Anyone have a 'Phonetic loan characters' cheat sheet, please.

[Wei-Ming 魏明]

Wikipedia calls them Phonetic loan characters. If you know 家 then there's no need to memorize "傢". You already recognize it. You just need to learn its meaning/compound words. The same is true for 容￫溶, 永￫泳 and many others.

 

Does anybody have a complete list of these Traditional Characters?

 

Thanks!

[honglam]

Are you a linguist focusing on Sino-tibetan languages, especially ancient Chinese Language, or a student learning Classical Chinese? I'm not quite sure about whether you have missed up the concept of phonetic loan character and Phono-semantic compound characters or not, according to the given examples. The former is a grammatological phenomenon of Ancient Chinese (up to 商, 周, 汉 Dynasties) and is no longer useful in Modern Chinese. The latter, most of those pairs of characters formed 2000 years ago(or earlier), and the meaning and pronunciation of those characters has already changed. For example, 容 means “contains” as in 容納, or “appearance” as in 容貌, yet 溶 means "dissolve" as in 溶解(sometimes some Chinese may use it as "melt", but that's a typo). And 永 means “forever, eternity” in Mandarin, but 泳 means "swim". These are just examples of those pairs that still have the same pronunciation. Some pairs, like 作zuo4 and 乍zha4, 封feng1 and 幫bang1, have already changed their pronunciation several centuries ago so that they don't sound the same anymore. So that's why I'd say, if you are not a graduate focusing on Sino-tibetan linguistics, or a student learning Classical Chinese, these knowledges are not as useful and convenient as you imagined.

[Wei-Ming 魏明]

I get what you're saying. I'm looking for a list of characters in modern traditional Chinese that have such close visual relationships that if you've learned the pronunciation of one, you don't need to memorize the pronunciation of another (or more than one other). For learners, it's always nice to find cheats.

 

容￫溶

永￫泳

家￫傢

義￫儀

制￫製

后￫逅

付￫咐附

[honglam]

On 1/16/2024 at 3:58 PM, Wei-Ming 魏明 said:

I get what you're saying. I'm looking for a list of characters in modern traditional Chinese that have such close visual relationships that if you've learned the pronunciation of one, you don't need to memorize the pronunciation of another (or more than one other). For learners, it's always nice to find cheats.

So what you need is just a list of Chinese characters which we calls 諧聲系譜 in Chinese historical linguistics. I do know some, but the problem is, I really think that those books I know are not designed for foreign Chinese learners.

The simplest book I know is a book called 现代汉字形声字字汇, yet it's written in simplified Chinese, and it's an old book so I could only find it in the library of my university either.

The rest... I'd say the majority are not written for non-specialist at all(the appendix of 上古音系 by 鄭張尚芳, a book called 廣韻諧聲譜 written by a linguistic amateur. Both are designed for linguists. These are good books I'd admit, but that's for someone like me, as a PhD candidate in Linguistics, focusing on ancient Chinese morphology...).

Or you may search for books like 形聲拼字, written for preschool kids. I think searching for some materials designed for kindergarten and primary school children is the only good choice.

[calculatrix]

Hi, maybe these can help you?

I created these lists from data from makemeahanzi. So, if you re-use them please take care of the copyright.

 

phonoreverse.txt phonochain.txt phono.txt

[Wei-Ming 魏明]

Thanks, calculatrix! I'll have a look. I'm not going to publish anything. It just for my own learning, and helping others to learn.

[cncorrect]

A Chinese dictionary arranges characters in that way. '新华字典' will do the job.

[Wei-Ming 魏明]

Here are some phonetic loan characters.

Phonetic Loan Characters.txt