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It may be obvious to some, less to others, but the Chinese writing system is not based on an alphabet.
An alphabet consists of a small number of letters. Letters represent sounds.
They spell out how words should be pronounced. Letters don't have any meaning by themselves.A Chinese character on the other hand is a more complex unit. It contains an indication of pronunciation as well as an indication of meaning. There are more than 100,000 different Chinese characters. It is actually impossible to count them precisely! There are infinite variants. The number of useful characters, for a literate person however, is “only” between 3,000 and 6,000. That is still a huge number compared to the 26 letters of our alphabet. But you can't compare apples and oranges!
For those who are curious, who are language geeks, or who are updating their skill set to learn how to say, "Yes, boss," in Mandarin...it's a bit too cursory on the subject of radicals, which are the heart of Chinese characters and how you look stuff up in the dictionary, but a reasonable introduction into the writing system.
(Score: 2) by Rich on Thursday December 17 2015, @01:41AM
It's what he calls "components". IIRC, there are 214 of those "Kangxi Radicals" made from simple strokes, basic shapes that (mostly) compose the complex characters. So, once you know these, the complex characters are assemble like syllables from characters.
An interesting sidenote is that many consider the Korean writing as very similar to Chinese or Japanese. Though that is, afaik, the only script system that's purely phonetic. All the others somehow evolved from pictures when people slowly figured out that phonemes are more efficient to write than images. Even the Latin alphabet starts with what once was a cow.
(Score: 2, Insightful) by Anonymous Coward on Thursday December 17 2015, @01:53AM
很搞笑的文章
(Score: 3, Informative) by Phoenix666 on Thursday December 17 2015, @04:25AM
That's pretty much it. There's a smaller subset of those that people actually use on a daily basis. Many of the others are detritus from 5,000 years of history. To put it in English terms, they'd be idioms like "hem and haw," neither of which words you hear in any other context. As such, once you get into the structure of it, which happens much faster than you'd believe, it starts to feel like a really big alphabet rather than cryptography.
Hangul, the Korean writing system, is purely phonetic and syllabic. It was designed by King Sejong the Great and they still celebrate its invention on Language Day today. It's flexible in a way that Chinese and Japanese aren't. For example, su in Japanese (す) is just that, the sound "su." The consonant is not separate from the vowel. In Korean hangul, it's ᄉ "s" + ᅮ "u" to make 수.
As East Asian writing systems go, Koreans got the best deal, the Chinese have something that works, and Japanese have a confused Frankenstein of kanji with both Japanese and Chinese readings (purely contextual, no system to it, no way to know which reading it is so you just have to know that word), hiragana, which evolved from the cursive writing of Chinese characters of women in the court in Edo, and katakana, which is purely used to render foreign words phonetically.
Washington DC delenda est.
(Score: 3, Informative) by Fnord666 on Thursday December 17 2015, @01:56PM
Hangul, the Korean writing system, is purely phonetic and syllabic. It was designed by King Sejong the Great and they still celebrate its invention on Language Day today. It's flexible in a way that Chinese and Japanese aren't. For example, su in Japanese (す) is just that, the sound "su." The consonant is not separate from the vowel. In Korean hangul, it's ᄉ "s" + ᅮ "u" to make 수.
Hangul is quite interesting. I can pronounce any word that I can see written out and if I hear the word I can write it down. Neither of these facts imply that I have the faintest idea what the word means though. Another interesting thing is that the same symbol, when used in different parts of a syllable, has a different sound. For example the character 'ㄹ' is pronounced as either 'r' or 'l' depending on whether it is at the start of a syllable or the end. As a result, English words like 'leather' are difficult for many Koreans because the starting 'l' sound in that word just doesn't happen that way in the Korean language. The 'l' sound does not begin a syllable so I often heard it pronounced 'reather'.
(Score: 1, Interesting) by Anonymous Coward on Thursday December 17 2015, @08:57AM
No, it was referring to components specifically, and not radicals.
Here is a description of the difference: http://blog2.skritter.com/2015/03/understanding-chinese-characters.html [skritter.com]
(Score: 2) by Rich on Thursday December 17 2015, @02:51PM
it was referring to components specifically, and not radicals.
I wasn't aware of the distinction. It doesn't help that "radical" lists can be found everywhere, even when looking specifically for "component list". I actually wasn't able to find a dedicated comprehensive component list at all. Also, the dictionares themselves offer "multi-radical-lookup" these days, which directly contradicts the explaining article's statement of "Each Chinese character has one and only one radical".
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Friday December 18 2015, @08:29AM
Radicals are historically prevalent, that's why you'll find much more information about them. They are useful when looking up words in paper dictionaries (who does that anymore?), but not a great tool to explain the structure of characters. Some people are working to fix this: https://www.outlier-linguistics.com/ [outlier-linguistics.com]
But it's a recent idea (compared to radicals), and popular education is slow to adopt it.