Deep Thoughts [Warning: This post is 100% parody]

[animal world]

That's an interesting comment, Anonymoose. I'm sure a company with deep pockets could, as a deliberate strategy, come up with a name that includes a new character for a new company or product. Conduct a big advertising campaign on TV so that everybody knows how to say the character and the new word might well stick and enhance the cachet and uniqueness of this product. Akin to what logo's and slogans have accomplished for western companies and campaigns. Just consider the success of something as simple as I ♥ New York.

Could you please give us the pinyin for 鐽, darmstadtium , as we're all desirous to put this character to use in a wide variety of circumstances.

[renzhe]

I assume that it should be dá, since Darmstadt is 达姆施塔特 / 達姆施塔特 / 达姆 in Chinese.

[jbradfor]

Wikitionary gives it as both bi4 and da2: http://en.wiktionary.org/wiki/%E9%90%BD

[Weirdly enough, there does seem to be a company with 鐽 in it's name: http://zh.wikipedia.org/wiki/%E5%8F%B0%E7%81%A3%E9%90%BD%E9%9C%87 ]

Edited December 3, 2009 at 06:59 PM by jbradfor

[imron]

I'm sure a company with deep pockets could, as a deliberate strategy, come up with a name that includes a new character for a new company or product

I don't think they could for a company name. There are various restrictions on the names you can give a company and a company using a character that doesn't exist simply wouldn't be allowed to register it with that name.

[renzhe]

Wikitionary gives it as both bi4 and da2: http://en.wiktionary.org/wiki/%E9%90%BD

Apparently, it's in Kangxi, so it was loaned to mean "darmstadtium" instead of invented.

[anonymoose]

Apparently, it's in Kangxi, so it was loaned to mean "darmstadtium" instead of invented.

I see. I didn't notice that. Well, I wonder what the most recently invented characters are then.

Incidentally, some more obscure characters for chemical elements are shown here, specifically for elements 104 and above.

There are various restrictions on the names you can give a company and a company using a character that doesn't exist simply wouldn't be allowed to register it with that name.

Yes, registering might be a problem, but it doesn't mean the company couldn't operate under a different name. For example, I doubt this noodle shop is registered under its trading name (although I don't know for sure).

[Lu]

I was serious about being able to create words in English (e.g. scuba, radar, laser come to mind, all "acronyms" that became words, but there are many others).

Chinese does that too, take the initial characters of words to create a new term, that is, a shorter, more user-friendly version of a long word.

Do you know any fully new words, that weren't loaned or derived, but really invented from scratch? For my own language the only word I can think of now is 'fiets', bicycle, and that's probably more because I don't know its origins than that it was really invented from scratch when that vehicle came in use.

[chrix]

Yeah, Lu, the Dutch Wikipedia cites the Woordenboek der Nederlandsche Taal und gives two possible etymologies:

- after a guy called Viets

- from the French vélocipède (this is the more likely)

I think in most languages it is very rare for a word to be made up completely, except for brand names (which in some cases have become regular words). One famous counterexample is "gas", created by a Flemish chemist, but even that was probably modeled after "chaos"...

[jbradfor]

Do you know any fully new words, that weren't loaned or derived, but really invented from scratch?

Lewis Carroll did, but fortunately(?) most of them didn't catch on:

http://www.jabberwocky.com/carroll/jabber/jabberwocky.html

I would expect there are some, but as they are "normal" words now, we don't know it. Abracadabra and supercalifragilisticexpialidocious also come to mind, but those aren't exactly "real words" or in common usage. Maybe "byte" is an example?

So while I agree it's rare, I think the point still stands, that there is a difference between forming new words in Chinese (which pretty much can use only existing characters), and forming new words in an alphabet-based language (I'll stick with English for now as examples).

Once a new word is created in English, whether created from latin/greek correctly (e.g. scientific names for things or an element, medical terms) or incorrectly (e.g. automobile, pentium), is a portmanteau (e.g. sexting, pixel), is from a foreign language either as-is (e.g. ennui) or modified (e.g. ketchup), or is an acronym (e.g. laser, radar, scuba, modem), I would argue that most native speakers ignore its etymology and just focus on it just being a word. For example, I would think that most people don't know what laser "stands for", and even for those of us that do, we don't think of the full text when reading it. It is now "just a word".

Contrast that to Chinese, and since I'm not a native speaker correct me if I'm wrong, but I think it's harder when reading a Chinese work that consists of two characters to separate the word from each of the two characters.

Hence, I think that for Chinese, the way a word is created from the characters is more visible. Maybe an example in English is herbicide. Except for people that deal with it daily, I would think that for most native speakers the way the word is formed (herb + icide) is more apparent.

[chrix]

Well, someone already brought up the chemical elements as a counterexample. Also, you can still create words from scratch, as you can use characters for their sound value only.

But one big difference is that Chinese does not borrow words easily, but prefers calquing. And that creates definitely a different "feeling".

[jbradfor]

renzhe says that 鐽 as an element name is actually not created, it's existed for centuries, but was re-utilized (recycled?) for a new purpose.

But you bring up a good point about transliterated words into Chinese. I would expect that to feel more similar to an alphabet (in which each letter has no meaning by itself). I do wonder, for a native Chinese speaker reading a transliterated word, how much the original mean of each character is still in their mind.

[anonymoose]

Another one of the chemical elements (seaborgium) is a character consisting of a 金 and a 喜. For some reason, if I put it here, then the rest of my post disappears, so if you want to see this character yourself, you can follow this link.

Anyway, I couldn't find any previous use of this character, so could this one be a new invention? Or maybe someone else can find a prior occurance of this.

