[關於康熙部首02] Chinese is not a system of symbols

the great thing about Chinese is that
nobody says it's an easy language to learn and the bad thing about Chinese is absolutely everything else the illustrations in this video largely speak for themselves i'm going to try not to do too much talking some of them are probably worth pausing and staring at for a bit longer if you're trying to get familiar with the the etymologies and think about whether or not memorizing the county system of radicals the right approach language for you on the left hand side of the screen there's a seemingly eccentric radical this is called the yawn radical what a great concept other languages just have boring alphabets but in Chinese one of the components of the language is just to represent yawning the most commonly used meaning is actually 20 something as if noted there on the screen and on the right hand side of the screen you have right away two examples of how it looks when it's used as a component in forming other characters now here you have six Chinese characters on screen the top row I'm simply using a font there that shows you what the seal script look like and then the row below that is modern handwriting but those are the same characters three examples same three you were just looking at before here's the yarn radical and what should leap out at you from the pictograph on the bottom is that this used to have the standard pair of legs on the bottom of the character that you will have seen again and again in Chinese certainly within the first ten characters you learn you will learn the pair of legs radical and what's on the top of the pair of legs appropriately enough for the meaning yawn it's a very stylized open mouth so it's supposed to be an image of a man standing with his mouth open but in a totally incoherent twist of fate the legs have actually gotten garbled so that we're now depicting the entire human body it's the stylized figure for the full human form below the open mouth and as you've probably noticed the open mouth is unrecognizable here we have a contrast between the Yan radical and two other radicals two other characters at least that feature an open mouth on top of legs so the same idea was created and recreated in the language in a way that's not systematic there's no way you could identify one by looking at the other there's of course there's no way you can never guess the phonetics from one to the other and you know if you haven't already memorized this kind of etymological analysis the radicals you wouldn't be able to make the link from the character that's on the left hand of the screen to the character that's on the right hand of the screen let alone the ones halfway in the middle but actually all of these are different ways to depict an open mouth on legs which is of course alluding to human form and a certain type of action so even when we know what all the symbols are they are not systematic you've probably had enough time to stare at it already but on screen there on the left hand side one of the most common characters in the Chinese language you say it every time you say hello and inexplicably we've ended up with the open mouth figure from the top half of the Yan radical it has no business being there you can look at the pictograph on the far left of the screen and you can see that this is simply an etymology that's broken and we're stuck with yet another example of one of the most frequently used words in the Chinese language having no explanation no meaning having just broken down and become incoherent one of the ideas that appears again and again in Chinese is of the human mouth many many different meanings are expressed by combining a mouth with a few extra lines here or there on the far left side of the screen you see what are probably the first two examples of this you learn one is just called the mouth reticle and the other is called the speech radical in English and then in the center box we have three more elaborate figures where I would say that you probably wouldn't recognize the figure of the mouth even if you know to look for a certain type of square form and within these few examples you already have the idea that anything that's a square or a triangle can be a mouth and the Chinese language is in large part composed of squares and triangles so again the ability of a reader to recognize a mouth as a mouth is almost nil and the ability to make a sort of correct inference going from one character and other through comparison and so on is close to zero although not not quite zero and then on the right hand side this is one of the the less widely understood mouth radicals at the top of the flute radical there the triangle is another way of depicting the human mouth the flu radical there of very simply you're looking at a mouth on top blowing down into a very stylized depiction of what we'd call in English has panpipes the three boxes represent the openings of the holes and then you have the length of the flute below that so you can imagine what a different world we would live in if Chinese teachers spent a lot of time explaining to you what any of these images were supposed to be I think for the most part people are stuck with memorize and move on attitudes and their teachers and being forced to move through this stuff as quickly as possible and that's why so many misconceptions with the language are prevalent among both foreigners and native speakers the flute radical is there again at the top left and you can see an image of what it looked like in ancient seal script these images are all thanks to the work of Richard Sears he actually does not own the copyright to them but he is the guy who did the hard work of getting them into a format where they could be widely used in the internet and now they used by Wikipedia in many