Hi Ah-bin,
Thanks for your very informative reply.
Yes, you saw on closer reading that I was aware of the problem of the existence of different systems of simplified radicals. But you're quite right, I should have said "
a simplified system of radicals" rather than "
the simplified system of radicals".
Ah-bin wrote:It's because simplification was carried out only as a stop-gap solution before getting rid of the characters entirely and using some phonetic system. etc
Indeed, in my earlier reading about the "history of the Chinese language", I had come across the information that - initially - the Communists had envisaged character simplification as only a temporary measure - with the grand and ultimate goal being their eventual abolition, with replacement by pinyin. I also remember reading that this last goal had died a very quiet death. [In fact, from memory, I think I even read an article in the 80's or 90's which explained that at some stage (in the 60's or 70's) Zhou Enlai had been interviewed, and in that interview he had been asked what the progress was on the issue of abolishing Chinese characters, and he had either given a very neutral answer (e.g. "not one of our top priorities"), or perhaps even explicitly confirmed that the goal had been abandoned by the PRC government. (Note: the interview itself wasn't in the 80's or 90's, as Zhou Enlai died in the mid-70's - the 80's or 90's was when I read the article, referring to an interview from much earlier.)]
But, despite having known this for a long time (both the original intention to completely abolish characters, as well as the abandoning of this plan in the course of the 60's and 70's), I hadn't made the connection between the original policy and the lack of a standardized system of simplified radicals. Indeed, this is an excellent explanation for the current state of things, so thank you. Understanding why things are as they are - due to insights into the history - are always beneficial
.
I can only hope that the PRC government gets its act together and *starts* (or continues) working on such a system (of simplified radicals), which they can then promulgate. I am in general against authoritarianism, but in some cases (e.g. language standardardization), I'm sometimes in favour of it. I mean,
having a standard is IMHO (almost) always good; and then one should always be free to not use it
.
Again, I qualify my statement of this perceived need as being something from my own very Western perspective. I remember explicitly reading in one of my many books "about" the Chinese language (written in English, of course), that, for example (and I paraphrase, obviously, as it's something I read years ago): "In fact, the
numbers of the radicals themselves are more an artifact of Western learners learning Chinese, not something embedded in Chinese culture. The average Chinese person [of the ones familiar with the Kangxi system, i.e. from Taiwan or Hong Kong], while being perfectly aware that "言" is a radical, would not be able to tell anyone that it is radical #149. As an analogy, most native English speakers would not be able to tell anyone that 'J' was the 10th letter of the alphabet." I found this insight to be quite a useful one, and that's the reason I've remembered it.
[The other thing which I wish the PRC government would get on with is declaring Unicode code-points for characters like
譟,
謢,
誏,
詄;
騄,
駖,
驒;
鵰,
鵟,
鴗;
鐽,
銂,
鎯;
纔,
綑,
綩,
紘,
纮,
鋹;
闇,
閤,
閰,
閞;
纇,
顗;
餽,
餬;
鮀,
鮆,
魽,
鰡,
魠,
鱆, etc. These currently don't have simplified equivalents. To be sure, they are very obscure characters, but all below character #6000 in a ranking which was done in the 1990's (with #0001 being the most commonly occurring character, #0002 being the second most commonly occurring character etc). I've read over and over again that 4,000 characters is sufficient for most (even quite highly educated) written Chinese, but still, I think 6,000 is a reasonable figure which the PRC government could strive to get code-points for in simplified characters, if they conform to some sort of standard simplification (i.e.
糹->
纟,
見->
见,
車->
车,
釒->
钅, etc).]
Ah-bin wrote:The other term which the Chinese teachers from China seem to prefer now is 偏旁 bianpang
Yes, this is the term used in the Chinese Wikipedia article I quoted (and learnt) a lot from.
However, even while I was trying to understand that article (and it took me and a friend about 6 hours to "decode" it - looking up unfamiliar and non-transparent 詞語, and trying to decipher (for us) complex sentence structures like "由於最早將漢字以部首加以分類的《説文解字》還是以小篆為標準字樣的，所以「心」、「忄」與「⺗」是相同形狀。"), it "irritated" me that they chose a term like "偏旁", when obviously (from what is
said in the article), the term covers not just "left-" (木, 氵, 牜, 犭, etc) and "right-" radicals (刂, 卩, 邑, 鳥, etc), but also "top-" (宀, 竹, 艹, 癶, etc) and "bottom-" (心, ⺗, 灬, etc) radicals (not to mention the ones which "surround from top-and-left", "surround from left-and-bottom", "surround from left-and-right", "surround from top-and-left", "surround from 3-sides", etc). In that sense, I prefer the term "部首", even though this too is limited, in the sense that it isn't intrinsically about the character itself, but only (as you too point out) about which heading the character is classified under, in a list of characters (e.g. in a dictionary).
PS. For the sake of simplicity, I say "top-", "bottom-", "left-", "right-", etc radical, but I'm of course aware that it's not the radical itself which is (intrinsically) a "top-", "bottom-", "left-", "right-", etc radical, but only that it's the
form the radical "takes", when it's in the "top-", "bottom-", "left-", "right-", etc position (though some do of course have
only a "top-", "bottom-", "left-", "right-" position, and many have a
preferred "top-", "bottom-", "left-", "right-" position).