Vol VIII: 气 and 乞

(Sorry I did not do the voice over this time but asking a friend for help since I was sick....)

Hello everyone welcome to my passion blog. So today I will introduce the rest of Chinese Character Classification, transfer characters and loan characters. As I talked in the previous episodes, there are total 6 categories of Chinses Character classifications.

You may have realized that the first four categories, photography, ideography, compound ideography, and phono-semantics, are pretty straightforward. We approach Chinese character more graphically and visually

However, the rest two categories are pretty complicated and hard to understand. Even some scholars are still struggling to fully explain the logic behind them. So, to be honest, I read different articles on transfer characters and loan characters, but still not have a clear idea how to explain them. I will try my best anyway, so here we go.

Let’s flip the order and talk about loan character first.

Loan characters, just as what the name tells us, they borrow some elements from another character, which is quite similar to phono-semantics. The elements they borrow is usually a homophonous character, which is those characters sound similar but having a different meaning.

Since there is a limited amount of Characters, but there are hundreds and thousands of elements in the world. When one thing exist in our daily does not have a “name” reference using the character, ancient Chinese people sometimes, will use another existing word with a similar sound to represent it. Later, the character being borrowed will be given a new character to represent its meaning or the other way.

Give an example, the character 气 has its original meaning as air and breathe. At some point, people realized that they have the need to find something represent the action “begging”. So they take the shortcut to use the character 气 as the meaning beg. Later to avoid confusion, a new character 乞 was invented to take the meaning of beg independently.

For transfer characters, this is the least understanding one. It is another approach for solving the issue of limited characters—change the present characters a little bit and give them new meaning.

Notice loan characters are sharing similar sound while transfer characters are sharing similar meanings or structure.

Example for transfer characters is referenced by a Chinese character scholar. 老 and 考 which means “old, aged” and “test” accordingly. It is believed that 考 is the transferred character of 老, but still, some scholars hold the opposite opinion. To see how the “slightly changed” happened, let's trace back to the seal script, you can see the radical part of these two characters are identical and the non-radical part is pretty similar. It is a cheap and faster way to create a new character than the first four methods.

Here is a metaphor. Imagine transfer characters and loan characters are created like the bacterium. From the same parent bacteria, the children bacterium started to fission.

Quick summary, so far, we covered all six ways of Chinese Character classification, and they are sort of divided into two groups. Hope this video makes some sense to you, thanks for watching. I will see you next time~

Reference:

https://www.zhihu.com/question/22354053

https://www.writtenchinese.com/lowdown-6-types-of-chinese-characters/

http://www.vividict.com/WordInfo.aspx?id=1445