[Banthum]

It's actually a myth that most Chinese characters have a semantic component (indicating meaning).

And the phonetic component often doesn't correspond to anything any modern person would know.

The problem in both cases is the shift of language through China's long history, and its divergence from the original design of the written characters.

The problem with the semantic components is that the meaning is re-used and stretched over and over. E.g. they used to use a 'foot' radical to represent a journey towards a destination. Later that shifted to mean "in a straight line, not veering left or right". Later that took on the meaning of "straight and narrow" or "straight shooter" or "not-deviant". Then it becomes, "not deviating from the right path". So now, the old foot radical typically means "justice" or "correct".

And the image shifts over time. This is the old foot radical now: 正 Does it look like a foot to you?

The problem is with the phonetics is language shifts. In many cases, in ancient Chinese, the characters do have a phonetic component that hints at pronunciation. but, the pronunciation changed over the last 2000-3000 years, so the pronunciation hint that made perfect sense in the Han dynasty is now meaningless because you're speaking a different language.

The result is that in the end the characters end up being arbitrary phonetic symbols with some arbitrary meanings attached.

[T-R]

Practically speaking, things are more nuanced than the article would imply, though - they're not 3000 completely unique characters, and at least for a lot of nouns, the radicals do serve to broadly categorize things as, e.g. "related to water", which can serve as a reading aid similar to how root words do. The author further claims "With a phonetic writing system like an alphabet or a syllabary, you need only learn a few dozen symbols and you can read most everything printed in a newspaper.", but that's only accurate insofar as reading means "pronouncing"; it's a tradeoff with being able to infer meaning.

[guardiangod]

>It's actually a myth that most Chinese characters have a semantic component (indicating meaning).

That's because most people only know about the 2000 Chinese characters used in everyday situations, so they have this misunderstanding; Others who don't know Chinese heard this and keep on parroting it. If you know more about the language (post-seconadary level), you would know Chinese relies heavily on semantic component.

Here is an example characters I saw in Stanley, Hong Kong a few days ago (as part of a 2 lines poem.)

巍峩 vs the normal form 魏我

Normally the character 魏 means "Tower on an emperor's building" and 我 means "I". By adding the component 山 ("Mountain") to the characters, the words 巍峩 now carries a connotation of epicness one associate with mountain range. ie. "The building and I, as impressive as a mountain range."

[mistercow]

I'm a little confused by your comment. Are you saying that Chinese writing relies on a semantic component, but that this component is indecipherable to the vast majority of readers of Chinese? That does not sound very useful, especially when it comes to literacy.

[guardiangod]

>Are you saying that Chinese writing relies on a semantic component

I am saying _advance_ Chinese writing has a significant semantic component, but most speakers are not knowledgeable enough to realize it.

>That does not sound very useful, especially when it comes to literacy.

Most people can speak English; You probably need an advance English degree to understand all the puns/word plays in Shakespeare's works (or use Cole's Notes.)

The flexible of a language's intricate details has no direct relationship with the literacy of its speakers(or how easy to become proficient at an language to the point where one can communicate compound ideas with it.)

Back to how useful all these are- not really if you stick with the basic. They are as useful as Shakespeare's or Wordsworth's works in the modern world. You could speak/communicate perfectly fine in English even if you are not able to understand advance details of English literature, especially the vocab side.

[blacksmith_tb]

Yes and no, usually it's enough to allow for broadly guessing at meanings[1]. Contrast that with the Roman alphabet - I am a native speaker of English, and if you hand me a book written in German, I can sound it out (to some extent), but without knowing what it means. Reading written Chinese, you may be able to guess at what a line means, but without any chance of sounding it out! (Disclaimer, I studied one year of college-level Mandarin, so I would have a slight chance, at least...). Of course, it's interesting also to think about the impact computing and smartphones are having on written Chinese, stroke order of characters, for example was less important when using a keyboard for input, but if you're drawing on a touchscreen, it comes back into play.

1: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Radical_(Chinese_characters)#S...

[gurkendoktor]

> I am a native speaker of English, and if you hand me a book written in German, I can sound it out (to some extent), but without knowing what it means.

That works well because English and German are very similar. If China moved from characters to Pinyin, someone who doesn't know Chinese could sound it out, but it would be mostly unintelligible (wrong initials, no tones).

[panabee]

Thanks for sharing this contrarian perspective that most Chinese characters lack a genuine semantic component.

I don't know if the data supports this or not, but it's an interesting thought.

Regarding the example of 正, Wikipedia suggests the foot radical is actually 足/⻊(radical 157) [0].

It suggests 正 is not a radical but rather derives from radical 77, "stop (止)."

When you add the top line to form 正, the image meaning becomes "stop in the middle," which seems reasonably aligned with the meaning of "right/justice/normal."

Not sure who's right: Wikipedia or you, so please clarify if Wikipedia is wrong. Thanks!

[0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Kangxi_radical

[dnautics]

it's hard to quantify as most? (i don't even know maybe 1000 or so characters) but a lot of them do have semantic component. Sometimes it's a bit obfuscated because simplification (either the pinyin instituted by the PRC or other simplifications, like jyoyo instituted by the japanese in the 19th? century) destroyed semantic meaning by fusing roots, or totally deprecating characters and replacing with unrelated characters that sound the same.

[panabee]

exactly, so not sure whether the original assertion (i.e., most characters lack semantic meaning) is correct, but it's an interesting thought to consider.

someone could prove/disprove this by analyzing the 3000 most common chars and indicating what percentage contain a semantic component (even if obfuscated).

do you know if wikipedia or the parent is correct about 正 as the radical for foot?

[nonabelion]

Wikipedia is correct. Radicals do carry a lot of semantic meanings. I think the most apparent examples are the names for chemical elements. For example, the radical 气 means gas. Hellium in Chinese is 氦，hydrogen is 氢. So look at the character you immediately know the natural state of the element. Moreover, even if you don't know a character, if you see it has the radical, you can guess what that is related.

[jwong_]

It's a myth insomuch that it doesn't apply 100% to all characters.

It works well enough to guess the pronunciation of a character you've never seen. Or maybe a word you know how to say but don't know how to write.

[truthexposer]

You're speaking out of your behind. Of course the signs are arbitrary with respect to their signifiers, that's any language, but there are still mappings between signs and their signifiers. English is no difference, am I supposed to know what a 'm' sounds like by looking at it? Look up the Rebus principle, it happens in every language.

And with respect to the phonetic shifts, from a linguistic perspective, most changes of the phonetic radical involve one change of the initial sound, i.e. bilabial to interdental, dental to alveolar, voiced to unvoiced. With respect to the phonetic inventory of the language, these shifts are only one feature shifts within an old SPE framework. These small featural differences, whether conscious or not, (usually unconscious because we acquire languages during our infancy) are picked up and used by the speaker of the language to categorize words.

[grzm]

You're speaking out of your behind.

Your detailed and substantive comment works just as well without this uncivil lead-in.

[truthexposer]

it's a much easier way to say, I significantly doubt your credentials as a person educated in both Mandarin Chinese and linguistics

[grzm]

HN strongly values substantive and civil discourse. If that requires a little more work on your part, please engage in it to help make HN a productive forum where discussions like this can take place. (That said, I don't see it necessary for the longer version either.)

[faitswulff]

I agree. I can only recognize on the order of 1,000 characters or so, but it is still obviously not a myth that characters have semantic and phonetic components. I have no idea what the grandparent commenter is talking about.