Talk:Radical (Chinese character)

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WikiProject Echo has identified Radical (Chinese character) as a foreign language featured article. You may be able to improve this article with information from the French language Wikipedia.

Contents 1 Character examples need to be completely revised 2 Major revision based on the French version 3 Clarification request 4 Complete revamping of this page underway 5 removal of 好 'good' image 6 deleted confusing external reference

[edit] Character examples need to be completely revised

The character examples under each radical given in this page give the impression that they may be under that radical. As such, I am of the opinion that the entire list of example characters should be edited and repopulated with characters which does reflect the radical, rather than the current case where any old character with that radical element is used.

Dylanwhs 19:51, 3 Jun 2004 (UTC)

But how do you know which radical a character is listed under? In almost all cases, I listed characters under the same radical that they were listed under in the Unihan database. In most cases it is arbitrary which radical a character is listed under, isn't it? ☞spencer195 20:00, 3 Jun 2004 (UTC)

I wouldn't say in most cases the character radical is arbitrary. The characters in Unicode are listed by Kangxi order, even those which are simplified have been shoehorned into the Kangxi 214 radical scheme. If you look at the source code for the characters examples and compare it to the radical character code, you will note that if they differ by from +/-10 to +/- 500 in some radicals, the likelihood is that they are not correctly assigned to that radical. For a list of Unicode CJK characters along with their codes as used in Wiki, have a look at my site, of CJK Characters in Unicode. Notice that since the CJK Ext.A characters and more recent updates in Ext. B (not in the site) have been created, characters lie outside the U+4E00 (19968) and U+9FA5 (40869) range. The characters within the range are those which were found in encodings of CJK character using countries, and one could refer to them as Unicode 2.1. The extensions A and above were published in 1999 and later, and now I think the whole lot amounts to around 70,000+ characters, taking in stuff from larger sets like CNS. As yet, I don't think there is a font which has all these characters in, and the wait may be a while. Unless you have SimSum 18030 you won't be able to display Unicode 3.0 which has the 20900 plus characters of Unicode 2.1 and Extension A of around six thousand extra.

Dylanwhs 07:07, 4 Jun 2004 (UTC)

I have found several non-kangxi radicals have been added, probably by simplified character users. We should clean them up. I also think it's best to list only ideophonetic (形聲) characters in traditional shapes, because their radicals are clear. - TAKASUGI Shinji 04:43, 3 Mar 2005 (UTC)

I think it would be best to list the Kangxi radicals as one set, and non-Kangxi ones as a separate table so that both are not conflated into one confusing mass. I understand that Japanese character dictionaries also have 'extra' radicals too, at least from my Kanwa Jiten at home. This could also be a feature. Dylanwhs 18:24, 4 Mar 2005 (UTC)

I have completely rewritten the Kangxi radical list. All characters are traditional forms and they belong to correct radicals. - TAKASUGI Shinji 18:11, 15 Mar 2005 (UTC)

[edit] Major revision based on the French version

I've incorporated the text from my translation of the French version of this article (Talk:Radical (Chinese character)/French Translation, started by User:Adjusting). I've tried to integrate the information in the existing text as much as possible, but fairly little of the actual previous text remains. The Kangxi radicals have been moved to List of Kangxi radicals with minimal change. So, any issues related to that content should go there.

Please read the new text and check it as well as copy-edit it. I do know Chinese (poorly), but I am used to looking words up in Chinese dictionaries and I know a lot about the linguistics of Chinese and of CJK languages in general, so I'm not totally out of my depths in this field. But that doesn't mean I haven't made mistakes or misunderstood.

If someone with administrative privileges wants to delete Talk:Radical (Chinese character)/French Translation when they don't feel it serves any purpose for verifying the translation, I'd appreciate it.

I am preparing the article Chinese character classification based on the French fr:Classification des sinogrammes.

--Diderot 13:25, 8 Apr 2005 (UTC)

[edit] Clarification request

The article doesn't make it absolutely clear, at least not without reading it in its entirety, what exactly a radical is. Surely this is the most important thing here? Does it mean any graphically distinguishable part of any Chinese character? Must it be in other characters? Must it be in the modern, commonly used list of about 200 radicals? Must it be in the older list of about 500 radicals? Must it be used in (at least one, commonly, what?) dictionary as an index, or is the index usage separate and has no influence on the definiton of what a radical is? Is bushu exactly the same thing as "radical" in English, and is it used that way in Chinese/Japanese/other languages? Must the radical(s?) of a character denote meaning, or may it be purely phonetical? ("These examples intentionally use the radical for its semantic value, but this not always the case." says so, but the text above contradicts it at least implicitly by classifying characters as "radical+radical" and "radical + phonetic ideo-phonograms", strongly suggesting that these "phonetic ideo-phonograms" that look like radicals are in fact not radicals)

In short, the article, being a definition of what a radical is, should strive to make it absolutely clear what is meant by the word, and this definition should be given at the beginning. As it is, it seems as if the authors themselves have different contradicting ideas of what the word means.

Not sure whose comment that was, but I wish to comment on the problem of the term radical, and how it is unfortunately applied to two different animals, the semantic component and the bushou, which may or may not coincide. I believe this will answer part of the above question --

First, when the earliest European sinologists decomposed Chinese characters, they attempted to apply to them the terms for decomposing the inflected words of European languages, namely radix or radical (the semantic root of a word, which provides its core meaning) and termination (the portion which changes when inflected, showing case, time and mood). Since the majority of Chinese characters are semantic-phonetic compounds, they applied the term radical to the semantic part, but they couldn’t apply the word ‘termination’ to the phonetic part since it does not take a terminal position.

