introduction

Introduction

Welcome! Chinese integrates both meaning and pronunciation in its characters. Deciphering this rich information will help students understand, appreciate & remember Chinese characters, one of humanity's greatest & most enduring cultural achievements. Until recent centuries, China had one of the highest literacy rates in the world & more than half of the world's literature was written in Chinese. Due to the central role of calligraphy in Chinese art and the vitality of Chinese civilization, Chinese characters have held a preeminent position in the world's art.

Despite these unparalleled achievements, many people in the last century viewed Chinese characters as inferior to the more purely phonetic writing systems of Western languages. As a result, China nearly decided to abolish characters in the 1950s & even now most Chinese are not taught the rich tradition behind their writing system. This website counters the simplistic myth of character inferiority by translating traditional Chinese character etymologies into English to show how Chinese themselves have used and understood the symbols they created.

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While Chinese characters are often thought of as overly complex, in fact they are all derived from a couple hundred simple pictographs and ideographs in ways that are usually quite logical and easy to remember. These wen (or zigen) are the true radicals of Chinese as identified by Xu Shen in his classic Shuowen Jiezi nearly 2000 years ago. Xu Shen also devised the bushou, meaning "section headings", to help organize his dictionary into more manageable parts. With minor changes this bushou system has been the foundation of almost all subsequent Chinese dictionaries. Often mistranslated as "radicals", not all of the bushou are true radicals in that some of them can be further broken down into their component wen. Many of the true radicals are not included in the list.

This web site & its associated printed dictionary present a series of zipu or "character genealogies" which show graphically the close interconnections between over 4000 characters according to the Shuowen Jiezi and subsequent research by traditional etymologists. Aided by computerized cross-referencing, these charts allow the dictionary to be organized around Xu Shen's true radicals, avoiding the expediency of arbitrarily dividing the dictionary by bushou. This new zipu system effectively generalizes the bushou system by allowing any character to be found if the viewer knows any part of the character or knows any character which shares the same component. Students can quickly locate characters while also better remembering the relations between characters.

Since the zipu are based on traditional etymologies, which themselves are based primarily on the "seal" characters from about 2,200 years ago, this dictionary does not represent the current state of research into character etymologies. In the last century far older characters have been uncovered, allowing modern researchers to go beyond the traditional etymologies and obtain a better understanding of the history of Chinese characters. As this research is systematized & made available on the web, I will link the character entries into the relevant research. I also hope to link the entries directly into web versions of traditional Chinese sources on etymology. Almost every character includes page references to various printed reference sources on traditional etymology.

Since English understandably does not have a specific word for character etymology relative to word etymology, many English speakers unfamiliar with Chinese terminology mistakenly conflate the two. This site deals only with character etymologies. Characters form the basic unit of meaning in Chinese, but not all characters can stand alone as a word & most Chinese words are formed of 2 separate characters. For instance "zhongwen", the Chinese language, has two characters as explained above. The etymologies of these words are usually quite obvious as long as the characters are known - a feature of Chinese which is probably its greatest strength and cannot be adequately duplicated in a simple phonetic writing system. This website does not discuss these word etymologies but rather helps students understand the less transparent character etymologies which are the object of most traditional research on Chinese etymology.