Phonetics
Posted: Tue Aug 02, 2011 9:09 am
The study of Chinese characters usually involves an explanation of the fact that many phonetic elements of characters do not represent exactly the same sound that the character is known by. Frequently the explanation entails a scenario to cover the means whereby phonetics only agree with the final part of the name-sound of the character. At the same time, however, directions are often given the student on how to distinguish the phonetic element in a character because that will identify the other part, the radical or semantic element, and that will help the student to understand the meaning of the character more easily. Following this background the student is then presented with whatever method of teaching phonetics is employed.
I went through this ritual and came out mystified. Chinese calligraphy is a detailed art whose talented writers cover a huge continent but all have maintained the same language for thousands of years. The changes have been few and due to technique or tools and quickly transformed the whole country, when they occurred. Yet I am led to believe that the 'natural' variation in speech between the north and the south eroded the "once consistent" set of phonetic elements of the language into the hodge-podge that its phonetics represent today. What motivated a person in the north, for example, to change one of the word pronunciations to the southern one when all the other people in the north still used the old name for something and how did it catch on to the extent that we see today ? Why would the person who spent his life making the dictionary of dictionaries select a Kunming name for a thing if the dictionary was for the Beijing elite and they all used the Beijing word for the thing ?
It was beyond me. So I decided to download a set of commonly-used characters to check their phonetic elements and see if any kind of pattern or inspiration might result. The first results added something new. In the hundred, most-frequently used characters a student will see in common-everyday Chinese, more than three-quarters of them do not have a phonetic element. Words such as 年nián year, 百bǎi one hundred and 此cǐ this, have phonetics, but 好hǎo good, 等děng wait, and 就 jiù at once, do not. Next I took a page out of the list at the five hundredth level of frequency of use. There were fifty-five characters. More than one third did not have a phonetic element. Over half did not have an initial or final (b or u for bu, for example) that agreed with the name-sound of the character, (i.e. neither part of the phonetic agreed or else the word did not have a phonetic). Three quarters of the phonetic elements did not agree with both the initial and the final part of the phonetic. So, it appears that up to the level of the five hundred most frequently used words in Chinese, the student who looks for phonetic assistance in each character will get it for one in four words on the average. (This check, by the way, took advantage of any of the multiple phonetics for characters. Although how a student is to know there is more than one and which one to use when is not clear.)
Five hundred characters with only one correct phonetic in four was enough statistics for me. I decided to do some reading and try to come up with a better idea of how phonetics might actually have come into being. Thus, before the Shang dynasty, scholars used a rebus (4 representing 'for', for example), a 'sound-alike' character for a character they could not express. One example is the stalks and ears of wheat (present day 'lái') for the verb 'to come'. Note, this was effective only as long as the wheat and verb had the same 'name' (which was not lái in the Shang dynasty) and this rebus procedure produced many 'phonetic', stand-alone characters in the ancient literature for modern scholars to ponder over. Then, during the Qin years and Han dynasty, I learned, there was a herculean effort to standardize the language and make it more easily understood by everyone. One thing was to add semantic classifiers (radicals, titles for groups of characters) to words to help to distinguish their written meaning. 鹅é goose was 我, which might have led to some difficulties in sentence comprehension. So, 鸟niǎo bird was added to help clear up the species involved. This semantic classifier cleared up the meaning but it also produced the question, "If niǎo is the semantic, what do we call the original é part now ?" The answer was to call it the phonetic because it was the previous name of the bird.
This accounts nicely for the beginning of the process. Another example, 纠 jiū 'twisted together', takes the topic a bit further. The original character in the Shang dynasty was 丩jiū 'twisted together'. In the Qin years a semantic classifier was added to it, 糸mì threads, but, at the same time another character was using 丩.It was 收shōu collect. So, later on, when the phonetics were considered a system of sounds that had been added to the language, 丩, a phonetic, was seen to have two pronunciations, i.e. jiū and shōu. Next, another kind of problem. 去qù to go, was a slightly different shape in Shang and Zhou dynasties but it is still recognizable as the same character as the modern one. Its lower element was listed as a semantic element or radical hundreds of years after its origin. This, naturally, made its upper element 土 tǔ earth, a phonetic but several characters already had that element in their structure, and many of them ended, coincidently in 'u'. (杜dù sweet pear tree,肚dǔ stomach, 牡mǔ ox). Many other characters, however, have another element in the character as the phonetic, 赦shè pardon, 地dì ground floor, 均jūn equal, 坒bì connected,埔pǔ plain. So the student would not know which element was the effective phonetic if the student was looking for 'phonetic' guidance for the pronunciation of characters from the characters themselves.
