{"id":5994,"date":"2014-10-21T19:46:55","date_gmt":"2014-10-21T11:46:55","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/www.hackingchinese.com\/?p=5994"},"modified":"2020-11-17T10:40:07","modified_gmt":"2020-11-17T09:40:07","slug":"why-you-should-think-of-characters-in-terms-of-functional-components","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.hackingchinese.com\/why-you-should-think-of-characters-in-terms-of-functional-components\/","title":{"rendered":"Why you should think of characters in terms of functional components"},"content":{"rendered":"

\"da2\"<\/a>This is a guest article written by John Renfroe over at Outlier Linguistics<\/a>. They’re working on a dictionary meant to teach us about functional components of Chinese characters and in this article, John describes why we should think about functional components instead of obsessing over radicals.<\/em><\/p>\n

I know this advice is going to rub some people the wrong way, but hopefully by the end of the article you’ll understand why I say this: radicals are of little use for learning how characters work. Their purpose is indexing characters in a dictionary.<\/p>\n

There’s a huge misconception about how characters work. You see this sort of advice all the time: Characters are made up of radicals, so you should learn the radicals first, or Make sure you learn the radicals, they’re the building blocks of characters<\/p>\n

This is not true. People who say this are well-intentioned but ill-informed about the nature of the Chinese writing system. The word radical is best understood as a character component that sometimes plays the role of radical and NOT a character component that has the nature of being a radical.<\/p>\n

For example, \u5927 d\u00e0 “big” is a component that is on the list of radicals, but it is not the case that \u5927 always plays the role of radical when it appears in a character. A single character only has a single radical, no matter how many character components it has. And which of its components plays the role of radical may be different in different dictionaries.<\/p>\n

And yes, many of the components on the list of radicals do show up a lot in Chinese characters and therefore should be learned, but they should be learned as being part of a system of functional components<\/strong> – components which express sound and meaning.<\/p>\n

The concept of radical, or \u90e8\u9996 b\u00f9sh\u01d2u, didn’t even exist until after the publication of the Shu\u014dw\u00e9n Ji\u011bz\u00ec [\u8aaa\u6587\u89e3\u5b57]<\/a>, at which point the writing system had already been around for well over 1500 years, and the vast majority of characters in use today were invented before the Shu\u014dw\u00e9n. Read that again and let it sink in. If that’s the case, then there’s no way that radicals were what people had in mind when they were creating characters. There must be something else going on.<\/p>\n

So what are radicals, really?<\/strong><\/p>\n

That’s an interesting question. The word radical is really a poor translation of \u90e8\u9996 b\u00f9sh\u01d2u in the first place. \u90e8\u9996 literally means section head. Following the model of the \u8aaa\u6587, character dictionaries are traditionally arranged into sections containing similar graphic components.<\/p>\n

These sections are called \u90e8 b\u00f9 in Chinese. The first character in that section is the \u90e8\u9996, the section head, or the first of the section. Each character in that section belongs to one \u90e8\u9996. Note that I didn’t say the character has one \u90e8\u9996. It’s an important distinction to make. The character is filed under a \u90e8, or section. This is a choice made by the editor of a character dictionary, not an inherent part of the nature of Chinese characters.<\/p>\n

Which section to file a character under can be a fairly arbitrary decision. Most people’s understanding is that the \u90e8\u9996 gives a hint about meaning and the sound component (\u8072\u7b26 sh\u0113ngf\u00fa) gives a hint about the sound, and that the two are different entities. That’s not always the case.<\/p>\n

Sometimes, the \u90e8\u9996 is the sound component. For example \u5200 (\u5202 d\u0101o, knife) is both the phonetic and the radical in \u5230, but it is not<\/strong> the meaning component – \u81f3 zh\u00ec is (it means to arrive, just like \u5230).<\/p>\n

Intuitively, one would think that radicals are assigned in a consistent manner, but sometimes the way they’re assigned can be very haphazard, even for characters that share the same structure:<\/p>\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n
Character<\/strong><\/td>\nRadical<\/strong><\/td>\n<\/tr>\n
\u5f4e w\u0101n “curve”<\/td>\n\u5f13 g\u014dng “bow for shooting arrows”<\/td>\n<\/tr>\n
\u6200 li\u00e0n “love”<\/td>\n\u5fc3 x\u012bn “heart”<\/td>\n<\/tr>\n
\u883b m\u00e1n “barbaric”<\/td>\n\u866b hu\u01d0 “type of poisonous snake; early form of \u867a hu\u01d0”<\/td>\n<\/tr>\n
\u8b8a bi\u00e0n “change”<\/td>\n\u8a00 y\u00e1n “speech”<\/td>\n<\/tr>\n<\/tbody>\n<\/table>\n

For the first three characters, the radical and meaning components are same. \u8b8a is inconsistent with the others in that it’s filed under \u8a00 (part of lu\u00e1n, the sound component which the other characters all share #1<\/a>).<\/p>\n

So again, characters are filed into a given section. This is a choice made by a human being, not an inherent part of the nature of Chinese characters, and it’s a flawed but workable system.<\/p>\n

So hopefully, you can see that radicals (remember: section headings, not necessarily meaning components!) are useful for organising and looking things up in a dictionary, but they’re not especially useful for explaining how characters work.<\/p>\n

But there’s a better way<\/strong><\/p>\n

You should look at characters in terms of their functional components. Character components can serve a few different functions, and you need to understand those functions rather than lump them all under one category called radicals.<\/p>\n

\"da1\"<\/a>There are three attributes that all characters have (using \u5927 as an example):<\/p>\n