Formation of chinese characters

April 29, 2009 3:06 AM

How chinese characters are formed?

Hi there, I am looking for a list of chinese characters on how its formed. Its something in the website below but I need a longer list.
Thank you in advance


http://www.zein.se/patrick/chinen9p.html

posted by red_rika to education (14 comments total)

What exactly do you want?
Are you looking for a list of characters and the radicals from which they're composed?
posted by atrazine at 3:25 AM on April 29

If you're talking about the stroke order many pages on Wiktionary show that, for example 的. This page should list every entry that contains stroke order information.
posted by XMLicious at 3:32 AM on April 29

i am not sure if i understand fully the meaning of radical. But if radicals mean the pictures of how the current chinese characters are formed (e.g. in the website i had shown, the current word ear somehow comes from the picture ear).

If that what radical means, then yes i want a list of characters and the radicals from which they're composed.

To be precise, I am doing a presentation on food. So basically i need words like, food, rice, pig, chicken, spoon, etc. and their radicals.

Thanks
posted by red_rika at 3:33 AM on April 29

Hmm.. i browse through the net and i found this website

http://www.ctcfl.ox.ac.uk/Radical_index.htm

and i don't think its radical that i want.


What I need is the history of how each words are formed.


Correct me if I am wrong about radical.
posted by red_rika at 3:42 AM on April 29

If I understand correctly, you're not looking for the radicals but a sort of pictographic history of how modern Chinese characters came to be written ...?
posted by Xany at 3:47 AM on April 29

yes ! thats absolutely correct xany.
posted by red_rika at 3:51 AM on April 29

It doesn't give historical etymologies, but zhongwen.com has rather good breakdowns on characters and could probably give you some direction.
posted by Schismatic at 5:02 AM on April 29

zdic.net gives this for characters in their online dictionary on a tab marked 字源字形; here's the history of the forms of the character 华 for example (hope the link goes to the right tab; if not select it yourself).
posted by Abiezer at 5:04 AM on April 29

You might want to check out Traditional Chinese instead of Simplified Chinese. I've always found that Traditional Chinese makes more sense as in many of the characters still retain the evolution throughout the different dynasties, as opposed to simplified Chinese where many words are just simplified for the sake of it, losing the original meaning.

During Han dynasty the scholars classified all the Chinese characters into 6 different categories, what you are looking for is basically the first one, "Pictograms (象形)"

At the end of that paragraph are some animals such as cow, sheep, or horse. Maybe they can be considered "food"? Good luck and feel free to mail me if you have any questions.
posted by jstarlee at 6:54 AM on April 29 [2 favorites]

The wikipedia article on Chinese characters has a pretty good section on the history of the writing system.

You'll need to get over the idea that Chinese characters are pictographic. Some of the simplest ones are pictographic in origin, but that doesn't carry you very far. How would you pictographically represent the difference between a chicken and a pigeon (and every other bird)?

Radicals are regularized components of characters that occur frequently and are used as a basis for collation and dictionary lookup. Many radicals can stand alone as characters as well as be combined with other shapes. For example 鳥 is "bird". That character can stand alone, or it can act as a component (a radical) in other characters: 鳩 is pigeon, and 鶏 is chicken. Those are both single characters, in case it's not clear.

In Chinese, many characters consist of a radical that indicates the character's general meaning, and another part that gives a clue to its general pronunciation. For example, 紛 and 粉 are both pronounced "fen" (with different tones), but mean "disarray" and "powder" respectively. The left-hand radical of the latter one means "rice," which kinda-sorta gives you a clue to its meaning; the left-hand radical of the former means "string" and doesn't really help much.
posted by adamrice at 7:08 AM on April 29

Makes sense to me - smooshed rice is powder, smooshed string is just a mess.
posted by flabdablet at 7:52 AM on April 29 [1 favorite]

Chinese Etymology

You enter the character you want to learn about, and it shows you all the historical versions of it.
posted by Chocolate Pickle at 3:03 PM on April 29

With Chocolate Pickle's link, you can just plug in the characters you want to know more about. I'm not sure if you need the words themselves; if so, this might help:

food = 食
meal = 餐
rice = 米 (uncooked) 饭 (cooked)
noodle = 面
bread = 面包
flour = 面粉
pig = 猪 / 猪肉
chicken = 鸡 鸡肉
fish = 鱼
spoon = 汤匙
fork = 叉
cup = 杯
plate = 盘
bowl = 碗
posted by hellopanda at 6:00 PM on April 29

Radical.
posted by IAmBroom at 4:12 AM on April 30