also as a little mini-explainer, since this is a major misconception about Chinese: the writing system actually encodes quite a bit of information about pronunciation! just, like, pronunciation 2000 years ago, which may or may not align with how it's pronounced now in any daughter language.
Chinese characters can be broadly broken down into:
- A straight-up picture of what the word indicates, albeit after thousands of years of simplification and regularization to make it easy to write quickly. 人 “person" ; 女 "woman"; 子 "child"; 口 "mouth"
- A semantic compound: 女 woman + 子 child = 好 “good, desirable"; 田 field + 力 plow->strength = 男 "man"; 日 sun (this was a circle before regularization) + 月 moon (this was a crescent) = 明 "bright". The spoken words indicated by the characters are NOT compounds in this way, only the visual symbol for them. (A spoken compound will be represented by multiple characters.)
- Occasionally, a very abstract word was represented by something non-abstract which had a similar pronunciation. This led to an obvious ambiguity problem, which led to adding extra details to the pictogram when the literal thingie was meant to indicate "no, I mean the literal thingie." For example, 且 an altar was stolen for the abstract "just, even, moreover..." and the literal altar came to be written 俎.
- This apparently inspired the solution for indefinitely expanding the written vocabulary without indefinitely expanding how many unique symbols you have to memorize: while many core words are included in the directly representative categories above, the majority of the dictionary consists of characters that are a compound of a semantic category word (such as "people", "water", "metal", "plants"...) and a phonetic category word, which on its own has a literal meaning but in the compound stands for its *pronunciation*, not its meaning.
So our friends 泌 and 密 from the above post are a combination of 必 in a phonetic capacity (not its literal meaning "must, sure to") and the semantic "water" for "secrete, ooze" and the semantic "mountain" for "secret, hidden". (Strictly, 密 is a compound of 宓 as phonetic and 山 as semantic, where 宓 itself is also a word in the same cluster of words-that-mean-some-sort-of-separation-and-pronounced-like-必: "stored at home", under a roof.)
But note, the phonetic component reflects the pronunciation *at the time the character became mainstream* which in general was well over a thousand years ago, often over two thousand. Hence, words written with the same phonetic may have no apparent phonetic relationship in, say, modern Mandarin. Some phonetics were changed during the Simplified reforms in the mainland several decades ago, based on observing how handwritten characters evolved in semi-educated settings such as street markets, but most remain frozen.
Chinese characters are mostly combinations of some several hundred frequently recurring symbols, and not all completely unique and unrelated. That's what makes it a functioning writing system it's possible to teach to a billion people.
... You just tricked me into writing a rough draft of a section in the Classical Chinese guide I'm writing. Yes, you!
#linguistics #chinese #classicalchinese
