Dear Mr. Thomas Chan and Mr. James Campbell,
Hi! I wasn't really able to write for a while because I was really busy.Anyway, I just wrote again to give you some information and to ask you some questions as well for this character.
1. I saw 2 variant form,s of the character "min" on a certain t.v. show discussing chinese character etymologies some years ago. The first form shows min with 1 mountain on the top, while the other one has 2 mountains.I also saw the ancient form of the character, with a different "door" radical and the character for insect is inside it.
I also saw the min character on this website, but it is with the shui(water) radical.Apparently, it doesn't have a meaning. Is it also a variant of the min character? Do you know any variants of this character? thanks a lot.
Richard
The different forms of min(fukien province)
-
Thomas Chan
Re: The different forms of min(fukien province)
Richard wrote:
>
> 1. I saw 2 variant form,s of the character "min" on a certain
> t.v. show discussing chinese character etymologies some years
> ago. The first form shows min with 1 mountain on the top,
> while the other one has 2 mountains.I also saw the ancient
> form of the character, with a different "door" radical and
> the character for insect is inside it.
> I also saw the min character on this website, but it is with
> the shui(water) radical.Apparently, it doesn't have a
> meaning. Is it also a variant of the min character? Do you
> know any variants of this character? thanks a lot.
Could you provide a link or some other reference to the characters
you see in CCDICT? e.g., 閩 is U+95A9. I'm having some trouble
trying to imagine exactly what the character looks like from your
descriptions. Do you mean 虫 with the three-drops-of-water radical
水 to the left of it? Or 閩 with a water radical to the left of it? Or
something else? By "ancient form", do you mean 閩 where 門 and 虫
are in their seal forms? Most of the time, that isn't treated as a
separate character.
The _Hanyu Da Zidian_ 漢語大字典 doesn't list any variants for 閩 in the
variants list in vol. 8 (other than the obvious PRC simplified form), but that
doesn't mean the table doesn't contain omissions. And the _Kangxi Zidian_
康熙字典 doesn't have a variants index to consult.
Thomas Chan
tc31@cornell.edu
>
> 1. I saw 2 variant form,s of the character "min" on a certain
> t.v. show discussing chinese character etymologies some years
> ago. The first form shows min with 1 mountain on the top,
> while the other one has 2 mountains.I also saw the ancient
> form of the character, with a different "door" radical and
> the character for insect is inside it.
> I also saw the min character on this website, but it is with
> the shui(water) radical.Apparently, it doesn't have a
> meaning. Is it also a variant of the min character? Do you
> know any variants of this character? thanks a lot.
Could you provide a link or some other reference to the characters
you see in CCDICT? e.g., 閩 is U+95A9. I'm having some trouble
trying to imagine exactly what the character looks like from your
descriptions. Do you mean 虫 with the three-drops-of-water radical
水 to the left of it? Or 閩 with a water radical to the left of it? Or
something else? By "ancient form", do you mean 閩 where 門 and 虫
are in their seal forms? Most of the time, that isn't treated as a
separate character.
The _Hanyu Da Zidian_ 漢語大字典 doesn't list any variants for 閩 in the
variants list in vol. 8 (other than the obvious PRC simplified form), but that
doesn't mean the table doesn't contain omissions. And the _Kangxi Zidian_
康熙字典 doesn't have a variants index to consult.
Thomas Chan
tc31@cornell.edu
-
Richard
Re: The different forms of min(fukien province)
Dear Thomas,
The character has three drops of water on its left side.The other 2 variants that I've mentioned here are not in this website's ccdict nor on any other ccdict. Btw, why isn't the ancient form of min considered to be another separate character? what are the other ways to look for in considering a character as a separate one? does it mean that if there aren't any appendices about its variants in the hanyu da zidian,no variants of the character exist? I'm really so sure that I saw the other 2 characters on t.v. They were clasified on the mountain bushou.
Thank you very much.
Richard
The character has three drops of water on its left side.The other 2 variants that I've mentioned here are not in this website's ccdict nor on any other ccdict. Btw, why isn't the ancient form of min considered to be another separate character? what are the other ways to look for in considering a character as a separate one? does it mean that if there aren't any appendices about its variants in the hanyu da zidian,no variants of the character exist? I'm really so sure that I saw the other 2 characters on t.v. They were clasified on the mountain bushou.
