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Meaning #1 of "radical" — semantic element A semantic component or element of a character is the portion or one of several portions which contribute meaning, as opposed to phonetic information. The Chinese script most likely began with stylized drawings of the things, actions or relationships represented. That is, each was likely a semantic graph composed of exactly one semantic element, such as 九 (originally depicting 'elbow'), 豆 dòu (a type of bronze vessel) or 象 xiàng 'elephant'. However, for things which were difficult to depict, it was more practical to borrow the graph for something which sounded the same or similar, a process known as phonetic loan. The above three graphs were thusly borrowed to represent 九 jiǔ 'nine', 豆 dòu 'bean', and 象 xiàng 'image'. Such graphs have no semantic element per se, being purely phonetic in usage. Characters also began to take compound forms, consisting of more than one element, often one semantic and one phonetic. For example, 舢 shān 'sampan' (a boat) comprises 舟 zhōu 'boat' semantic, and 山 shān 'mountain' phonetic. Eventually, there were many kinds of characters, some with multiple semantic or multiple phonetic elements or both. By the Han dynasty, scholars were beginning to look back and analyze the complex script which had by then evolved. The process of evolution had by then taken place over at least a millennium and a half, and the structures and roots of many characters were no longer clear. Xu Shen (許慎/许慎; Pinyin: Xǔ Shèn; 58-147) in his seminal dictionary of Chinese, the 15-volume Shuowen dictionary (說文解字/说文解字; Pinyin: Shuōwén jiězì; "Explaining Simple and Analyzing Compound Characters"), in 121, was the first attempt to construct a comprehensive dictionary of Chinese and the first to catalogue its roughly 10000 characters in a systematic way. In the process, he also analyzed each character, deconstructing them into their semantic and phonetic components, and identifying phonetic loans. Meaning #2 of "radical" — dictionary section header
Identifying Semantic Elements versus Section Headers in Characters In the characters 姐, 媽, 她, 好, 姓 and 妾, each character has a common graphical element: 女. In 妾, it is somewhat deformed in order to make the whole character fit into a unit square, but it is in each case present. 女 is also an independent character (Pinyin: nǚ), signifying a woman or the concept of femininity. This meaning is in some respect reflected in most of the characters above, although the relationship is sometimes historical, culture-specific, or even simply remote and uncertain. The other part of each of the above characters is used either for its phonetic value, playing no part in the meaning of the character but indicating something about its pronunciation; or as an indicator of meaning which has in some way been modified by the addition of 女 or which is used to modify its meaning, as shown in the table below: In the images below, the red part of the character is the Section Header. These examples intentionally use the section header for its semantic value, but this is not always the case. Furthermore, in these examples it is easy to identify 女 as a graphic element separate from the rest of the character. In other cases, identifying the semantic root and section header is not so simple. Shape and position of section headers in characters
Limitations of the section header system Some of the section headers used in Chinese dictionaries, even in the era of Kangxi, were not genuinely distinctive graphic elements. They served only to index certain unique characters that do not have more obvious possible section headers. The section header 鬯 (Pinyin: chàng, "sacrificial wine") is used to index only one character: 鬱 (Pinyin: yù, "luxuriant", "dense", or "moody"). Modern dictionaries tend to eliminate these kinds of section headers, at least when it is possible to find some more widely used alternative graphic element under which a character can be categorised. Furthermore, classification using semantic components is not always easy. Often, the relationship between the meaning of a character and the meaning of its semantic component is etymological. It is sometimes only possible to make the connection by knowing the history of the character and its origins because the meaning has shifted over time. For example, the 月 yuè 'moon' in the modern forms of 朕 zhèn, 俞 yú and 服 fú is in each case a corruption from 舟 zhōu 'boat'. This problem applies equally to phonetic components. Their presence in a modern character often reflects ancient pronunciations and may no longer have any relationship to modern pronunciation. In many modern dictionaries, characters may be indexed under more than one section header in order to make it easier to find characters. Character Decomposition
Dictionary lookup Most dictionaries use section header classification to index and lookup characters, although many present-day dictionaries supplement it with other methods as well. Following the "section-header-and-stroke-count" method of Mei Yingzuo, characters are listed by their section header and then ordered by the number of strokes needed to write them. The steps involved in looking up a character are: For example, consider the character 信 xìn, meaning "truth", "faith", "sincerity", and "trust". Its section header is "human" (人) and there are 7 additional strokes in the remaining portion (言). To look this character up in a dictionary, one finds the section header for "human" in the part of dictionary that indexes section headers, finds the page for that section header, and then passes through the lists of characters with one additional stroke, 2 additional strokes, etc. until one reaches the entries with 7 additional strokes. If the section header chosen by the user matches the section header used by the dictionary compiler (which can be difficult to guarantee for more complicated characters), and if both the user and the dictionary compiler count strokes the same way (also often a problem with characters that the user is unfamiliar with), the entry will be in that list, and will appear next to an entry number or a page number where the full dictionary entry for that character can be found. As a rule of thumb, components in the left or top of the character, or elements which surround the rest of the character are the ones most likely to be used as section header. For example, 信 is typically indexed under the left-side component 人 instead of the right-side 言; and 套 is typically indexed under the top 大 instead of the bottom 長. There are, however, idiosyncratic differences between dictionaries, and except for simple cases, the same character cannot be assumed to be indexed the same way in two different dictionaries. In order to further ease dictionary lookup, dictionaries sometimes list section headers both under the number of strokes used to write their canonical form and under the number of strokes used to write their variant forms. For example, 心 can be listed as a four-stroke section header but might also be listed as a three-stroke section header because it is usually written as 忄 when it forms a part of another character. This means that the dictionary user need not know that the two are etymologically identical. It is sometimes possible to find a single character indexed under multiple radicals. For example, many dictionaries list 義 under either 羊 or 戈 (the section header of its lower part 我). Furthermore, with digital dictionaries, it is now possible to search for characters by cross-reference. Using this multi-component method (which you can try out at Jim Breen's WWWJDIC Server), a relatively new development enabled by computing technology, the user can select all of a character's components from a table and the computer will present a list of matching characters. This eliminates the guesswork of choosing the correct section header and calculating the correct stroke count, and cuts down searching time significantly. One can query for characters containing both 羊 and 戈, and get back only five characters (羢, 義, 儀, 羬 and 羲) to search through. Variations in the number of section headers Though section headers are widely accepted as a method to categorize Chinese characters and to locate a certain character in a dictionary, there is no universal agreement about either the exact number of section headers, or the set of section headers. This situation is still further complicated by the dichotomy between traditional Chinese characters and simplified ones. The 214 Kangxi radicals act as a de facto standard, which may not be duplicated exactly in every Chinese dictionary, but which few dictionary compilers can afford to completely ignore. They serve as the basis for many computer encoding systems. Specifically, the Unicode standard's radical-stroke charts are based on the Kangxi radicals or section headers. The count of commonly used section headers in modern abridged dictionaries is often less than 214. The Oxford Concise English-Chinese Dictionary (ISBN 0-19-591151-2), for example, has 189. A few dictionaries also introduce new section headers based on the principles first used by Xu Shen, treating groups of section headers that are used together in many different characters as a kind of section header. In modern practice, section headers are primarily used as lexicographic tools and as learning aids when writing characters. They have become increasingly disconnected from meaning, etymology or phonetics. Unicode See also | |||||||||||||||
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