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.