Thank you very much.
Richard
-
Thomas Chan
Re: The different forms of min(fukien province)
Richard wrote:
> The character has three drops of water on
> its left side.
Ah, so it is U+2405D.
Once again, you've stumbled across one of those characters that is hard to
get information on. I would advise checking the unihan.txt file first,
since the characters in chinalanguage.com's dictionary are simply the ones
in a character set (for computers), and character sets for computers can
and do contain weird characters (including mistakes). If it's in a dictionary
like the _Kangxi Zidian_ or the _Hanyu Da Zidian_, etc., then we can look it
up, but otherwise, there's really no easy way to really find out what a
character really is.
unihan.txt[1] says only this:
>U+2405D kIRGKangXi 0657.361
>U+2405D kIRG_TSource F-554D
>U+2405D kRSKangXi 85.14
>U+2405D kRSUnicode 85.14
That means, it is not in the _Kangxi Zidian_ (----.--1), but it would be after
the 36th (----.36-) character on (modern) p. 657 (0657.---) if it were. It
comes from Plane 0Fh (decimal 15) of CNS 11643-1986. And it is filed under
radical #85 (水), with 14 residual strokes (for 閩).
It is probably just some character dug out of the Taiwan government's records.
[1] You can get it from http://www.unicode.org/Public/UNIDATA/ .
> The other 2 variants that I've mentioned here
> are not in this website's ccdict nor on any other ccdict.
> Btw, why isn't the ancient form of min considered to be
> another separate character?
If the "ancient form" is composed of the same pieces, then there's really
nothing different about the character--if the "ancient form" of 閩 is just
the "ancient form" of 門 plus the "ancient form" of 虫, then you probably
won't find a separate entry. It's usually only if there is some kind of
large difference, like 之 and ㄓ, that the "ancient form" (古文) is listed
seperately. But I don't know what the criteria is--certainly, 雨 'rain' and
its "ancient form" U+20572 are structurally similar?
> what are the other ways to look
> for in considering a character as a separate one?
This is not a simple issue. Would you have considered 內 and U+5185 to be
one or two different characters? Most likely, one, but Unicode choose to
encode them as two. But for 直 (U+76F4), there's more than one possible
for it (and they are somewhat different-looking), and some people would've
said they were two[2].
I would read chapter 10 "East Asian Scripts" of the Unicode 3.0 book to
understand how Unicode handles matters (which may not be how any other
dictionary might handle it), especially about the 3-dimensional model,
component structure, unification, etc.
[2] I've got some scans from various sources at
http://deall.ohio-state.edu/grads/chan.200/cjkv/u76f4/ .
[3] http://www.unicode.org/uni2book/ch10.pdf
> does it
> mean that if there aren't any appendices about its variants
> in the hanyu da zidian,no variants of the character exist?
> I'm really so sure that I saw the other 2 characters on t.v.
> They were clasified on the mountain bushou.
That just means the index contains omissions (remember a while ago
when you asked me about variants of 岷, and through reading the entries,
I found a variant that wasn't listed in the HYDZD variant index?), or that
the dictionary compilers didn't know about the character (for example, many
Cantonese dialect characters are not in the _Hanyu Da Zidian_, although almost
any Cantonese speaker is familiar with them).
Thomas Chan
tc31@cornell.edu
> The character has three drops of water on
> its left side.
Ah, so it is U+2405D.
Once again, you've stumbled across one of those characters that is hard to
get information on. I would advise checking the unihan.txt file first,
since the characters in chinalanguage.com's dictionary are simply the ones
in a character set (for computers), and character sets for computers can
and do contain weird characters (including mistakes). If it's in a dictionary
like the _Kangxi Zidian_ or the _Hanyu Da Zidian_, etc., then we can look it
up, but otherwise, there's really no easy way to really find out what a
character really is.
unihan.txt[1] says only this:
>U+2405D kIRGKangXi 0657.361
>U+2405D kIRG_TSource F-554D
>U+2405D kRSKangXi 85.14
>U+2405D kRSUnicode 85.14
That means, it is not in the _Kangxi Zidian_ (----.--1), but it would be after
the 36th (----.36-) character on (modern) p. 657 (0657.---) if it were. It
comes from Plane 0Fh (decimal 15) of CNS 11643-1986. And it is filed under
radical #85 (水), with 14 residual strokes (for 閩).