other sources one of the absolutely most common words in the Chinese language is in the top right corner of your screen now and this is used to form meanings like to be able to do something all kinds of stories and excuses are made up for this character it's one of the first characters you have to learn I think most people are told just memorize it it doesn't have to make sense the part that doesn't make sense if you look at the seal script it made sense a few thousand years ago but we actually do not know what the component in the middle is so we know we have a mouth at the top and then we have a different mouth radical at the bottom but what is in between the two is today unknown and unless someone is going to go out and really on earth some new archaeological finds do some analysis of ancient bronze castings or something of the sort we may never know so there is one mystery in the middle of that character in the bottom left corner this is what you see on signs for restaurants all the time again one of the very first words you'll ever learn but probably you've had people tell you that the top part of the character is the roof over house or the roof of a restaurant or maybe the lid on top of a pot that's boiling food it's none of those things it's the mouth reticle and again if you just compare those three images three pictographs you can see very clearly the same triangular idea of stylizing the mouth that's at the top blowing into the pipes and the flute radical it appears here again above the pot that's cooking the food and in the bottom right corner we have a contrast all of the first three it would be impossible to guess that you're looking at a mouth that triangular arrangement the top but here it would be hard to guess that you're looking at the opposite this historically this is a pretty pretty famous character because it did actually used to look like a bell a heavy iron cast Bell of common in traditional Chinese culture still pretty commonly display today as a symbol status or affluence but it has been stylized incoherent ly over time to really resemble one of the characters that's built out of the triangular mouth radical so the moral of the story is that the system is not systematic and here I'm drawing your attention to the fact that both in the older seal script and in a modern hand written form there's really no clear hint if anything in this case it's more confusing in seal script so it's also not a simple case of saying well the new methods of writing are bad and the old methods of running are good and many of the resemblances that we rely on our imaginary not just in the sense that they reflect maybe a tradition of imagining what the characters are supposed to be but people make up their own stories people make up their own fables to help the memorized characters as do teachers parents and so on I it would be impossible if you were if you were learning Chinese in a vacuum if you were just starting from a blank sheet of paper it would be impossible to guess what these three pictures have in common and of course the three characters also have no phonetic link but believe it or not all three of the images are looking at do you depict human feet and there you have the only slightly less stylized a image of the feed two of them and they were Radical at the top one on the bottom left-hand bottom right but these different ways of symbolically depicting feet in the seal script stage so again the the type of inference in connection we make I don't know if it would be an insult to philosophy to say that it's philosophical but it takes a lot of imagination a lot of memorization and a lot of hard work to ring the meaning out of the system of radicals and to enrich your own reading of Chinese by being able to break down the characters so in terms of practical conclusions the radicals are not a systematic description of the language the not a system at all there's no systematic relationship here that's being revealed within the language instead the radicals present an analysis going which that raises more questions than answers and that's okay and whether or not you think it's okay we'll come down to your own character whether or not you think those questions are worth asking and whether or not you you'd like to have access to this kind of ancient and philosophical dimension of the language instead of just memorizing a million meaningless brushstrokes this is sort of first things last the etymology of word may be completely unrelated to its current appearance and it may now even be unrelated to the radicals that are used in forming that appearance the example in the bottom left is one of the first words you need to learn in Chinese you've been saying it every time you say thank you even if you haven't learned how to read it yet the next character to the right is the phonetic loan particle used in writing the word for thank you and it means to shoot as into fire and arrow and then moving a stage further to the right you see the ancient pictograph when that character actually looked like a hand a human hand reaching out for or using a bow and arrow tragically incoherently it is no longer a depiction of a bow and arrow instead we have a totally unrelated word that actually depicts the human body in a very stylized form that has replaced the bow and arrow so coming back to my earlier point in this case we're not looking at anything unknown it's known the whole history the whole meaning of the character and all of its components is known as well understood by scholars there are no question marks here it's also broken so we're left in the 21st century to work within the limits of what I would not even call a broken system but a bunch of broken information that has not yet even been assembled into a systematic analysis the language lots of fun huh you