).

髒＆臟→脏

Next on our list is a pair of characters that were merged into one in the simplification process.



髒(zāng, dirty) is a 形聲 made up of the semantic 骨(gǔ, bone) and the phonetic 葬(zàng). It's pretty straight forward...an association of filth with bones. As an extra bonus, 葬 means to inter or bury the dead, so it has association with the meaning of 髒.


Next is 臟.



臟(zàng, organ) is also a 形聲 made up of the semantic 肉(ròu, meat) on the left and the phonetic 藏(cáng, zàng) on the right. Again, pretty self-explanatory. The meat radical is very often used with parts of the body.


On to the simplification of these two beautiful characters.



So here we have 脏. It's semantic component is 月, which can either be 月(yuè, moon) or 肉(ròu, meat). You can find more about this simplification in my previous post here.
It's phonetic component is 庄(zhuāng) which is the simplification (or variant) of 莊(zhuāng).

So while the semantic part of this character is arguably accurate, (you still have to guess whether it is moon or meat), the phonetic part is less accurate than its traditional counterparts. What's more, we have even more confusion since 脏 has 2 pronunciations and 2 meanings.

I don't want dirty organs :(

聖→圣

Today's character is 聖 which means "holy, sacred, saint, sage". It is a 形聲 so let's break it down. (It can also be considered a 會意)



So we have 耳 along with 呈. It's meaning is interpreted either as a 形聲 or a 會意.

形聲：The semantic component is 耳(ěr, ear) and the phonetic one is 呈(chéng)
會意："the person who speaks 呈 into the ear 耳 - sage".


So how did they decide to simplify this one? Take a look.



So what's wrong with this? The character already exists. 圣(kū) is a 會意, "to till the ground 土 with the hand 又 - till".


So isn't it nice that what once was holy is now just scattered dirt? That's some nice imagery.

Anyone can comment now!

Hey guys, I just realized that I could allow anyone to leave comments on my posts, so go nuts now. You don't need an account to do so anymore. I hope to get a lot of comments from now on :D

發＆髮→发

So it's been a while since my last post. I've been thinking I should start doing 1 character per post, that way they are easier to read and they come more frequently.

So let's start with the character 发.

What is it? Well, it's two characters merged into one. In Traditional Chinese those two characters are 發 and 髮, and they both have two completely different meanings.

I have found two different etymologies for the character 發, they both make sense to me, so I'll post them both.



1. 發(fā) is made up of the semantic 弓(gōng, bow) and the phonetic 癹(pō/bá). It has the meaning of "to send out", which you could do with a bow. The 說文解字 uses this etymology.



2. 發(fā) is a 會意 made up of 癶(bō, footprints)弓(gōng, bow)殳(shū, action with the hand). Therefore, its meaning could be seen as "the action of 殳 on a bow 弓 to make the arrow go forward 癶 - shoot".

Whichever origin you believe to be true, both work. Either way, both methods (形聲 and 會意) are normal ways of creating characters.


As for the second character, 髮, it goes a little something like this.


On top we have the semantic 髟(biāo, hair) and on the bottom the phonetic 犮(bá). Thus, we have the character for "hair", 髮(fà[PRC]/fǎ[TW]).

So the simplification for these two characters is the same. 頭髮 and 發音 become 头发 and 发音 respectively. 发 is apparently based on the 草書(grass script) of both characters. It is a new character with no semantic or phonetic components. It does reduce the number of strokes but it doesn't really simply things. What's more, it looks a lot like 犮 and 友.

2 pronunciations, 2 meanings, 1 character, lots of confusion 囧

Confusion in Simplification

In this post I would like to show some characters that are a bit hard to distinguish when in the simplified script.






If you glance at these, they could be easily confused. Here they are in the traditional script.







There are more strokes, but they are much more easily distinguished.
※斗 is also a character in traditional characters, but I didn't include it for aesthetics' sake. In simplified, both 鬥 and 斗 were merged into one character, 斗.

Here are a few more examples that I have found.



With only a difference of one small stroke, I get these two mixed up a lot at first glance.




Very easy to differentiate :)




The middle character here seems like it's a mixture of the two other characters. All 3 can often be confused for one another.

There's more of a distinction now. 冘 and 衣 are more separate and distinguishable, but can still cause problems.





Again, the two phonetic compounds can be easily confused in simplified.



No problem here, the two are very different.






Veeery easy to confuse the two. I always read this one as bed.



Ahhh, very good. A very beautiful character and yet again, no problem whatsoever reading these two characters.




Now this next one is a bit different. I'm going to start with the traditional script this time.

Here we have 4 different characters, 4 different meanings...

O_O What the....? Why? In the simplified script these 4 characters have been reduced to one character.


To add to this confusion, the character 幹 means "to fuck" in Mainland China. Now all of these characters are accomplices to this negative meaning.

