166 sats \ 10 replies \ @0xbitcoiner 6 Aug \ on: Learn Chinese with Sensei #2: 自由人 ideasfromtheedge
I've always been curious about the 'design' of Chinese characters. Is there any logic to the 'design' and its meaning?
There is! Let me think of something that will illustrate the ‘design’ well n get back to you!
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I like 晶 to illustrate that...
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好 is maybe a better example. The radical of a "woman" next to the phonetic part for "child", their combination meaning “good”. On my phone now, not sure how to write the different parts separately to illustrate my point better.
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Great choice. Especially since I have a boy and a girl haha
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"good" as in "that's ok" or "good" as in "good person"?
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Both.
But here the etymology works best for the latter.
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The radical of the character can tell you what kind of word it is. For instance, 泳 and 池 are words related to water because of the three strokes on the left.
I guess they resemble drops of water.
💦
What I don’t know is the process in which these radicals came about. I just learnt the radicals by heart without bothering to find out about their history. Haha
Here’s an example of how the character for hands, 手 was used by Tokyo Hands as inspiration for its logo.
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What I don’t know is the process in which these radicals came about.
A lot of these radicals came from hieroglyphs. The characters are usually classified into 6 categories:
- Pictographs
- Indicatives
- Compound ideographs
- Loangraphs
- Phonographs
- Signs
Check out this Wikipedia article for details.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Chinese_character_classification
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