Does the pronunciation of the right radical always remain the same?

[Cyath]

One thing I've noticed in my study of Chinese is that it tends to be that words are pronounced the same regardless of the 左边。 (left side) Like

锤捶垂 all of these are all "chui"

 

And yet, sometimes they are not pronounced the same way after all! Examples of this escape me at the moment though.

 

Is there any guide or system to this? 

 

[Demonic_Duck]

Phonetic (sound) components most often come on the right, but it's far from consistent. Sometimes the phonetic component is placed elsewhere; sometimes it is technically phonetic but doesn't seem so due to historical sound changes in the language; and sometimes there's no phonetic component at all.

Examples: 整 (phonetic component 正 on the bottom)

脸 (phonetic component is 佥, which doesn't sound alike in modern Mandarin)

好 (no phonetic; 女 and 子 are both semantic).

[lechuan]

Outlier Linguistics has a good video on this subject.

[Lu]

And yet, sometimes they are not pronounced the same way after all! Examples of this escape me at the moment though.

睡.

猜 and 倩 are also good ones.

 

Unfortunately, the pronunciation of phonetic elements is not always the same. That would make it too easy. It's often still a useful hint though.

[Angelina]

It would be impossible for all of them to be pronounced the same. Language is always changing, plus, you only know how they are pronounced in 普通话, 普通话 is not everything. 

[lips]

down vote for #5?  WTF!?

[AdamD]

down vote for #5? WTF!?

Is it possible someone hit the wrong one by accident? I can't see some colours and always have trouble working out which one is which.

 

Either way, I agree with @Angelina in that the same character system (or thereabouts) is applied as widely as Cantonese and Japanese. Linguistically it'd be a stretch for an incredibly old writing system to apply to all associated forms of modern speech, and the simplification process never reliably responded to 普通话 phonemes.

[OneEye]

Phonetic (sound) components most often come on the right, but it's far from consistent.

 

That reminds me of a famous paper from the 70s by none other than 周有光 Zhou Youguang, the "father of pinyin," in which he massively botches the whole sound component thing. He basically defines sound components as "the part of the character that isn't the radical (部首)," and then cherry picks examples in which the "sound component" doesn't represent the pronunciation well, as a way of showing how "broken" the Chinese writing system is.

 

The most egregious example is 錦 jǐn. 金 jīn is both the radical and the sound component in this character, but since he's defined sound components as "the thing the isn't the radical," his argument is that 帛 bó makes a lousy sound component. Well, yeah. That's because it's a meaning component.

 

He makes the same mistake with other characters, and he even chooses some characters with no sound component to make his point.

 

The problem is, his paper is widely cited as authoritative because he's Zhou Youguang, and people use it to support their position that the Chinese writing system is broken, needs reform, is impossible for foreigners to learn, etc. But all it really demonstrates is that Zhou Youguang didn't understand the Chinese writing system quite as well as people think. And not only that, but because his paper is so influential, a lot of people use his definition of sound components in their analysis of the Chinese writing system! So his mistake has propagated through the decades and often comes up to rear its ugly head when we speak to Chinese educators about teaching characters. They object, saying that teaching character etymology isn't all that helpful because the sound components don't work very well anyway. But really, they just don't understand the system. But let's be honest, very few people do, which is what we're trying to change.

 

Interestingly, it's been found that "instructor-guided elaboration" of character structure significantly increases retention, but even in that paper the author gets a few character form explanations wrong. And there are a ton of papers on character acquisition for second language learners that focus on teaching radicals rather than functional components.

 

It's an epidemic.

 

猜 and 倩 are also good ones.

 

Actually, without having looked into it very deeply (so I could be wrong), my hunch is that 亻(人) could be the sound component in 倩 rather than 青. 人 and 千 were often interchangeable as sound components (their pronunciation was very similar in Old Chinese), and actually the ancient form of 千 was just 人 with an added mark for differentiation (and you can still kind of see it: 亻千). For me it was one of those things that was obvious once I saw it, but I might never have made the connection myself.