Why Chinese is easy

This post may be removed. It is very poorly writtten (I did it at 4 A.M.). Don't take everything in it was 100% correct and please mind any grammatical errors.

Chinese is easy. It is! Not just Mandarin, but most versions of Sinitic languages are easy. How is this, you ask? Well, just think about it this way.

In English we have prefixes and suffixes. We all know that "aqua" and "hydro" (depending on which origin you choose) both mean "water". So when we see a word that begins with one of these prefixes, we know it has something to do with water. Imagine the English language where all words are made up of prefixes and suffixes.

Let's imagine this for a moment. Let's take the word "simple" as an example. Imagine that for it's antonym, instead of using the word "difficult" we simply used the prefix "un" or "non" plus the word "simple", "unsimple" or "nonsimple". That's one less word that we have to memorize. This is essentially how Mandarin and other Sinitic (Chinese) languages work. Because they are based on a written language, simplicity is one of the key features in the language's grammar and syntax.

Just as English has prefixes, Chinese has semantic components and characters. The prefix "aqua" in English would most likely be represented by the semantic component 氵 or the character 水. Almost every character that you see with the component 氵 in it is going to have a connection with water or a liquid of some type.

Not only does Chinese have this unique feature to its written language, it is extremely logical. The word for "air conditioning" is 冷氣 or "cold air". And "air conditioner" is 冷氣機 or "cold air machine".

But wait, there's more! Chinese used to be 100% phonetic※ That's right, all phonetic. While there are today 214 main radicals (with some variants), there is another set of components used for pronunciation purposes. For example, the character 皇(huáng) is itself a character, however it is often used along with a semantic component to create a new character with a new meaning, but that is still pronounced huáng.
E.g. 徨、惶、蝗、煌、凰、etc.

While this is how the language was in the beginning, it is no longer 100% phonetic, rather it is now approximate. So while it may not be perfect, you can usually guess a words meaning or have a good idea what it is about, as well as know how to pronounce it a good part of the time.

So for those who think Mandarin or any Sinitic language is difficult, think again. The grammar is very simple and logical, and in many cases it is extremely similar to English grammar.

For those who think that the character system is too hard or has no reason to exist, think about this. When you write "air conditioning" you are writing a lot of letters. Let's break it down into "strokes". I count 27 "strokes" when I write the words "air conditioning". What's more, if you don't know what one word means, you don't know what the entire thing means. Now 冷氣(lěng qì) has 17 strokes total (11 in simplified Chinese) and gives us hints. The first character has the semantic component 冫(bīng) which means "ice", so it tells us that the character has something to do with either "ice" or something cold. The second character has the semantic component 气, which means "air" or "steam" and let's us know that the character has something to do with air.

So don't let this beautiful language scare you away, come join us and learn more about the rich and beautiful culture that is behind the Chinese languages, both written and spoken.

※ There are a number of characters that are not phono-semantic compounds. Read my post on different character types here.

Chinese in Japanese

Most of you know that Japanese uses "kanji" and that it has another writing system that is its own. There are 3 scripts in Japanese: hiragana, katakana, and kanji(漢字). The first two scripts are known collectively as kana and were both derived from Chinese characters. Kanji on the other hand, is a bit different.

Kanji IS hanzi, that is to say, 漢字 is 漢字. However, the Japanese borrowed the symbols throughout different time periods, thus they are not all the same.

MOST of the kanji in Japanese are the exact same as traditional Chinese characters. If you know traditional characters, you can read a good amount of Japanese and/or can understand the gist of any conversation. Having some basic knowledge of the Japanese language can greatly increase what you understand, without even having to learn the language.

There are, however, some characters that are the same as simplified Chinese characters, such as 会（會）. There are even characters that the Japanese government simplified themselves, leaving us with a THIRD version of any said character. Let's take a look at a few examples.

樂(TC),楽(J),乐(SC)
龍(TC),竜(J),龙(SC)
關(TC),関(J),关(SC)

You can find a more extensive list here.

In addition, there are characters that were invented by the Japanese but do not exist in Chinese, such as 畑(hatake, a field of crops).

In conclusion, you will see a LOT of two-character compounds that are the same in Chinese and Japanese, so whenever people are having conversations in Japanese chatrooms, you won't be dumbfounded like the weeaboos around you. Unless you don't know any traditional characters....then you'll be with the weeaboos :/

Reasons for not posting

Hey all. So I haven't been posting recently for several reasons. Firstly, I got a new netbook, so I no longer have to mooch off of my roommate's. Secondly, I decided to make the switch to Ubuntu (Linux) and have left Windows to all of you guys. I have been enjoying it immensely and couldn't be happier with it. Lastly, I have just started school up again, so my free time is somewhat limited now.

