On "loan characters" vs wrong characters

[Hwong_DsiKiem]

"The situation is that when the ancients wrote a character by sound regardless of meaning, it was a 'loan character'(通假字), which is considered a form of poetry, whereas if a modern schoolboy writes one, he is punished for writing the wrong character!" ~Chao Yuenren, paraphrased

This seems so ironic... Any thoughts?

[O…O]

Well,we study classical Chinese to know the ancient history,but not to communicate with others.Just like ancient English,if you write a sentence in modern English with several ancient English words among,it will look strange.

[sparrow]

There's  also the tendency to romanticize the past. Perhaps it's quaint if writing "touster" or "buk" instead of "toaster" or "book" is considered poetic in ancient texts, but maybe that's because the individuals who committed the mistakes, or the documents where the mistakes occur, are revered.

 

If the mistakes had been pointed out to the author after reviewing his draft, he might have corrected the mistake had he been able to. Having to write everything by hand must've made correcting such errors difficult—especially since Chinese characters are not easily corrected.

 

I'm speculating, but you can imagine it was among scribes' best interests to propagate the idea that such mistakes were "poetic", otherwise a particularly anal receiver of such a document might have demanded a rewrite—even if just to correct a few characters out of a thousand-character document.

 

But again, that's only speculation.

[OneEye]

The term 通假字 came around later to explain a phenomenon that occurred before the script was standardized. It wasn't really "wrong" when it was written, because there was no standard for what was "right." It was a very different stage in the development of the writing system, so what was acceptable of course differs from what's acceptable today. Language is fundamentally oral, and there is much more oral residue in any writing system at earlier stages of its development, so it makes sense that the sound of the character written was more important than its form. It's very different from today, when most people think of the form of the written word as being more important than the sound (hence the concept of correct spellings, whether they represent the spoken language or not). (see Walter Ong, Orality and Literacy for more on this)

 

That's not to say that characters don't get borrowed for their phonetic value today. They do. 花錢的花 has nothing to do with flowers, but is used for its pronunciation in order to avoid creating a new character to represent that word (裘錫圭 gives this as an example in his book《文字學概要》). That's not 通假, it's 假借, but still. Also, as I understand it, 通假 characters are used extensively in written Cantonese. Same deal in written Taiwanese, although people here tend to borrow characters based on their pronunciation in Mandarin rather than in Taiwanese, so it's kind of a weird cross-language 通假.

 

You should check out the bamboo texts from the Warring States period. The number of 通假 characters in those is staggering.

[Hwong_DsiKiem]

I know we need to learn them for Chinese lessons, and it's just a pain, because we're required to guess what they mean in the exams. I mean, Chinese characters are supposed to convey a meaning, not a sound. And I would use that as a counterargument to what you said towards the beginning. If Chinese characters are only about sounds, homophones wouldn't need to exist and Chinese would not need to convey meaning.

Of course, the simplified script now conveys sounds more so than the proper characters (正體字), which still convey meanings.

And even if what you said goes by, the same sentence Chao said could be used. I wouldn't say it's extensively used in Cantonese though. More like they haven't been taught the proper character. Like for instance, Cantonese speakers around here often replace the character 㗎 with 嫁, but if you have to do it properly, it would be 㗎.

[陳德聰]

proper characters (正體字)

...

 

 

Chinese characters are "supposed to" convey both a meaning and a sound. So the premise of your counterargument is false.

[skylee]

Like for instance, Cantonese speakers around here often replace the character 㗎 with 嫁, but if you have to do it properly, it would be 㗎.

Why is it proper?

[OneEye]

A written word only has any meaning because it represents a spoken utterance, which in turn only has meaning because a group of speakers agree it means something. A certain way of writing the word is only "correct" because the group of people who use the language  agree that it's the correct character to represent whatever spoken word. In the absence of this agreement (ie, in the absence of a standard for writing), you can't really talk about what's correct and what's not, only about what's actually used. When you're unsure of which character to write, using a character for its phonetic value makes perfect sense, because its the most likely thing to be understood (because again, language is fundamentally oral). Such was the case during the Warring States period, and such is the case with modern written Cantonese. 

 

Besides, your argument that 通假字 are "not...the proper character" is irrelevant to whether they are extensively used in Cantonese. Whether they fit your definition of proper or not has no bearing on whether the phenomenon actually takes place, and it does.

 

The Chao Yuanren quote ignores the fact that there was not necessarily one right character for each word in pre-imperial China. Nowadays, there is an agreed-upon standard against which language use is measured. A deviation from that standard in a way deemed unacceptable by native users of the language is called an "error." But you can't apply a modern notion to ancient people's usage. They weren't necessarily making mistakes, they were just using the writing system in the way it was being used at the time.

