"on the lake your boat upset / and your clothes got soaking wet ... "

[larryhammer]

... how do you stand and wait for them to dry? / patiently, patiently, patient ell wye

Somewhat more than half the traditional Chinese characters are composed of a radical that indicates the general domain of semantic space plus a phonetic part that indicates the pronunciation in Chinese at the time the character was created. For example, the character for ocean (海), where the part on the left is the radical for water (a simplified-upon-squeezing form of 水, the character for water) and the rest is the character for every (毎) -- ocean is that kind of water that is pronounced (nearly) the same as the word for every. Or once was, anyway.

And yes, the way that a radical can also be a character on its own can make things a little loopy. Concerning the radical 酉, Nelson's The Modern Reader's Japanese-English Character Dictionary 2nd ed.* has this to say:

Tori bird or hiyomi no tori ("bird of the zodiac," as distinguished from the common bird** of Rad. 196***). At left: tori hen. In combination, this element connotes liquid and hence in any position is generally called sakezukuri (i.e., the right-hand element of the character for saké). Nickname: Saké.

Sake being written 酒, where the radical is water again -- giving us two fluids for the price of one. While it might look like this character was put together by scribes feeling the need to overdetermine liquidity after one too many bottles of it, here the bird is being used not as a radical but as the phonetic part: sake is a water-like-thing that has the sound of the Chinese word for the zodiac bird.

For an extra level of complexity, Japanese uses these characters in two ways: to transcribe the Japanese word that means approximately the same thing as the Chinese character and to transcribe an approximation of the sound of the Chinese word written with that character. In other words, kanji are sometimes pointers to local arrays and sometimes indirect pointers to arrays stored in another location.****

This moment of frivolous geekery was brought to you by a sea and C++, and zero bottles of sake.


* The revision of Classic Nelson, not the New Nelson.

** Yes, many zodiac animals are written with a different kanji than for the animal itself. Sometimes they're even pronounced the same, too.

*** 鳥, the component that's common to all the kanji in this icon.

**** By this analogy, kana would be local variables.

---L.

Comments

[galeni.livejournal.com]

How very cool. Thank you!

(signed) geek girl

[larryhammer]

:-)

[thistleingrey.livejournal.com]

In other words, kanji are sometimes pointers to local arrays and sometimes indirect pointers to arrays stored in another location.

Ha! Though I've done only "Hello world" in C, I have enough recognition vocabulary that that sentence makes sense. Interesting analogy--thanks. (Am former/sometime tech writer.)

[thistleingrey.livejournal.com]

...Apparently, <blockquote> is a non-starter in comments in some layouts. I'll have to remember that.

[larryhammer]

It partially formatted it, by reducing the font size. Still, how odd. I'll have to remember that too.

---L.

[larryhammer]

I didn't get much further in C -- most of my programming was done in FORTRAN, which doesn't do pointers. But I learned enough concepts to be able to use them in metaphors. (I got out of that to become a tech writer.)

---L.