[chrix]

I'm not talking about darmstadtium, I'm talking about all the other characters that were created: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Chemical_elements_in_East_Asian_languages

EDIT: Even more in organic chemistry: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Organic_nomenclature_in_Chinese

Edited December 8, 2009 at 06:48 PM by chrix

[xiaocai]

I'm not talking about darmstadtium, I'm talking about all the other characters that were created: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Chemica...sian_languages

EDIT: Even more in organic chemistry: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Organic...ure_in_Chinese

Yes, most of these chemical names were made from scratch, if you take radicals as the smallest units in Chinese. And my favourite among them will be 甾, with the 田 depicting the four rings and 巛 representing the three alkyl groups on C10, C13 and C17. Whoever invented this character must be a genius. It seems to me that those who are most keen on making new characters are actually chemists.

I think it is indeed harder to create an all new character with existing radicals in Chinese than making new words in any alphabet based languages, and the nature of Chinese writing system has determined that there will be no such thing as "acronym" in Chinese. This may be a disadvantage, since we have at least on way less to create new words. But that is just how Chinese is; no language is perfect. Not so many years ago there was even a group of people that advocated obsoleting Chinese characters as a whole and adapting Latin alphabet as the new writing system, primarily due to its apparent difficulty to master even for native speakers of the language and "unfriendliness" to printing and later computerisation. There is a long story behind the debate, and I think there are many people on these forums know it better than I do. But now 汉字 is still surviving in spite of all these downsides, thanks to the effort of many, and not many people are too concerned about the "originality issue" jbradfor has mentioned.

That being said, with the increasingly rapid emergence of new things and ideas, we may need new methods to create new words to describe these things and ideas more precisely very soon. Who know? I just think it will be interesting to see.

[animal world]

there is a difference between forming new words in Chinese (which pretty much can use only existing characters), and forming new words in an alphabet-based language (I'll stick with English for now as examples).

Imho, the proper analogy would be making new words in Chinese with new hanzi and new words in English with NEW LETTERS. Don't see the latter happen anytime soon, do you? So, if we don't see fit to expand on our measly alphabet of 26 letters, it's even more daunting for the Chinese to expand on their already vast arsenal of hanzi. The command of the average Chinese is roughly 3,000 hanzi (if that much); mastering 5,000 hanzi is considered to be quite well-educated. Beyond that is for people whose counterparts in English have words such as sesquipedalian* in their vocabulary.

So, i see new hanzi coming into being for highly-specialized fields, such as the cited 甾, that will be cherished and immediately understood by people engaged in those fields. Furthermore, i see the possible resurrection of rarely used hanzi to satisfy new needs and trends, such as the internet lingo. An example of this is the popular 囧. There's a vast inventory of seldom-used hanzi whose meanings could be expanded to suit current needs. As the Chinese have spent centuries to develop this inventory, there's no need for them to rack their brains now to come up with new ones. Creating new words is a different matter.

*Not quite a good analogy, as this refers to long words not words based on rarely used letters.

[gerri]

Somehow, that wakes the (not really existing) mathematician in me: If you take all the radicals of the Chinese writing system, and the rules by which they are combined to form characters - are all possible combinations/permutations in existence, or are there still many more possibilities?

[xiaocai]

Somehow, that wakes the (not really existing) mathematician in me: If you take all the radicals of the Chinese writing system, and the rules by which they are combined to form characters - are all possible combinations/permutations in existence, or are there still many more possibilities?

Radicals can be roughly divided into 部首 and 非部首偏旁 two big categories. And most chinese characters are made up by combining two radicals with one from each of the categories. 部首 are much less in number and most dictionaries recognise ~100 of them. But there are a good thousand of 非部首偏旁 existing. And this will make it well over 100,000 for two-radical combinations, not to mention characters made up of three or more radicals. By contrast, he biggest Chinese dictionary available, which is 康熙字典, lists less than 50,000 characters. So I believe that there are still plenty of possibilities of brand new characters.

[anonymoose]

If you take all the radicals of the Chinese writing system, and the rules by which they are combined to form characters - are all possible combinations/permutations in existence, or are there still many more possibilities?

Even to think about calculating this mathematically makes my brain hurt, but to answer your question, I think the characters in existance only cover a small fraction of possibilities.

There are countless possible combinations which are not in existance. Just as a simple example, take all the characters composed of a 口 containing another component, such as 回、囚、囝、囡. According to my dictionary (which is fairly comprehensive), I count about 30 or so such characters. If you look in the Kangxi dictionary, you will probably find many more. But consider how many individual character components are there. If we consider radicals, that's something like 200 or 300, which means we could create another 200+ characters just by putting individual components in the 口. And then there are also characters like 圆、囮、囥 where the content of the 口 is not just a single component, but a compound consisting of two components, or we could say, consisting of other characters in their own right. So if we include these possibilities also, you could probably create another 1000 characters just based on the 口.

The number of possibilities is enormous. And when you've done all that, you could just start putting characters into groups of three, in the same vein as 鑫、众、鱻 and you've instantly doubled your number of characters.

[imron]

To be honest, going forward I don't really think we'll see that many new characters coming in to the language - at least not any mainstream ones. With effort involved in getting them added to the various Chinese fonts, added to the Unicode standard, poor support in general for Unicode applications using Chinese characters outside the BMP, adding them to all the various different input methods, and then actually getting all those updated to people's machines, it's going to be restricted to rare characters or those with specialist needs who can through all the above hassle. I think we're far more likely to see older characters co-opted for new purposes, like with 囧.