[Hwong_DsiKiem]

I don't see why I get downrepped for referring to proper characters by its actual name. That is NOT an argument. That is its name. Proper vs simplified characters. Or perhaps you only downrepped it because it is not what you call them in China. I hear that it is called "繁體字" there.

 

As for conveying meaning, I mean the characters convey meaning. Because look at how they are written. For instance, the character 愛 has a heart in the middle, and it conveys the meaning of love.

 

@Skylee, because that is the word that you are supposed to use. Same for how you don't write 製做, but 製造.

[skylee]

Re the use of 嫁 vs 㗎，who suppose that it should be 㗎？ Where is the standard?

[陳德聰]

I downvoted you because "proper" is a very loaded word, and that is simply not what we call it in English. It also gives completely unfounded meaning to the term as if there is actually something more "proper" about "正体字". It has nothing to do with the term being 繁体字 in China. I just take issue with your attitude toward language in general because it reflects a misunderstanding of the topic at hand.

[Hwong_DsiKiem]

Well those "traditional characters" are called 正體字 in both Taiwan and Japan.

And it isn't 嫁 because the dictionary gives the meaning of marriage for that character and 㗎 as the particle.

Perhaps I haven't been clear. I meant when using "gaa3" as a particle.

 

But no, I wasn't talking about traditional or simplified characters about the topic. I was talking about loan characters and characters that are considered wrong by teachers of schools.

 

Edit: If you are offended, I will use "traditional characters" to refer to the characters, since that isn't the point of the topic, traditional or simplified. It's about loan characters and what are considered wrong by teachers, when using homophones.

[陳德聰]

OneEye has provided some wonderful insight into 通假字 in #4 and #8.

In response to #4, you said Chinese characters are "supposed to convey a meaning, not a sound". This is false. They simultaneous convey both.

I suppose we can ignore your claim that 正体字 "still convey meanings" in comparison to 简体字 which apparently "conveys sounds more" (I don't see any evidence for this as they are both just orthographic representations of sounds that already exist).

Either way, I think the quote is not really all that ironic or interesting except as a musing on the development of a written standard for Chinese. But this seems perfectly natural considering that 通假字 exists specifically because of a lack of a standard... Spelling is largely arbitrary in the first place.

[Hwong_DsiKiem]

About what you said about nothing more proper, that is actually not very "accurate", if you will. The simplified characters started as hand-written abbreviations of the trad characters. Later it became official because many people were using it anyway, and also it was used to help improve the literacy rate. I have some old dictionaries and the article on Shinjitai to back me up on this. Although I hear that Taiwan, which uses what they call the proper characters, actually has a higher literacy rate. Not sure if that is really true though, but that is no longer the point.

 

My point is Chinese characters should convey meaning. So if you only use homophones, it loses the point.

I mean, for instance, the character for "brightness" is written with the sun and the moon, which give out light (well the moon doesn't give out light scientifically but that's the idea the character has). And so if I were to write 床前鳴月光, it no longer implies light anymore.

In fact, this is what my friends from overseas like about Chinese characters. You see the meaning in the words. Like for instance the door (門), electricity (電), etc. Although they do say that they prefer a more phonemic script, which is what simplified characters have done, say for instance, for the word "华", because of the Mandarin pronunciation of "化".

In fact, the Japanese borrow the meaning of the kanji, but not always the sound of them, into their language. For instance, "私" means "me", but is pronounced "watashi".

My teacher explains 通假字 this way: "it is a commonly accepted mistake that many writers use, so it has become standard."

But still, it is a pain when I see them in exams because I simply have to guess what they mean in classical text and we weren't taught most of them.

[sparrow]

Edit: This is the wikipedia article I used for this post.

 

 

 

My point is Chinese characters should convey meaning. So if you only use homophones, it loses the point.

 

That is only partially true. Chinese characters are classified as:

1. 象形字
2. 指事字
3. 会意字
4. 假借字
5. 形声字
6. 转注字

To quote Wikipedia on 形声字 :

By far the most numerous characters are the phono-semantic compounds, also called semantic-phonetic compounds or pictophonetic compounds. These characters are composed of two parts: one of a limited set of characters (the semantic indicator, often graphically simplified) which suggests the general meaning of the compound character, and another character (the phoneticindicator) whose pronunciation suggests the pronunciation of the compound character. In most cases the semantic indicator is also the radical under which the character is listed in dictionaries.

 

As you can see, the reality of Chinese characters is that most are composed of two parts: One part conveys meaning and another part conveys sound. And then there is also a significant portion of characters whose forms do not convey meaning in any whatsoever.

