What differentiates radicals and other character components?

[Skyelar]

Unless I'm mistaken and all character components can be considered radicals, what makes certain components radicals and others not radicals? I'm not talking about the obvious ones that can't stand alone as characters, like 亻 and 氵, I'm talking about components like the 女 in 妾, which Wikipedia claims is a radical.

[Hofmann]

Depends on who you're talking to.

[querido]

To Skyelar:

Character decomposition and related issues in etymology are partly ancient history, partly the imaginings of scholars through the ages that have earned a place in tradition, partly the original imaginings of current scholars in that subject, and partly your own (seeing things that are helpful to you whether or not anybody else sees it). 

 

What I wanted as a beginner in the language was a single, consistent, conservative, legitimate-enough source for this kind of info (which I could simply allow to settle all such questions in my mind). My choice was the ABC Dictionary, whose electronic form was only available in Wenlin at that time, as far as I knew, but which now comes with Pleco too. (But I don't remember whether or not all of the etymological stuff is also accessible in Pleco.)) I never regretted this decision and I still use Wenlin every day. But by now maybe someone here can point you to a website etc.

 

Here is why you need not get too involved in your original question:

The number of radicals, and which character-features would be called radicals, were questions decided by the authors or compilers of very famous dictionaries over the centuries, and probably by committees commissioned by universities and governments. But different authors or groups made different decisions because they had different ideas about how the dictionary should be subdivided and organized. So, there is no single authoritative answer. But you'd like to settle it and other such questions with one reliable and useable answer and move on, right? That's what I meant in the second paragraph above.

[Skyelar]

Ah, I see. Thank you both for your answers! 谢谢你们都的答案！

[OneEye]

Radicals (部首) are simply a means of arranging characters and looking them up in traditionally-arranged dictionaries.

 

Traditional dictionaries are arranged into sections (called 部 in Chinese). Each character in a given section shares a common graphic component. That graphic component appears at the beginning (or "head" 首) of the section, hence the term 部首, which would be better translated as "section head." Some people use "radical" to mean "any component of any character, regardless of function or lack thereof," but strictly speaking, this is not accurate.

 

Some people think radicals are the same as meaning components (semantic components), but that's also not the case. Sometimes the radical is a sound component. Sometimes it's a corrupted component. Sometimes it's a part of a sound or meaning component.

 

So it's important to keep in mind what radicals are, and leave them out of everything else. They're used to look up characters in dictionaries, and that's it. When talking about etymology, the word "radical" should not enter the picture. Unless, of course, you're telling someone which section of the dictionary to find the character in.

[tooironic]

So what do you call anything else in a character that is not a radical? A component? And if so what kind of components are there?

[889]

On Wenlin, you can search on any character for its use a component in any other characters.

[querido]

Here's an example from Wenlin's entry for 好. The triangles are links to the given info:

 

Here is Wenlin's explanation of how it does things. Of course, when I copied and pasted the trangle-links did not follow, and you probably don't have the fonts to show everything.

Explanation.txt

[OneEye]

So what do you call anything else in a character that is not a radical? A component? And if so what kind of components are there?

 

Yeah, components. Sure, some people say things like "this is the phonetic radical" or whatever, but that's muddying the water. I prefer clarity. Radical = 部首 = dictionary lookup. Component = 部件 = any part of a character. Functional component = 偏旁 = component that serves a function within a given character (note: 部件 and 偏旁 are used interchangeably by most people, but palaeographers generally make the distinction I mention here). So, there are non-functional components/部件, like the 口 in 部. The functional components are 咅 (expresses sound) and 阝 (expresses meaning). In 部, 口 is just part of the sound component.

 

There are a bunch of different kinds of functional components, and the distinctions between them can get pretty hair-splittingly small. But you can generally group them into four categories (I'm using Outlier terminology here because I think it's clearer than what's used in much of the English-language academic literature like "phonophore" and such):

 

1) Sound components. They hint at the sound of the character. The 大 in 达 is an example.

2) Meaning components. They give meaning to the character via their own meaning. The 大 in 尖 is an example (it means "big").

3) Form components. They give meaning to the character via their form. The 大 in 美 is an example (it depicts a person, while the part that resembles 羊 was originally a headdress).

4) Empty components. There are a few types, but one common type is a corrupted component. These are components that were originally one thing but corrupted over time into something else. This obscures the component's original function in the character, hence the term "corrupted." The 大 in 莫 is an example. It used to be 艸 on top and bottom, and the bottom one corrupted over time into 大:

 

Interestingly enough, while 大 is a radical, it is not the radical in any of the characters I mentioned, regardless of its function.

 

Corruption is an important concept that I've never seen talked about in Chinese character pedagogy. Usually, people try to force some kind of meaning onto a corrupted component (大羊爲美 is probably the most well-known example). This may be useful from a mnemonic perspective, but if you want to actually understand a character, making things up doesn't help. And in my opinion, understanding how a given character actually works, and how characters work as a system, is the key to long-term recall and predictive ability (i.e., being able to predict possible pronunciations and meanings of an unfamiliar character encountered in context). If you're artificially adding meaning where there is none, you're hiding the logic underlying Chinese characters from yourself.

 

Note: Some components can play more than one role. For instance, in 达, 大 is also a form component. The character originally depicted a person 大 crossing a road. The modern meaning "to arrive" is an extension of that. In the traditional character 達, what now looks like 土 (and hence, is a corrupted component) was originally 大. It was a person 大 walking a goat/sheep/ram/whatever 羊 across the road.

 

Anyway, I could talk about this forever, but I'll spare you.  If you're up for more torture, I wrote an article a while back about radicals. We also have some about corruption and using character etymology to help you learn Chinese characters.

 

Edit: Our dictionary has a function that allows you to to search for all characters using a component in a given role. So you can get a list of all the characters (from the most common several thousand) in which 大 is a sound component, or a form component, meaning component, or empty/corrupted component. We'll also have an option, like the one in Wenlin, which shows you every character it appears in regardless of function.

[tooironic]

Thanks OneEye, very interesting and informative as usual.