龸 Vs ⺍ on top of 冖

[Sreeni]

The top horns in 学堂〔學﹣〕xuétáng College are slightly different. Middle horn is straight in táng and inclined in xué. How it differs in meaning?

[Dlezcano]

because the top part of 堂 actually comes from 尚 which gives the sound, while the top part of 学 is a simplification of more complex forms.

[mungouk]

@Sreeni if you're interested in this kind of thing, I can highly recommend the Outlier Essentials add-on for Pleco, which gives etymology, info on sound vs meaning components, and in some cases examples of the ancient forms and how they evolved.

 

I find it really useful when coming across a new character, to understand what the pronunciation clues are (if any), and what the meaning clues are.

Here's the entry for 堂 (click to enlarge it)：

 

 

 

[Sreeni]

@mungouk @OneEye thanks. Had some confusion on which outlier product to go for. Ordered expert level Pleco dictionary add on now. Installed. 
 

I think Outlier has done great work and hope to learn meanings in a right way and fast and hope will not forgot ever.

[Sreeni]

On 2/10/2021 at 8:58 AM, Dlezcano said:

because the top part of 堂 actually comes from 尚 which gives the sound,

 

@OneEye, @mungouk, @Dlezcano Sound component means Sound + meaning you mean?  Otherwise how just earth alone becomes Hall?

 

The original meaning of chang = to go up into a hall, as per oneEye = outlier as below in quotes.

 

“Still, yet” is a sound loan meaning for 尚. In other words, it’s not related to the original meaning of 尚, “to go up into a hall.”

[OneEye]

This one is a bit of a complex case. I actually had to revisit a lot of the research on these characters to answer this question (and to make sure I hadn't made any mistakes in the dictionary entries), and I'm going to end up rewriting some of the dictionary entries for 尚 and 堂 just to make them more clear. These were actually some of the very first entries we wrote, 6 years ago or so.

 

Short story: 堂 is 尚 (sound) + 土 (meaning). The fact that 尚's original meaning had to do with halls doesn't automatically make it a semantic component, because it had lost that meaning by the time 尚+土=堂 was created, so the person who created 尚+土=堂 could only have been using 尚 for its sound.

 

Now for the long answer. Look at this diagram while you read the rest of the explanation, because it's a bit convoluted:

 

 

Originally (early Western Zhou), 堂 was written 冂. It was just a depiction of a large hall. It sometimes had two vertical lines above it, as a decorative mark, especially when it showed up as a component of other characters. This can be seen as a branch of evolution of 堂, and this branch pretty much ended here. We'll pick 堂 back up in a moment.

 

尚 was created by adding a 口 underneath and two horizontal lines above 冂. It meant "to go up into a hall" (上堂). So, 冂 (堂) is actually a semantic component of 尚, and the mouth and lines served to distinguish it from 冂 (堂). However, when 尚 was used as a component, the 口 was often omitted. By the Warring States period, 尚 sometimes appeared with a third mark (a vertical line) above the 冂, which is the origin of the modern form.

 

Another character (again, we're back in the early Western Zhou) was created by adding a foot underneath 冂. Later, two horizontal lines were also added to the top of this by the same process as for 尚, creating [尚+止] (but with no 口). Scholars transcribe this as 尚 over 止, but there's no unicode support for this character so I can't type it.
 

Later in the Western Zhou period, a new form of 堂 was created by adding 京 to [尚+止]. 京 was a depiction of a building, while [尚+止] was used as a sound component. Note that this isn't a continuation of the previous form of 堂. This is a new form, and also a very short-lived one.

 

Later, during the Warring States period, yet another reformation of 堂 occurred: rather than 京 ("building" semantic component) plus [尚+止] (sound component), it became common to write the character as 尚+土, as it's written today. The Warring States was a very turbulent period of character evolution, and most new character formations during this time were 形聲字 (one semantic component, one sound component).

 

The important thing to note is that by this time (late Warring States, around 700 years after the 冂 form appears), 尚 no longer retained its sense of "to go up into a hall." It just meant "above; high; lofty; to go up; to exalt" and so on. So the people who created this new version of 堂 were highly unlikely to be thinking of the original meaning, or even aware of it. In their minds, they were using 尚 purely for its sound.

 

Note: this analysis is largely informed by 陳劍's 2008 paper,〈金文字詞零釋（四則）〉 which can be found here. Fair warning: it's dense reading.

 

9 hours ago, Sreeni said:

Otherwise how just earth alone becomes Hall?

 

Keep in mind that most characters are 1 meaning component and 1 sound component, and most sound components don't carry any semantic value. A character like this is basically signaling to the reader, "the word whose meaning has to do with X (the semantic component), and which sounds like Y (the sound component)." So it's not that "earth alone becomes hall," but that "earth" (semantic) plus [zh/ch/sh/d/t]ang (sound) equals "táng, which means hall."

 

As for how 土 has anything to do with a hall, stamped earth was a common building material, as it says in our entry.

 

 

[Sreeni]

On 2/11/2021 at 5:16 PM, OneEye said:

that "earth" (semantic) plus [zh/ch/sh/d/t]ang (sound) equals "táng, which means hall."

is sound tang taken from tu + Chang, (bold letters)? 
does zh/ch/Sh/d/t sounds haveany meaning?

 

龸 this symbol has entry in Pleco but does not have any meaning. any details on origin/etymology/details about this symbol ?

[OneEye]

28 minutes ago, Sreeni said:

is sound tang taken from tu + Chang, (bold letters)?

No, that's not how it works.

 

土 only contributes meaning in 堂. 尚 (shàng, by the way, not "chang") only contributes sound in 堂. 

 

But these characters were created thousands of years ago. The pronunciation of the language has changed significantly since then, so the sounds in a sound series (a group of characters containing the same sound component) aren't always as close as they once were. In the case of 尚, characters containing it as a sound component are pronounced dang, tang, zhang, chang, and shang in modern Mandarin:

 

* 當 dāng
* 黨 dǎng
* 堂 táng
* 躺 tǎng
* 倘 tǎng
* 趟 tàng
* 棠 táng

* 常 cháng
* 嘗 cháng
* 敞 chǎng
* 掌 zhǎng
* 裳 shang
* 賞 shǎng

 

That's why I said "[zh/ch/sh/d/t]ang". That's the range of pronunciations that can be expressed by 尚 as a sound component.

 

37 minutes ago, Sreeni said:

龸 this symbol has entry in Pleco but does not have any meaning. any details on origin/etymology/details about this symbol ?

 

That's because it's just a (non-functional) part of characters containing 尚. It doesn't have a meaning. Its origin is explained in the post above.

[Sreeni]

General question: The spoken language was initially originated?
 

Or spoken and written language originated at same time?

 

two or more words with same pronunciation but multiple meanings? Why they can not pronounce differently ?

[OneEye]

The spoken language came first. This is the case with all writing systems—you can't have writing if there's no language to write down.

 

2 hours ago, Sreeni said:

two or more words with same pronunciation but multiple meanings? Why they can not pronounce differently ?

This is called "homophones" and it's a phenomenon that exists in every language. Chinese has a lot of homophone characters (think "syllables"), but most words are multiple syllables, so this isn't an issue.