Comment by lazide
4 years ago
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.
Chinese has a lot of specific characters for various species of birds (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Radical_196), fish (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Radical_195), and "bugs" (which includes small reptiles and certain other non-warm-blooded animals) (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Radical_142).
One of my favorite features of the language is the fact that every element in the periodic table gets its own character - and the characters have radicals that indicate their usual state of matter (钅 for metal, 石 for non-metal solids, 氵 for liquids, 气 for gases) - see https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Chemical_elements_in_East_Asia....
There are also lots of specific words for species of trees (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Radical_75) and other plants (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Radical_140), but characters under those radicals also include botanical terms, medicines, things made of wood and plants, etc.