Chinese Complication Project

[roddy]

Given that the simplification of Chinese appears to have ground to a halt, I have decided to embark on the complication of Chinese. The idea is to produce a whole new range of characters to express ever more complex concepts.

The eventual aim is to have a set of characters so specific that entire books can be written with just three or four of them. Compulsory education will probably need to be extended to 60 years to ensure literacy, but on the plus side, high school graduates will be able to write complete libraries of books in the short time before they retire.

Obviously, this is quite a time consuming task. If anyone else would like to contribute, they are welcome.

Here's what I have so far. There are all single characters, created by combining other characters. I realise they are a little ugly, but I will try to tidy them up later. Also, there are no pronunciations yet - suggestions welcome.

1. A king, under a roof, surrounded by four women: Harem

2. A person under a table: Drunk

3. A friend beside trouble: That annoying feeling you get when a friend asks you to do a favour you really don't want to do

Does anyone know how I can go about getting these into dictionaries?

Roddy

[badatpool]

I think putting it on “Art and Literature” is preferable to doing it here. Yes, it’s a really good idea, especially another artist 徐冰（Xu Bing）who was famous by creating new Chinese characters(maybe it’s better to call them “signs”) didn’t get it in your age. And it's a shock in modern art for chinese artists at that time.

More?By the way,I like the third one.

[dmoser]

I love this idea. Yes, MORE characters, the more complicated, the better.

And there are so many new concepts that cry out for ideographic representation. How about a character for "chat room"? (Maybe the "trouble" character fan2 烦with 15 "mouth" radicals?) And the word "cool", which is now so ubiquitous, and is currently simply represented phonetically in Chinese with the character ku4 酷, simply cries out for some creative Hanzi rendering.

You're a genius, Roddy!

BTW, Xu Bing's work is indeed fascinating and worth checking out.

But of course, his claim to fame was creating plausible-looking but non-existent characters in order to spoof the impenetrable quality of ancient texts. I met him once, and he's a very thoughtful and serious artist, with a great sense of humor.

[asharpe]

This is quite like the English concept of a rebus: the placement and juxtaposition of words such that they convey a concept or well-known phrase (usually as a puzzle):

man

board = man overboard

secret <---

secret

secret = top secret

gnikool = looking backwards

Chinese seems wonderfully suited to this sort of puzzle/word play, since the characters lend themselves to compact complex representations. In fact, it might be argued that a lot of Chinese characters were "invented" as a rebus; zhongwen.com has much information about the origin of characters.

It appears that at least one dictionary (http://www.tigernt.com/cgi-bin/cedict.cgi) has the Chinese definition for rebus as 谜 ([mi2] /riddle/); it seems a bit more than that.

[roddy]

You're a genius, Roddy!

When I read that, I felt very

(which refers to suprised gratitude, of course)

Obviously, this is neither art, nor word games. It is linguistic destiny.

Roddy

[nnt]

Chinese complexification has been successfully carried out by Vietnamese people for Vietnamese language (always in advance ! ) with Nôm writing with the following characteristics :

• 
  Complete freedom for the "creative" writer (no "Satan-dardisation")
  Extensive use of homophones : no problem of memorizing the exact signification of each character (or half-characters), only used for its (variable) phonetic values
  Freedom of composition of new characters with radicals and the above-mentioned phonetic "atoms"
  Freedom of interpretation for the reader ("creative reading")
  

For example, how could you write "genius" in Nômized Chinese ?

Just choose any character in each set of characters :

{天田添填甜恬腆佃掭钿... etc }

x {才菜采材财裁裁猜踩蔡... etc...}

Roddy you're a 甜采 !

[Azumanga]

Just choose any character in each set of characters :

{天田添填甜恬腆佃掭钿... etc }

x {才菜采材财裁裁猜踩蔡... etc...}

Roddy you're a 甜采 !

Hehe, he can also be a 甜菜 （beet, sweet beet）

No offence, Roddy

[Azumanga]

Oh, Roddy, have you created the pronounciation for those complication Chinese characters?

[Lu]

Should be non-existant syllabes, methinks. Mong. Or chong2. Or muo. Or...

I really like inventing new characters. And I really like yours, Roddy!

[Azumanga]

Should be non-existant syllabes, methinks. Mong. Or chong2. Or muo. Or...

Chong2 is existant. 重 崇 虫

[Lu]

Oh. Chong3 then?

[Azumanga]

Oh. Chong3 then?

宠 chong3, 宠爱 chong3 ai4, dotes on somebody

[Lu]

Azumanga, you're correct. Someone once told me that the pronounciation chong3 inexplicably did not exist. I found that strange & interesting, but it turns out that person was wrong.

Ok, back to the complification.

[geoffkhan]

Yes!

Wait a second, isn't there something called "traditional Chinese"?

[roddy]

A morally correct refusal. For example:

我才认识他一个小时， 他就让我陪他回家
你去了没有？
当然没有，我了他就走了

Roddy

[amperel]

you are welcomed

[Ian_Lee]

雫 -- dripping, trickling

峠 -- mountain pass

I didn't complicate them. They already exist in the Japanese Kanji vocabulary.

[Lu]

I'm sorry to disappoint you in that last one Roddy, but 歪 already exists. It's pronounced wai1 and means, as you may guess, askew.

How about combining 客 and 不 for the meaning you had in mind? Or something with 否 (actually, that looks like complification in itself)?

[Claw]

Lu: look a bit more carefully... Roddy's character has 正 on top of 不, not the other way around as in 歪. In fact, he says he was inspired by the character 歪.

[pazu]

As NNT has said, Vietnamese Nom characters were exactly what Roddy had suggested... though Roddy was being later about 900 years.

I suggest you to have a look of the Nom Foundation Project here:

http://www.nomfoundation.org/

They have a very useful and interesting Nom Lookup Tool.