It is probably just some character dug out of the Taiwan government's records.
[1] You can get it from http://www.unicode.org/Public/UNIDATA/ .
> The other 2 variants that I've mentioned here
> are not in this website's ccdict nor on any other ccdict.
> Btw, why isn't the ancient form of min considered to be
> another separate character?
If the "ancient form" is composed of the same pieces, then there's really
nothing different about the character--if the "ancient form" of 閩 is just
the "ancient form" of 門 plus the "ancient form" of 虫, then you probably
won't find a separate entry. It's usually only if there is some kind of
large difference, like 之 and ㄓ, that the "ancient form" (古文) is listed
seperately. But I don't know what the criteria is--certainly, 雨 'rain' and
its "ancient form" U+20572 are structurally similar?
> what are the other ways to look
> for in considering a character as a separate one?
This is not a simple issue. Would you have considered 內 and U+5185 to be
one or two different characters? Most likely, one, but Unicode choose to
encode them as two. But for 直 (U+76F4), there's more than one possible
for it (and they are somewhat different-looking), and some people would've
said they were two[2].
I would read chapter 10 "East Asian Scripts" of the Unicode 3.0 book to
understand how Unicode handles matters (which may not be how any other
dictionary might handle it), especially about the 3-dimensional model,
component structure, unification, etc.
[2] I've got some scans from various sources at
http://deall.ohio-state.edu/grads/chan.200/cjkv/u76f4/ .
[3] http://www.unicode.org/uni2book/ch10.pdf
> does it
> mean that if there aren't any appendices about its variants
> in the hanyu da zidian,no variants of the character exist?
> I'm really so sure that I saw the other 2 characters on t.v.
> They were clasified on the mountain bushou.
That just means the index contains omissions (remember a while ago
when you asked me about variants of 岷, and through reading the entries,
I found a variant that wasn't listed in the HYDZD variant index?), or that
the dictionary compilers didn't know about the character (for example, many
Cantonese dialect characters are not in the _Hanyu Da Zidian_, although almost
any Cantonese speaker is familiar with them).
Thomas Chan
tc31@cornell.edu
-
James Campbell
Re: The different forms of min(fukien province)
Sorry I can't help out here, but your questions sound really exhaustive by now. Good thing Thomas Chan has more patience than I do.
> I'm really so sure that I saw the other 2 characters on t.v.
> They were clasified on the mountain bushou.
Oh yeah! you do your Chinese reading on t.v. too? Do you get that "weird and ancient characters nobody knows anymore" program still?!? I think they stopped broadcasting it here! You got any of the old programs saved on tape by chance?
> I'm really so sure that I saw the other 2 characters on t.v.
> They were clasified on the mountain bushou.
Oh yeah! you do your Chinese reading on t.v. too? Do you get that "weird and ancient characters nobody knows anymore" program still?!? I think they stopped broadcasting it here! You got any of the old programs saved on tape by chance?
-
Richard
Re: The different forms of min(fukien province)
Sorry about that. Its just that I have a penchant for Ancient characters.I've
seen that t.v. program probably some years ago.I don't have a copy of that t.v. program. The t.v. program used standard mandarin Chinese and discussed characters found on epitaphs and other ancient sources.Sorry about my exhaustive questions. I was just asking you since I do have a column in my school paper which focuses on Chinese linguistics.
Thanks a lot.
Richard
seen that t.v. program probably some years ago.I don't have a copy of that t.v. program. The t.v. program used standard mandarin Chinese and discussed characters found on epitaphs and other ancient sources.Sorry about my exhaustive questions. I was just asking you since I do have a column in my school paper which focuses on Chinese linguistics.
Thanks a lot.
Richard
-
LIAO TIAN MING
Re: The different forms of min(fukien province)
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ltm8888@hotmail.com (MSN user)
Native Chinese(Mandarin, Cantonese) speaker with fluent English from GuangDong, China. (Simplified character is used by mainland Chinese!) Experienced Chinese tutor for International student, knows exactly what the learner needs. And with good computer skills too.
Please dont hesitate to email me if you have any questions and I will be pleased to talk with you in further details.
ltm8888@hotmail.com (MSN user)