How to ask "what is x character's 书面 form?"

[歐博思]

How would I ask this?

For instance just a moment ago I was trying to recall the written form of 些 ( I now remember as 些许). I was trying to baidu this but I wasn't sure how to search for this. ----些字的书面版?

[anonymoose]

What do you mean by the written form? What's the non-written form of that character?

If you simply want to ask how to write a character, then you can just say "X怎么写?".

[cd6883]

XX and 书面语 are enough, you can also say XX（的）书面语怎么说？

[Hofmann]

Are you simplifying it too much into a system where there's a 口語 and 書面語 expression for everything?

狗，書面語是甚麼？ Don't tell me it's 犬.

[歐博思]

Thanks CD6883.

Nowhere did I say that. Hoffman what's your point? 犬 is a fancier way to say 狗. That is fact.

[muirm]

I think Hofmann's point is that they are not different "forms" of the same word as you suggested, but rather two different words, where one happens to be used more commonly in writing.

[歐博思]

Either I didn't ask clearly or some of you are missing the point. 些 and 些许 both mean "a few". The meaning is the same. The latter has two characters and means the same as the first. I was merely seeking out how to find the second character that maintains the original meaning as the lone character. Chinese sometimes pads a character with a second similar character for prosodic reasons among other things as I'm sure some of you already know.

[Hofmann]

That is not 書面語. 書面語 is a register where certain words tend to be used in place of others. That you said "版" in your attempt at translation suggested that you thought of sets such as 些 and 些許 as different versions of the same thing. 口語版, 書面語版, 1.01版, etc.

What you have here is a character added to another character in order to clarify it (There are at least 8 things that sound like xiē and one thing that sounds like xiēxǔ), and the result happens to be more common in 書面語.

[Patpat]

Well, looks like people have all sorts of (crazy) ideas about what 书面语 actually is, which is par for the course. My two cents is that the better translation for "form" might be 形式, yielding “XXX的书面语形式是什么？” or, given the above observation that not all words have 书面语 equivalents, you could also ask “XXX有书面语形式吗？”

Near-synonymy IS possible (but not necessary) between some partners of oral-written pairs but my intuition is that are *many* more domains in which 些许 would be appropriate than 犬...this may be b/c in modern Chinese my impression is that 犬 cannot be a free morpheme. (so you need to add modifiers yielding 猎犬、牧羊犬, etc.).

It is not clear why homophony would be an issue for written Chinese but not for spoken. The rhythm hypothesis is more appealing but has similar issues.

Not all written language forms are of the spoken+classical form that 些许 takes, so watch out for that too！

[daofeishi]

There is no absolute distinction between 书面语 and 口语. The most likely place to find more formal-sounding synonyms of a given word would be a dictionary (like zdic.net)

Searching for 些, I got 些许 as a common synonym. The same with 更为 for 更 and 最为 for 最. I don't think searching for 书面形式 in a search engine is likely to get you very far

If you want to ask a friend, you could perhaps ask something like "一些"的些有更正式的同义词吗？ But be prepared to explain what you mean by 正式.

[tooironic]

書面語 and 口語 are readily understood concepts by most native speakers of Chinese; just asking what X的書面語/口語是甚麼？ should suffice.