There is one more factor that I learned that adds to the confusing state of phonetics. Hài was a well-known character in the Shang dynasty. It was a pig and it serves as one of the Twelve Earthly Branches. Its name varied from hài, to hó, to hú, to kaī and kō and so did its phonetic when a semantic classifier was added. Now, all these cases that I have mentioned occurred before the Qin and the Han made their changes to the language. All of the problems I have mentioned, therefore, passed straight through their otherwise comprehensive assault on the language, and weights and measures et al., et al. While on the subject of the Qin, et al., it may be pointed out that they were consummate 'Legalists'. For them, the meaning of the language would have been extremely important while its sound was merely rhetoric at best. The Han, it may be remembered, rewrote the classical books from memory that the Qin had burnt. They reverently reproduced every word from the original. No one changed them to correct their phonetic errors because we are using the same characters, still unchanged, today.
On this basis, then, I postulate that there never was a phonetic system for Chinese that would allow a person to look at a character and know how to pronounce it. The word 'phonetic' as it applies to Chinese characters simply refers to the part of a character that is not its semantic or radical element.
References. Frequency Statistics: Da,Jun 1998 Chinese Text complement http://lingua.mtsu.edu/chinesecomputer/oldversion Phonetics: Chinese Characters Dr.L Wieger Dover Pubs 1965, Analysis of Chinese Characters GD Wilder & JH Ingram Dover Books 1974, Chinese Characters R Harbaugh Yale U Press 1998, Chinese Characters Classification Wikipedia. Etymology: The Composition of Common Chinese Characters Xie Guanghou Peking U Press 1996, Tracing the Roots of Chinese Characters Li Leyi Beijing Lang & Cult U Press 1994, Evolutionary Illustration of Chinese Characters Li Leyi Beijing Lang & Cult U Press 2000, The Origin of Chinese Characters Wang Hongyuan Sinolingua 1993.
I went through this ritual and came out mystified. Chinese calligraphy is a detailed art whose talented writers cover a huge continent but all have maintained the same language for thousands of years. The changes have been few and due to technique or tools and quickly transformed the whole country, when they occurred. Yet I am led to believe that the 'natural' variation in speech between the north and the south eroded the "once consistent" set of phonetic elements of the language into the hodge-podge that its phonetics represent today. What motivated a person in the north, for example, to change one of the word pronunciations to the southern one when all the other people in the north still used the old name for something and how did it catch on to the extent that we see today ? Why would the person who spent his life making the dictionary of dictionaries select a Kunming name for a thing if the dictionary was for the Beijing elite and they all used the Beijing word for the thing ?
It was beyond me. So I decided to download a set of commonly-used characters to check their phonetic elements and see if any kind of pattern or inspiration might result. The first results added something new. In the hundred, most-frequently used characters a student will see in common-everyday Chinese, more than three-quarters of them do not have a phonetic element. Words such as 年nián year, 百bǎi one hundred and 此cǐ this, have phonetics, but 好hǎo good, 等děng wait, and 就 jiù at once, do not. Next I took a page out of the list at the five hundredth level of frequency of use. There were fifty-five characters. More than one third did not have a phonetic element. Over half did not have an initial or final (b or u for bu, for example) that agreed with the name-sound of the character, (i.e. neither part of the phonetic agreed or else the word did not have a phonetic). Three quarters of the phonetic elements did not agree with both the initial and the final part of the phonetic. So, it appears that up to the level of the five hundred most frequently used words in Chinese, the student who looks for phonetic assistance in each character will get it for one in four words on the average. (This check, by the way, took advantage of any of the multiple phonetics for characters. Although how a student is to know there is more than one and which one to use when is not clear.)
