Question about radicals.

[Torito Verdejo]

Hi. I have a question about morphology and I guessed someone in this forum could give me an answer to it: why do we consider, for example, 肋 to be created from radical 肉, when it clrearly seems to be composed by 月 and 力?

Thank you very much.

[Gharial]

Hi, and welcome to the forums!

 

The problem is that the meat radical in most of its characters (I mean in the PRC, and HK, and presumably Singapore, etc, anywhere but Taiwan LOL) looks exactly like the moon radical. That is, the canonical meat radical may well be six strokes as a character in and by itself, but it is usually written with only four strokes when a mere component in other characters. Hence the possible confusion over the similar forms.

 

If you use a traditionally-indexed i.e. Kangxi 214-radical-based dictionary (e.g. the Far East, Harbaugh, the ABC ECCE, even Pleco's radical look-up in this particular regard) you'll be reminded (as well as potentially frustrated) that there is an "etymological"~indexical difference despite the similar forms, but if you use a simplified dictionary (e.g. the Oxford/CP Concise) or handwriting input (e.g. in the Pleco app) then you'll be less aware or even blissfully unaware of the precise components involved, as the two radicals are then conflated into a single look-up/section (compare however the keeping apart still of items like 日and 曰, even though they also look very similar when actually parts of characters). Personally, I prefer such combining, WYSIWYG ("what you see is what you get") indexes in instances like this (as the main point is ease of finding a potentially unknown character), even though some might argue that it is a missed opportunity "etymology"-wise.

 

For what it's worth, the Introduction to the Radical Index in the ABC ECCE has the following to say: "The majority of radicals that appear to have radical 74 'moon' really have radical 130 'meat'." The index itself lists only 11 or so characters under the 'moon' radical but over 100 under the 'meat' one.

 

The solution in such indeterminate tricky cases is to provisionally think of the item as having two meanings (i.e. meat/moon), and not worry about assigning the "correct" radical-meaning until after you've looked up the character that it's part of and ascertained the overall meaning. And like I say, simplified dictionaries will help a bit more in this regard.

 

In my Guide to Simplified Radicals (here: http://www.chinese-forums.com/index.php?/topic/31003-guide-to-simplified-radicals/ ), I state in footnote V that "characters relating to 'body parts' have 月 as left or base, while those related to 'moon' have 月 on the right", and I think that's a generalization that almost always holds true.

 

Just out of interest, there was a similar or related question a while ago: http://www.chinese-forums.com/index.php?/topic/38626-help-with-character-contains-these-radicals-%E6%9C%88%E8%A5%BF%E5%A5%B3/ . And the following is also worth a look (maybe it was posted before on CFs, but I can't remember quite where), and addresses in its comments, if not in the article itself, the Taiwan difference that OneEye mentions: http://justlearnchinese.com/does-chinese-radical-%E6%9C%88-implicate-body-parts-or-moon/

[lling]

“月”旁是由肉字演变而来的。现在的“月”旁，很少与月亮有关，极大多数是肉的意思。如：脚、脸、肺、肠、肾......

[OneEye]

The two characters were very similar from the very beginning. Here's an example of 肉 in Oracle Bone Script:

 

 

And here's an example of 月:

 

 

That similarity has continued up until today.

 

But actually, in the Taiwanese standard, 月 "meat" and 月 "moon" are differentiated. You can see that reflected in Harvey Dam's (Hofmann on Chinese-forums) calligraphy on our posters, and you can see it in the example characters on the right (which use the Taiwan Ministry of Education font) in the images below.

 

 

(for reference, 'f' is the form of the component, 'm' is the meaning when it's used as a component, and 'w' is the meaning when the character is used as or in a word. 'v' means variant, and 's' means simplified)

 

In the PRC and in HK, the two components are visually identical. But it's fairly easy to figure out when it's "moon" and when it's "meat" when used as a semantic component. Does it have to do with time, the moon, or light? It's moon. Does it have to do with the body, or meat, or something that happens to meat (as in 腐)? Then it's meat.

[Torito Verdejo]

Thank you very much, Gharial and OneEye. Both of you were very clear and exhaustive. I finally understood: some radicals, as it's the case for the one for "meat" and the other for "moon", have evolved towards a common composition and appearance, becoming hence homographs.
 

