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灬 is called 四點水!


jbradfor

1759 views

I'm starting to think that Chinese do this on purpose, just because Chinese isn't hard enough to learn on its own.....

灬 is the fire radical, 火, when on the bottom. See, four dots in 灬, four strokes in 火. Not very hard.

I was trying to describe a character to someone, and tried to say it had the fire radical on the bottom, so I said "下面有火". He looked confused, so I wrote it for him, and then he laughed and said that they call it "四點水"!

So why, when describing it, do they call it "four dot water"? Would calling it 四点火 really be that hard?

6 Comments


Recommended Comments

Hofmann

Posted

It's one of those names of radicals that have nothing to do with what they actually are, such as 雙人旁 (彳), 左耳旁 (as in 陽).

BTW, you can call it 四點火.

jbradfor

Posted

Thanks for the warning about the other radicals! I assume somewhere there is a list of what Chinese "commonly call" the various radicals, vs what they actually mean?

edelweis

Posted

There seem to be quite a lot of lists like this one or that one that give radicals names, but I could not find one that also has the meaning of the radical.

I got the impression that 四點底, 四點火, 四點兒 were listed more frequently than 四點水 but I could be mistaken.

Interestingly enough, 冫 is often listed as 兩點水兒.

(四點水 does have some google hits)

Hofmann

Posted

See the meanings here.

jbradfor

Posted

Phew. Thanks all, I feel better now.

And next time someone tells me something, even if it is from a native speaker, I promise I'll check first....

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