Vol VII: 沐

Hello everyone, welcome to my passion blog. For the seventh episode of Origin of Chinese Character, I will introduce another category in Chinese Character classification: Phono-semantic compound.

To fully understand how phono-semantic compound works, you need to have some background knowledge of the component of Chinese characters.

(write out Phono-semantic)

First, slightly different from romance language or Germanic language, in Chinese, words are composed of difference or repeating characters instead of letters. And for most of the time, single characters also has its own meaning. There are many different ways to form a character according to Chinese Character classification.

Other than that, Chinese characters can also be divided into two large categories: single-component character and other compound characters with radical.

Within a character radical usually indicate the meaning, which will share by a group of character with similar meanings, here is an example:

河湖海

You can easily tell what do these characters have in common: the three dots on the left. Yes! That is a radical indicating water component of the characters,

So in the same order, these characters mean river, lake, and sea.

It will be easier for you to understand how radical works by comparing it to the word roots.

See, the radical indicating water is similar to the roots aqua or aque in Germanic language.

Making more sense, right?

Now, another important identity for Chinese Character is its pronunciation. Pinyin is the tool for beginner to memorize those pronunciations, which also includes consonants and vowels.

It will take way to much time just explaining the pronunciation, so let just skip the part.

Go back to the end, how the radical and pronunciation of Chinese character contributes to the phono-semantic compound.

Those characters can also be called Radical phonetic character, which includes two components: phonetic component, so-called rebus, or semantic component, so-called determinative.

In most of the cases, radical plays the role of the semantic component while the rest of the character carries its original pronunciation pass it to the new character.

Let’s take a look at an example

木Mu

Ah, I know you recognize this one. Tree.

And you also recognize the radical (三点水） indicating water, which I introduced earlier in this video.

So we combine them together.

沐

This new character also read as mu, which is the same as 木，

But now it has a new meaning, washing one’s hair or take a shower. You might think wow the meaning is completely off!

However, the oracle bone script shows that the original meaning of mu is the rain watering the tree!

Thanks for watching, I’ll see you next time!

Reference:

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Chinese_character_classification#Rebus_(phonetic_loan)_characters

http://www.hanban.com/writing-chinese/structure-of-chinese-character/introduction-phono-semantic-compounds.html

http://blog.tutorming.com/mandarin-chinese-learning-tips/what-is-pinyin

https://en.wikibooks.org/wiki/Chinese_(Mandarin)/Radicals

http://www.bbc.co.uk/languages/chinese/real_chinese/mini_guides/pinyin/pinyin_vowels.shtml

http://www.vividict.com/WordInfo.aspx?id=2361