 

To quote Wikipedia about 假借字 :

Rebus was pivotal in the history of writing in China insofar as it represented the stage at which logographic writing could become purely phonetic (phonographic). Chinese characters used purely for their sound values are attested in the Chun Qiu 春秋 and Zhan Guo 戰國 manuscripts, in which zhi 氏 was used to write shi 是 and vice versa, just lines apart; the same happened with shao 勺 for Zhao 趙, with the characters in question being homophonous or nearly homophonous at the time.

 

As you can see, the transition from logographic to phonographic writing was an important change for many Chinese characters.

 

Lastly, the kind of Chinese characters you've been using to prove your point—pictograms and ideograms—only constitute a small set of Chinese characters. Again, from Wikipedia:

 

On 象形字 :

Pictograms make up only a small portion of Chinese characters.

 

On 指事字 :

Also called simple indicatives or simple ideographs, this small category contains characters that are direct iconic illustrations.

 

On 会意字 :

Translated as logical aggregates or associative compounds, these characters have been interpreted as combining two or more pictographic or ideographic characters to suggest a third meaning. [...] 

Xu Shen placed approximately 13% of characters in this category. However, many of these characters are now believed to be phono-semantic compounds whose origin has been obscured by subsequent changes in their form. Some scholars reject the applicability of this category to any of the compound characters devised in ancient times, maintaining that now-lost "secondary readings" are responsible for the apparent absence of phonetic indicators.

 

Thus, Chinese characters are not all about meaning. Many, in fact, are at least in part or wholly about sound.

[Hwong_DsiKiem]

But aren't the ones that show the sound in trad characters also show their meaning, do they really don't show the meaning and just the sound alone? So you're saying for instance, the character 棋 doesn't have anything related to 其? (actually that might not be the best example because "wood"'s on the other side... So it does show meaning, not just sound)

 

I mean, from the types you listed, they do convey meanings, except for 假借字

 

My reasoning is that all Chinese characters came from pictograms, which supposedly convey the character's meaning. Perhaps except for special words used only in some languages/dialects like "イ因"...

Less so in simplified characters, since they are more of a phonetic script than meaning-conveying characters.

[sparrow]

I forgot to post the link to the Wiki article I was using: Chinese character.

 

What I was trying point out with my last post is that Chinese characters do not all come from pictograms. At least according to Wikipedia, only the minority of Chinese characters come from pictograms, another small amount come from ideograms, another portion are phonetic, and the vast majority are a combination of phonetic part coupled with a meaning part.

 

But the meaning part usually doesn't convey much meaning—铁 has something to do with metal, but we don't know what. 棋 has something to do with wood, but its anyone's best guess. Only because I know it's about chess, I can in hindsight say, "Well, I guess chess pieces are made out of wood, right?" That's not a lot of meaning if you ask me. 补 has something to do with cloth, but you just have to shrug unless you already know what the character means! Most characters are like this.

 

Very little meaning is conveyed by the character itself. Most of the time, all the meaning portion of a character gives you is a general idea about what the broad category the character is about, and even that's not guaranteed. 花钱的花 has nothing to do with grass or plants. 使 means envoy, so that's where the 单人旁 comes from, but it also means a lot of other things that should probably be associated with a different character using the 提手旁, don't you think? There are many examples of this.

 

By the way, if you want to see some real pictographs, look up Naxi Wen. 纳西族 is one of the minority groups in Yunnan and they use a language that is truly pictographic. It's a dying language by the way, which sucks. I can imagine it's hard to teach kids that kind of written language in a modern world when it's so time consuming to write...

[Hwong_DsiKiem]

"鐵" would be a more accurate guinea pig if you want to discuss meanings, since simplified characters are more phonetic than meaning-implying, when compared with trad characters.

 

Although, funny thing that in Japan, they maintain a difference between chess, 棋 and go/igo/weiqi, 其 but with 石 as the radical.

 

But what I am saying is, Chinese characters came from the "pictures", so why are not all of them pictograms, as far as old characters are concerned?

 

"花钱的花 has nothing to do with grass or plants."

Ah that is something I have heard from my teachers. I was more referring to a character itself and not a word like this, as in, considering "電腦" with the sense of "electric brain" as opposed to "computer" here, since that is what they did for classical Chinese.

[OneEye]

Why don't you go do some reading on this and come back when you understand a bit more, so that we can actually have a reasonable conversation on it? I mentioned one book earlier, 裘錫圭《文字學概要》. It's probably the best one to read, but it may be too difficult and/or technical. Any college-level 文字學 textbook should do it. Read it, think about it, realize that the author knows much more about it than you or your teacher, and then come back with your questions. Your misunderstandings can all be easily rectified by carefully reading a book or two by a reputable scholar.

[Hwong_DsiKiem]

Actually it is the dictionary that I read that gave me some of the points, but I see that we do not seem to want to continue on at this rate, so perhaps we should drop it for the time being.