Then, the 部首 bùshǒu (section heads) which organize dictionaries somehow got mistranslated as ‘radicals’ as well, creating confusion which has lasted up until the present. Many students are therefore under the misimpression that the component under which a character is indexed in the dictionary is its semantic component. This is not necessarily so, even if it happens to be true in many or even a majority of cases, and a careful examination of the characters under the first half dozen 部首 bùshǒu sections of the dictionary will amply demonstrate this.

The solution is to avoid the term ‘radical’ entirely. For the meaning-bearing component, the term widely used by scholars is ‘semantic’ component, while the section heads in the dictionary may be termed simply bùshǒu, and explained to students as, for example, the ‘header’ or ‘key’ or ‘index’ component under which the character is listed in dictionaries. Dragonbones 09:05, 20 March 2006 (UTC)

A fuller answer to the above should probably delve into the reasons behind the choices of bushou beginning with Shuowen, such as the study of this by Serruys. Dragonbones 09:11, 20 March 2006 (UTC)

[edit] Complete revamping of this page underway

Subsequent to the above comments on the problematic nature of the term "radical", you'll find that if you go through the old page, it jumps from one meaning of radical to the next, completely confusing the issue. It even goes so far as to call phonetic elements and components of any kind 'radicals', completely missing the mark. This chimaera needs to be dissected and rebuilt, more than any other page I've seen on Wiki.

I have begun this attempt by first outlining where the English term 'radical' comes from, and the two meanings unfortunately assigned to it. Then I've gone through the page, looking at each use of the term, and changing it to one of two disambiguating synonyms, semantic element vs. section header; in some cases both meanings were intended by the term, and in others, neither was intended, as the authors randomly threw in the word 'radical' when other things like 'component' or even 'phonetic component' were intended. Biggest mess I've seen in ages.

The clarification of each use of 'radical' in terms of which meaning was intended does two things. One, it fixes erroneous or ambiguous usage, a step forward. Two, it highlights how badly organized the remainder of the page is, even now. Next we need to reorganize the page on this basis so that it doesn't jump from one meaning to the other. Perhaps three pages are needed? One to explain the problem with 'radical' and direct the user to two meanings, semantic element vs. section header; and then a separate page for each of those? I need help doing this, but before joining in, please ensure that you understand the difference between semantic components and dictionary section headers as well as the fact that careless use of the term 'radical' for both is the source of this whole mess.Dragonbones 15:07, 20 March 2006 (UTC)

[edit] removal of 好 'good' image

In the section entitled “Identifying Semantic Elements versus Section Headers in Characters”, there is a serious problem with the inclusion of 好 as semantic plus semantic. That represents the spurious folk etymology rendition of this compound as a 會意 huìyì associative compound. However, it is not at all clear that its etymology is associative in nature; it is more likely that it is semantic-phonetic (like the majority of compounds), although the specifics of its origin are unclear. We should not be presenting it as clearly semantic-semantic when this is quite possibly not the case. Off the top of my head, more likely candidates for this category which include 女 are for example 姦 jian1, 妻 qi1, or perhaps 姆 mu3, 姥 lao3 or 姜 jiang1 (although whether the latter should be considered a compound is unclear). I haven't had the time to thoroughly vet these, but 姦 jian1 *has* to be semantic-semantic-semantic, right? I'd suggest replacing 好 with 姦 jian1 'adultery', but don't know the process for uploading the image to Wiki. Can sb please help? Dragonbones 08:17, 13 September 2006 (UTC)

Until you figure that out, please leave the table and images as they are. If you have some serious evidence to prove your point, then the situation is perhaps different. None the less, even if the etymology were unclear, it's a good enough example character in my opinion (with the added note that the etymology may be spurious).

By the way, I gather from the explanation that the character has in a way become semantic + semantic over time, although it might have been something different in the distant past. It would be good to have some more diverse examples though.Wipe 00:38, 16 October 2006 (UTC)

[edit] deleted confusing external reference

The external reference "http://www.chinaknowledge.de/Literature/radicals.html - A good detailed introduction on section headers" is a perfect example of the confusion between the two meanings of the word radical. It is also not well written, so I have removed this external link, which will only confuse readers. (In general, I like Chinaknowledge.de, by the way -- but I would expect to see a drastic improvement in that particular page before it would qualify as a useful and informative link.) Here is an example of the confusion, with highlighting added for emphasis:

"The classifiers, determinants or radicals (bushou 部首) of a Chinese character serve to categorize words according to their meaning and to place them into a dictionary...Having a closer look at some characters, wrong attributions can easily be found, for instance the character for dao 到 "arriving" seems to be compounded from a standing "knife" 刀 to the right and the character 至 as a second part. Indeed, all characters deriving from the radical "knife" have the same shape. But looking at the meaning of the character, we see that in fact, the "knife" is not the radical, but the phonetical part of the character (pronounced dao), and the left part is in fact the radical 至 zhi "arriving"."

You can see that the author alternates between using radical in the meanings of bushou and semantic without explaining the difference, thus completely confusing matters. Dragonbones 09:47, 13 September 2006 (UTC)