Comment by lazide
4 years ago
When it’s character based instead of alphabet based, I think it’s the equivalent of coming up with a new word in English, which is basically what you’re describing.
Sometimes it’s mashing two previously unrelated ‘words’ together (aka the tons of compound characters in Chinese), other times it’s coming up with something completely new.
Same rules apply though, if it doesn’t add value worth the trouble (or get mandated by the powers that be), it’ll eventually just die out or be a curiosity.
Also, to keep it tech related:
RISC = English CISC/VLIW = Chinese?
IIUC Old Chinese was a much more “isolating” language, in that words were typically single characters - meaning that to make new words, you typically needed to make new characters. As it evolved through the ages, “compound” words composed of multiple characters became more common. These days, new words are almost always combinations of multiple characters (often 2, occasionally 3-4).
> These days, new words are almost always combinations of multiple characters (often 2, occasionally 3-4).
Yep! For example, the most common Chinese term for "Internet" is 因特网. This is composed of three characters:
互: "mutual"
联: "join", "coupled", "allied"
网: "net" -- carrying both the meaning of a woven net and a computer network
I think your comment got a little mixed up - fairly sure Internet is 互联网 (因特网 seems to be a much less common term, a hybrid of phonetic "Inter" and semantic "net")
2 replies →
Any idea if it was due to things like the Confucian Official’s exam system (and corresponding increase in prioritization of education)?
More complex characters require more education to understand is my guess. Some of the traditional ones are….. obscure, and crazy complex.
I'm not entirely sure what you mean to ask nor am I a Chinese speaker, but I have myself suspected that the massive variety of characters was a side-effect of having a middle class that was differentiated based on their ability to read. You see various in-group signalling systems similar to this in lots of areas.
A good historical example is all the strangly specific words for groups of animals. A history I read of this indicated these terms were first found in books sold to nobility, and they were just made up. But you weren't hip if you weren't reading that literature.
1 reply →
> Sometimes it’s mashing two previously unrelated ‘words’ together (aka the tons of compound characters in Chinese), other times it’s coming up with something completely new.
That's not how it works. Most Chinese characters stem from a character C having a pronunciation A referring to a meaning M being used to note another word of meaning M' with same pronunciation A (sometimes slightly different A'). This of course doesn't scale really well, hence the existence of determiners in logographic scripts, which are words used without their pronunciations placed before or after another to give a semantic clue. The innovation of Chinese (which I think is why it's still an efficient script today) was to incorporate the determiner in the character itself to give birth to a character C' where a part refer to the pronunciation and another acts as the determiner, instead of padding the main text with (a lot of) determiners.