Radical Strokes Your first step into the Chinese script
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hinese writing is seen everywhere as Chinese characters serve as a potent decorative item. To find out how this writing came into being is an interesting journey. Chinese is a pictographic language and the complexities of the Chinese (written) language multiply for a non Chinese when one learns that there are no alphabets to begin with. It is not like many Indo-European languages where alphabets are strung together to form words. For everything that exists in the world, from things to people to phenomenon, Chinese language has denoted a special character to it. Lu Xun, a well known modern Chinese writer who was deeply influenced by Chinese literature, had once put the blame of China’s backwardness on the Chinese written script. He believed if Chinese characters were our pride, they are also an obstacle for the larger illiterate masses. The Chinese characters that I am referring to here are basically pictograms or symbols that are sometimes based on the shape/appearance of the thing and sometimes crafted to represent a different meaning. There are six classified groups
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( ) for writing Chinese characters. The first one is the primary pictographs or pictographic characters which are based on the shape and appearance of the objects they represented. The classical characters of horse ( ), vehicle ( ) and mouth ( ) are few examples of the primary pictographs. The second category is Self explanatory and Indicative characters. Under this category, Chinese characters are divided into two. They are sometimes the symbolic marks and sometimes another stroke/mark is added to the already existing character to change its meaning and make a new character. For example, in the character of tree ‘mu’ ( ) if we add another stroke ‘yi’ ( ) either on the top or bottom of it, it changes its meaning. If we add it on top of the character for ‘mu’, it becomes ‘mo’ ( ) which means ‘finish or decline’ since the logic applied here is a tree is finished if you cut it. On the other hand, if we add it to bottom of ‘mu’, it becomes ‘ben’ ( ) which means ‘roots’. There are Self explanatory characters which are very easy to recognize such as one ( ), two ( ) and three ( ). The indicative characters are father ( ) (the strokes at the bottom shows the father beating the son) to divide ( ) (the bottom has a ‘knife’ left to divide) and right ( ) (‘mouth’ at the bottom to show that its ‘right hand’ we use for eating) etc. The third category is Associative compounds or Ideographs which are formed by combining two or more elements, each with a meaning of its own to create a new meaning. The examples can be the character for home/family ‘jia’ ( ) and ‘kan’ which means to see ( ). In the character for home/ family it has a roof radical followed by character of pig at the bottom, explaining a concept of old houses where men used to stay up and pigs used to be in the basement. In the character ‘to see’ there’s a character of hand above the character of eyes explaining the posture when you see something. The fourth category is Pictophonatic characters or Ideophonatic compounds which has one element explaining the
meaning and the other lending the sound. For an example, ‘zhui’ ( ) will be common in all the following characters which have different meanings, ‘dui’ ( ) which has soil radical means dump or pile, ‘tui’ ( ) which has a hand radical means to push, ‘chui’ ( ) which has a metal radical means hammer and lastly, ‘shui’ ( ) which has a speech radical means who. In all the above characters, the radical explains the meaning and ‘zhui’ provides the sound. The fifth category is Phonetic loan characters. They are adopted to represent homophones or words which have the same sound. To illustrate, the character of ‘shu’ ( ) which means book and to write, also, the character of ‘ri’ ( ) which means day and sun at the same time. These words have the same sound but sometimes, can have different characters too, such as: ‘shu’ have two different characters for expressing ‘uncle’ ( ) and ‘beans’ ( ). The sixth category is of Mutually explanatory or Synonymous characters. For example the character for old ‘lao’ ( ) and the character for aged, long life ‘kao’ ( ), are almost similar in their usage and can be interchanged. There are three theories that some Chinese characters fall into one category based on its shape, sound and meaning. So, the above mentioned example also illustrate that both ‘lao’ and ‘kao’ should be under one category because they fall under the same radical ‘lao’ ( ). Another example of this kind can be ‘dian’ ( ) and ‘ding’ ( ) where the right part is common in both the characters and therefore, they should be under one category, even though they are not similar in sound and meaning. Another example of this kind can be ‘wu’ ( ) which means military and ( ) which means dance having the same sound. ‘Classical Chinese’ was later simplified and took upon shapes which bore no resemblance to the shape of the objects they represented. The new pictograms became distanced from the earlier realistic representations. After many modifications, ‘Simplified Chinese’ is compatible and comparatively far easier to learn. However, initially, it is always a challenge to memorize all the characters as they no longer appear similar to the picture/drawing of the objects they represent. Even with a simplified version of the lan-
guage, Chinese remains as one of the toughest languages in the world for its complex and vast script. During my days in Shanghai in 2005, many times it happened that when I didn’t understand a Chinese character in the newspaper, I would carry it to my Chinese friends studying at my university and they would be of no help. Their reply varied from: “I don’t know”, “I haven’t seen this word ever” to “Why do you need to look for this word?” It was then I realized that it is also very common for a native Chinese to not know many Chinese characters. There are approximately sixty thousand odd Chinese characters in the Chinese script, and definitely not all Chinese know all of them. A native Chinese is expected to know an average of eight thousand to ten thousand Chinese characters. The only way to learn Chinese characters is to memorize them arbitrarily one by one. Both India and China, the world’s two largest nations with the fastest growing economies, also happen to be neighbours. In the backdrop of recent moves about strengthening cultural exchanges between the people of the two Asian giants, India has tentatively planned to introduce Mandarin as a part of the school curriculum. Since there’s a dire need for both countries to understand each other and open new avenues for people to people contact, this comes as pleasant news.
MANJU HARA Manju Hara is a Research Scholar at Jawahar Lal Nehru University.
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