 

With 猜, we're looking at one of those ugly sound series. 青 made a good sound component for 猜 once upon a time. They had the same initial (tsʰ) and main vowel (e or ə), and the final consonant was pronounced in the same part of the mouth (ŋ and g). They've just diverged a lot over time.

[Angelina]

Mainland China had "the father of pinyin", Taiwan had "pinyin is a Russian conspiracy", a lot of damage done to scholarship and literacy skills. This, unfortunately, is not restricted to Mainland China. 

 

 

BTW 音韵学 is really difficult

[Demonic_Duck]

Do you always have to bring unrelated politics into every thread? FWIW 周有光 is hardly a supporter of the mainland establishment himself, the only reason he's not labeled a dissident is due to being a national treasure. Playing the relativism card really isn't necessary here...

[lips]

Do you always have to bring unrelated politics into every thread?

 

Amen, I'll remember this whenever I see politics creeping into a discussion in the future.

[艾墨本]

Woah, fascinating. Thanks OneEye!

 

As an extension, would it be accurate to say that current scholarship on character components is largely flawed due to this? Is the opinion you just expressed well known among academics that study characters?

[Angelina]

Putting the blame on one particular paper for subsequent flawed scholarship is not much different from the reason why such a thing happened in the first place, namely, that there is one problem that should be addressed.

Is the opinion you just expressed well known among academics that study characters?

Academics that study characters are usually wary of pointing at one problematic paper that apparently started an "epidemic".

[OneEye]

Notice that I didn't say the paper started the epidemic. That paper is part of the epidemic, not the cause of it. 

 

As an extension, would it be accurate to say that current scholarship on character components is largely flawed due to this? Is the opinion you just expressed well known among academics that study characters?

 

It depends on who you're reading. Paleographers tend to get it right more often because they understand this stuff on a deeper, more historical level. But there's plenty of bad scholarship in paleography, too.

[Angelina]

One other academic discipline Cyath might be interested in is 音韵学.

I suggest you to start reading both 文字学 and 音韵学.

[Lu]

With 猜, we're looking at one of those ugly sound series. 青 made a good sound component for 猜 once upon a time.

Oh, I don't doubt that. That was my hunch anyway. It's just that it can really trip one up after a series of 青 请 精 静 情 to suddenly run into 猜. Although personally I don't have any trouble getting 猜 right, it's 倩 that really got me when I first came across it. Thanks for the explanation for that one, I'd always figured that in the past qian and qing had a similar pronunciation, but I learned something new today.

[Angelina]

Does the 青 in 倩  imply meaning? Youth? I wonder how 倩 is pronounced in other Sinitic languages. 

 

 

This reminds me of 戋 钱 浅 贱 残 where 戋 is semantic and the rule is called 右文说. Less common then the usual 青 请 情 晴 清 where the right side is phonetic. 

[OneEye]

Thanks for the explanation for that one, I'd always figured that in the past qian and qing had a similar pronunciation, but I learned something new today.

 

Well, I could be wrong. But 千 actually makes a really good sound component for 倩. That is, it fits more neatly than 青 does (and that's true both historically and in other modern Sinitic languages). That doesn't mean 青 couldn't be the sound component, though, which is why I'm reserving the right to be wrong until I look into it more. One problem is that I haven't found an example of the character containing 千, only with 亻. However, the earliest example of 倩 I can find is Warring States, which is when the 人/千 (and 身) switch thing was really common, so it's not a deal breaker by any means.

 

Anyway, I'm going to cheat a bit and post a screenshot of a bit of our database. This or a version of it will make it into the "expert edition" entry for 人 in our dictionary:

 

[Angelina]

the earliest example of 倩 I can find is Warring States, which is when the 人/千 (and 身) switch thing was really common

 

This make sense.

[Lu]

Well, I could be wrong. But 千 actually makes a really good sound component for 倩. That is, it fits more neatly than 青 does (and that's true both historically and in other modern Sinitic languages).

I wish they'd done that.