Recently I have been working on finding a good way to be able to continue playing Final Fantasy VII in Chinese on Ubuntu, and after a while of searching around, I found a suitable method and here are the results.

Click on it to see the full size.

So yeah, I can continue to play it and not have to reboot into Windows to do so. I think I may be trying to start posting again. I need to find some subjects to talk about though.

If any of you have any ideas or have anything you want me to go over, leave a comment or contact me.

See you soon.

Eat my what now?!?

Another funny anecdote! Here is another sentence that my Taiwanese friend told me about.

「我下麵給你吃」

So this means, "I'm going to cook some noodles for you (to eat)." Nothing wrong with this sentence. 下麵 literally means "down noodles" and refers to the action of putting noodles into a pot to boil them. A synonym could be 煮麵.

Now if we look at this same sentence written in simplified characters, it becomes...

“我下面给你吃”

In the simplified script, 麵 was simplified to 面 which already exists and means "face; side; surface". 下面 actually means "below; under; next; the following".

So what does this mean for us? Merging two characters into one has consequences. Let's look.

「我下面給你吃」means "I'll give you my lower side to eat." or basically, "I'm giving you my cock to eat." Very elegant, wouldn't you agree?

So in the simplified script the sentence can be rather ambiguous when written, you've been warned!

Should I learn Simplified or Traditional?

I found this post on the blog of a Chinese woman. It is very well written and I think you should all read it.

Xiaoning's Blog

Another good site I saw was Chinacopia. Here is what they had to say about the two scripts.

Chinacopia

I'll let the two sites speak for themselves.

Radish = Dream divination?

I recently had a conversation with a friend about this absurd simplification.

The word radish in Mandarin is 蘿蔔(luó bo). It is a disyllabic word like "butterfly" 蝴蝶 or "camel" 駱駝. Just like any of these words, its characters contain a semantic component, which gives us a hint as to its meaning, and a phonetic component. In this case we have 羅(luó) and 匐(fú). The pronunciation of 蔔 has changed over time and is no longer very phonetic with regards to its phonetic component. Nonetheless, this is the word "radish".

Now in the simplification process, 羅 was simplified to 罗, thus 蘿 became 萝. The character for "dream", 夢(梦 in simplified), looks very similar to this character. The only difference is the addition of a 冖.(※1)

卜(bǔ) is a character that already exists and means "to practise divination; to foretell; to predict". 蔔 was completely replaced by a character that already exists and means something completely different! Now because of this simplification, 卜 has two different sets of meanings. On top of that, 卜 is not a lot more phonetically accurate than 匐.

Anyways, a Taiwanese friend of mine told me that when she saw 萝卜 written while chatting with some Chinese people she completely misunderstood what the person had written.

Very subtle, huh?

So the next time you see 萝卜, it's not dream divination, it's radish!

Notes:
※1 A lot of fonts display 夢 with the grass radical 艹, however, this is incorrect. You can see here and here the 說文解字 versions(小篆) of both 草 and 夢. What is on top of 夢 is actually this grapheme, which is a pictograph of sheep horns. Here are the correct versions of them in the traditional script.

Hey! That's not radish!

More inconsistencies in simplification pt.7

7. 詹


Obviously the Chinese government did not have a problem with this component. There are enough characters to prove it.



If they had changed all of the phonetic components 詹 to 旦 then I would have no problem, but no, they could not. You cannot change 儋 to 但 because it already exists.

A traditional learn can go from from 擔 to 担 much more easily than a simplified learner can go from 担 to 擔.

Changing character components has consequences. It changes the spoken language(with time), it changes the Chinese culture, it removes something that the people of China have been living with for millennia.

Just because the Chinese government simplified some characters and a good portion of Chinese speakers in the world use them does not mean that you have to. You can easily understand simplified characters if you learn traditional ones. You will understand why and how words came to be. You will have a better understanding of the Chinese language than most Chinese people do.

More inconsistencies in simplification pt.6

6. 瞿


Everything looks fine here, no problems that I can see. But wait...there is one simplification...



Why change a phonetic component that is already phonetic when all of the other characters that use it have not been changed?

More inconsistencies in simplification pt.5

5. 韱


It takes a few seconds to write, but I find 韱 very beautiful as a character. Apparently the Chinese government didn't have a problem with it either. Or...did they?



Ack! They did it again!! Why?!? Now we have 佥 in the first character used to replace 韱, but 佥 is the simplification of 僉. How did this happen? There are two characters in the traditional script, 簽 and 籤, that were both simplified to 签. Great...now 签 holds two different meanings.

The last two character have had their 韱s replaced by 千. Again, we need some consistency. Right now we have 3 different ways to write this phonetic component in the simplified.

韱佥千 in simplified.
韱 in traditional.

The simplified script seems to be getting less and less simple with further study.