Thank you again for taking the trouble to answer.

[aless]

@OneEye Sorry， I know this post is more than one year old, but I came across those two images you posted (with the taiwanese characters for moon and meat), and I was wondering is they are from a book or from some online resource. I'm currently in Taiwan and if it's a book I'd like to check if they have it in the library. Do you happen to have the reference? 

[OneEye]

No worries!

 

That's actually from a set of PDF posters my company (Outlier Linguistics) publishes. You can find the posters here, and a demo of our dictionary for Pleco here.

 

Keep in mind that the full character for meat is 肉. The distinction I was talking about above only applies when talking about character components.

[lips]

It may be pedantic, but 月 in a Chinese character came from six different sources, and four of them resulted in the radical 月。

 

月、肉、舟、朋 (a pictogram 象形字)、丹、冒。The first four became the radical 月, but technically all are written slightly differently in traditional Chinese calligraphy. 丹 became the bottom part of 青, and the top part of 冒 became the bottom part of 胄.

[aless]

 Thanks @OneEye   I hadn't noticed the Outlier among Pleco dictionaries or, better said, I didn't think it could be useful also for beginners, "etymology dictionary" sounds a bit intimidating to someone who's just started studying chinese.

 

My problem actually is with the variant forms of the radicals, I couldn't find any reliable source that lists them all, for example, in the character 擦， it took me forever to find out the top part under 宀 is actually 月 and 卩, and I'm still not so sure about 卩.

 

I find Pleco characters decomposition and www.hanzicraft.com useful, but I don't know how reliable they are.

 

Thanks for the info!  

[Hofmann]

Looks like I didn't see this thread until more than a year later. Still, I'd like to clarify that in traditional (note, lowercase t) regular script, all components that look like 月 (or ⺝) are in complementary distribution, which means that in no cases does it make a morphological difference whether a 月-looking thing is etymologically a 肉 or 舟 or 月. The Taiwanese standard typefaces created this distinction, and Outlier's posters were made to reflect that.

[Luxi]

1 hour ago, aless said:

it took me forever to find out the top part under 宀 is actually 月 and 卩, and I'm still not so sure about 卩.

 

Yellowbridge does quite a good job with lists of components.

Here's their breakdown of 擦

http://www.yellowbridge.com/chinese/character-etymology.php?zi=擦#

 

Another site that gives good information and has an amazing collection of old characters  is Richard Sears' Etimology.

http://www.chineseetymology.org/CharacterEtymology.aspx?submitButton1=Etymology&characterInput=

 

 

[OneEye]

1 hour ago, lips said:

It may be pedantic, but 月 in a Chinese character came from six different sources, and four of them resulted in the radical 月。

 

 

Well, that's true, but in cases in which it's not actually 月 or 肉, we call those empty components. That is, it looks like one thing, but doesn't have its meaning or sound.

 

1 hour ago, aless said:

it took me forever to find out the top part under 宀 is actually 月 and 卩, and I'm still not so sure about 卩.

 

Well, it's not 卩, it's actually 又. 祭 was a picture of a hand 又 holding a piece of meat 肉 over a sacrificial altar 示.

 

9 minutes ago, Luxi said:

Another site that gives good information and has an amazing collection of old characters  is Richard Sears' Etimology.

 

 

Well, he's digitized a few books: 金文編, 甲骨文編, and 六書通. That's useful and cool, but those are all fairly dated (especially the last one) and scholars have revised their views on many of the ancient forms in those books. But I wouldn't say the other information on that site was good or reliable. Much of what he says is way outside the mainstream scholarly view. 小學堂 is great for looking up ancient character forms. Much more up to date, but they don't do much in the way of explanation. 

[Luxi]

11 minutes ago, OneEye said:

Much of what he says is way outside the mainstream scholarly view.

 

That's good to know. I've been using Etymology for a long time but never questioned.

 

14 minutes ago, OneEye said:

. 小學堂 is great for looking up ancient character forms.

 

Great, I didn't know that site, thank you! 

[aless]

@Luxi thanks for the links! Yellow Bridge does indeed a better job, it lists the radical as 又， while both Pleco and HanziCraft say it is卩.