Five hundred characters with only one correct phonetic in four was enough statistics for me. I decided to do some reading and try to come up with a better idea of how phonetics might actually have come into being. Thus, before the Shang dynasty, scholars used a rebus (4 representing 'for', for example), a 'sound-alike' character for a character they could not express. One example is the stalks and ears of wheat (present day 'lái') for the verb 'to come'. Note, this was effective only as long as the wheat and verb had the same 'name' (which was not lái in the Shang dynasty) and this rebus procedure produced many 'phonetic', stand-alone characters in the ancient literature for modern scholars to ponder over. Then, during the Qin years and Han dynasty, I learned, there was a herculean effort to standardize the language and make it more easily understood by everyone. One thing was to add semantic classifiers (radicals, titles for groups of characters) to words to help to distinguish their written meaning. 鹅é goose was 我, which might have led to some difficulties in sentence comprehension. So, 鸟niǎo bird was added to help clear up the species involved. This semantic classifier cleared up the meaning but it also produced the question, "If niǎo is the semantic, what do we call the original é part now ?" The answer was to call it the phonetic because it was the previous name of the bird.
This accounts nicely for the beginning of the process. Another example, 纠 jiū 'twisted together', takes the topic a bit further. The original character in the Shang dynasty was 丩jiū 'twisted together'. In the Qin years a semantic classifier was added to it, 糸mì threads, but, at the same time another character was using 丩.It was 收shōu collect. So, later on, when the phonetics were considered a system of sounds that had been added to the language, 丩, a phonetic, was seen to have two pronunciations, i.e. jiū and shōu. Next, another kind of problem. 去qù to go, was a slightly different shape in Shang and Zhou dynasties but it is still recognizable as the same character as the modern one. Its lower element was listed as a semantic element or radical hundreds of years after its origin. This, naturally, made its upper element 土 tǔ earth, a phonetic but several characters already had that element in their structure, and many of them ended, coincidently in 'u'. (杜dù sweet pear tree,肚dǔ stomach, 牡mǔ ox). Many other characters, however, have another element in the character as the phonetic, 赦shè pardon, 地dì ground floor, 均jūn equal, 坒bì connected,埔pǔ plain. So the student would not know which element was the effective phonetic if the student was looking for 'phonetic' guidance for the pronunciation of characters from the characters themselves.
There is one more factor that I learned that adds to the confusing state of phonetics. Hài was a well-known character in the Shang dynasty. It was a pig and it serves as one of the Twelve Earthly Branches. Its name varied from hài, to hó, to hú, to kaī and kō and so did its phonetic when a semantic classifier was added. Now, all these cases that I have mentioned occurred before the Qin and the Han made their changes to the language. All of the problems I have mentioned, therefore, passed straight through their otherwise comprehensive assault on the language, and weights and measures et al., et al. While on the subject of the Qin, et al., it may be pointed out that they were consummate 'Legalists'. For them, the meaning of the language would have been extremely important while its sound was merely rhetoric at best. The Han, it may be remembered, rewrote the classical books from memory that the Qin had burnt. They reverently reproduced every word from the original. No one changed them to correct their phonetic errors because we are using the same characters, still unchanged, today.
On this basis, then, I postulate that there never was a phonetic system for Chinese that would allow a person to look at a character and know how to pronounce it. The word 'phonetic' as it applies to Chinese characters simply refers to the part of a character that is not its semantic or radical element.
References. Frequency Statistics: Da,Jun 1998 Chinese Text complement http://lingua.mtsu.edu/chinesecomputer/oldversion Phonetics: Chinese Characters Dr.L Wieger Dover Pubs 1965, Analysis of Chinese Characters GD Wilder & JH Ingram Dover Books 1974, Chinese Characters R Harbaugh Yale U Press 1998, Chinese Characters Classification Wikipedia. Etymology: The Composition of Common Chinese Characters Xie Guanghou Peking U Press 1996, Tracing the Roots of Chinese Characters Li Leyi Beijing Lang & Cult U Press 1994, Evolutionary Illustration of Chinese Characters Li Leyi Beijing Lang & Cult U Press 2000, The Origin of Chinese Characters Wang Hongyuan Sinolingua 1993.