More inconsistencies in simplification pt.4

4. 襄


襄 itself is pronounced xiāng. When used as a phonetic component characters are usually pronounced rang, xiang, niang, nang(in descending order of frequency)."Rang" is the most common pronunciation, usually in the 3rd or 2nd tone.



The first pair of characters, 孃 and 娘, are actually variants of each other. We will not count them, I have only added them because in simplified characters they are both 娘.

釀 and 讓 have completely different simplifications. One uses 良 and the other 上.

If all of the characters had used one of these simplifications I would have less of a problem with the simplification process. They have created more differences than similarities. A written language needs to be easy to remember, otherwise it will ultimately fail. The Chinese writing system is one of the world's oldest active, continuously used writing systems. Why change it now?

More inconsistencies in simplification pt.3

3. 韋


Here we have 韋 and 衛 in 4 characters that have not been simplified.



Here is where things become uneven. The normal simplification for 韋 is 韦. I would have no problem with that...if it were consistent. So most characters containing 韋 have had it simplified to 韦, makes sense. However, look at 衛. A new generic character has been created. 卫 is nothing more than a symbol. It gives no phonetic or semantic hint to help us read or understand it.

It is only has three strokes so it is much quicker to write and I don't find it hard at all to remember. However, it does not follow the same rules as the rest of the 韋 simplifications and as we saw in the first image, some of them were not even simplified! These are not super rare characters that I pulled out of some ancient book, they are characters that are used. I even have a friend who has 暐 in his name.

韋暐衛
韦暐卫 Which do you find easier?

More inconsistencies in simplification pt.2

This is part 2 of my "More inconsistencies in simplification" post. Again, I did not show all characters that have been affected.

2. 蜀/屬


Here, all of the characters are identical except for the final two, whose radicals have been simplified. I have included a few characters with 屬 since the pronunciation of both components is the same. 屬 is actually made up of 尾 and 蜀. Let's move onto the next image.



So we have a simplification for 屬, which is 属, and one for 蜀, which is 虫.

属 is a generic character that was created to reduce stroke count. Due to this simplification, the semantic and phonetic components have been lost and we are now stuck with a completely new character that we must memorize without any aid.

虫(huǐ/chóng) is a character that already exist. By removing the 罒 and 勹(which was a pictograph of a larva), you are left with only 虫, which also means larva. The pronunciation is now different and no longer aids as a phonetic component.

So again we have an inconsistency in the simplification. Only a handful of the more common characters were simplified to reduce the number of strokes. The phonetic components in these 形聲 have been reduced to nothing more than symbols. Does it really simplify things? I do not believe so.

More inconsistencies in simplification pt.1

So I enjoyed doing the post on 巤 so much that I'm going to do another one with more examples. Seeing as this post turned out to be rather long, I am going to be breaking it up into seven parts. Each post will contain one of the seven phonetic components that I will be going over; they are 言蜀韋襄韱瞿詹.

I will be showing two sets of characters for each component. The first image will show characters whose traditional (on top) and simplified (on bottom) versions' component are exactly the same. The second image will consist of characters whose components have been changed in simplified or characters that have been completely changed. Click on the images to view the enlarged versions. Let's get started.

1. 言


All of these characters, save for the last two, are exactly the same in both scripts.(※1)(see bottom of post) The second to last character has had 龍 simplified to 龙 but has left 言 unaltered. The last character in this series is rather interesting; it has its radical simplified to 讠 yet it contains another 言 that has not been simplified. How confusing...

So wait, why have we only seen one simplification so far? I thought China simplified the 言 radical? Well, it was simplified, but not everywhere. Take a look at the next image.



So here you see some of the other changes that 言 goes through. Normally 言 is simplified to 讠. However, you can see here that many different changes are occurring.

Let's look at these 3 characters back to back: 狺獄嶽, with each character a component is added(※2). Consistency. The simplified versions: 狺狱岳, one unsimplified 言, one simplified one, and then a completely new character to reduce the number of strokes.

Next look at 諸儲櫧藷蠩. Again we have consistency. In simplified we have 诸储槠藷蠩(※3), the first 3 have simplified 讠s, and the last 2 do not. Why?

The 言 in the character 這 has been replaced with 文 for no reason other than the reduction of strokes.

Lastly, we can see in the second to last character that 言 has been part of a unique simplification based on the shape of the character.

All of this can be rather difficult to remember. When do I simplify? When don't I? The simplification process created many problems such as these. I have only included characters and examples that I was able to think of in the past few days. 言 may have 7 strokes, but it is easy to remember and even to write quickly.


Notes:
※1 The grass component 艸 and the top part of 雚 are written different in both scripts. Click here and here to see examples.

※2 獄 is a 會意(the place where dogs 犭犬 yell 言 at each other = jail).

※3 藷 is not really used anymore, 薯 has taken its place.