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Radical or real word?


ralphmat123

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Hi there,

I'm new to Chinese and have a question about radicals etc. I know what radicals are and that they are like the building blocks of words.

I learnt that mu 木 is 'tree'. But when I looked up 'tree' in the dictionary, it said came up with shu 树

 

So is this actually the word if you want to talk about 'a tree' and mu is just the building block? I assume this is the same with other Chinese characters?

 

Thanks :)

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木 does indeed mean "tree" when used as a character, but it is not used on its own anymore in modern Chinese. The modern word for a tree is indeed "树".

Many Chinese characters are ancient, and the spoken and written language has changed in the meantime. 木 went out of fashion and was replaced by a newer word "树", as happens in all languages.

Still, the character 木 is used as a component in many other characters because it caries the meaning of "tree". The modern word 树 uses 木 as a radical, as do 林 and 森 and many others.

You will still find 木 used as a stand-alone character in compound words like 木头, but it's never used on its own today.

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Renzhe is right and this thing occures also with other words. I give you another couple of examples. When you study radicals/building blocks you'll learn 日 (sun) but you don't use 日 as a word, you should rather use 太阳. Another example is this: 目 (eye). Normally you'd use  眼睛 as a word meaning "eye".

Even if there are exceptions (for example 不,是,会。。。and many others) most of words are made of 2 or more characters in modern Mandarin Chinese. Instead classical Chinese used words made of 1 character usually.

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木 is actually more common in modern written Chinese than 树 (木 ranked 694 vs 树 ranked 697), however that includes composite words, see http://lingua.mtsu.edu/chinese-computing/statistics/char/list.php?Which=MO

So it is still an important character to know on its own! When used as a single charcter word it is usually short for 木头 (wood, timber) or as a part of an old saying (not necessarily a chengyu), e.g., 独木不成林 (a single tree doesn't make a forest).

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OneEye:

 

Very informative post! You say that there's no good book on this topic in English. Are there any Chinese books that you can recommend to someone with decent Mandarin but no prior knowledge in character etymology (sorry, I don't know the correct terminology, would this be 文字學?)?

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字源 is in the logo of chineseetymology.org's iphone app and means character etymology, but I'm not sure if there are other terms as well.

I would highly recommend that web page by the way! I shows the oracle bone, bronze, large seal and small script form of available characters, decompose them into phonetic and semantic components, as well as a brief explanation in English and the entry from Shuowen.

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but you don't use 日 as a word

It can be used as a word, but not the word you're thinking of. For politeness reasons, I'll decline to give the specific meaning, but it starts with 'f' and rhymes with duck (note: not firetruck).

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Actually, there is something in English. I just didn't think of it because I read it in Chinese before I bought the English version. Qiu Xigui's Chinese Writing is a translation of his book 《文字學概要》, which is, probably more than any other book, foundational to the field (so read it first, either in English or Chinese, before moving on to the others). It was translated by two very well-respected scholars, Jerry Norman and Gilbert Mattos, who worked closely with 裘錫圭 during the whole process. Reading it in Chinese will give you the vocabulary you need to understand other books in the field, but reading it in English will get the information into your brain more quickly. Your choice.

 

As far as Chinese books on the topic, I think that rather than answering here, it might be better to start a new thread on the subject.

 

Richard Sears' site chineseetymology.org is a decent reference, but it has some real problems, so you have to be careful. I'll talk more about that, and an alternative to it, in the new thread.

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It can be used as a word, but not the word you're thinking of. For politeness reasons, I'll decline to give the specific meaning, but it starts with 'f' and rhymes with duck (note: not firetruck).

 

I think in the heat of the moment, your dirty mind has glossed over the much more obvious meaning of "day (of the month)", as in "2014年5月26日" :wink:. Having said that, to be fair it normally gets replaced with "号" in spoken Chinese.

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日记

日子 (as in, 幸福的日子, i.e., "those happy days")

日出

星期日

日本

旭日升 (my favorite soft drink...I was despondent when I found out they stopped making it...it was a carbonated sweet tea in a can...)

 

These are all common and/or unremarkable uses of 日 in everyday speech.

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...but does fully clarify that there is nothing objectionable about 日 itself, but rather is offensive or not based on context.

 

Or even more accurately, 日 is an obscenity when used as a verb, but is 100% unobjectionable when used as a noun (in all the cases I can think of...and double-checked with my Chinese-as-a-second-language-teacher wife)

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These are all common and/or unremarkable uses of 日 in everyday speech

Agree completely. As OneEye mentioned though I was going for its use as a single word.

Also agree with your Chinese-as-a-second-language-teacher wife that there's nothing objectionable about the character itself, and it will usually be immediately obvious from context when it's being used in an offensive way.

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