Radical or real word?

[ralphmat123]

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

[renzhe]

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.

[OneEye]

One fundamental thing you need to understand from the get-go is that characters and words are not the same thing. A word is a spoken entity, and in modern Chinese it will usually be comprised of 2 or more syllables. Those syllables, or morphemes, are each represented by a character. The character is not the word or syllable itself (since it is written and not spoken), it's just a written representation of a morpheme. Usually, the form of the character and the word it represents are closely related, but not always. For example, 來 is a picture of wheat, and is only used to write the word "to come" because the two words ("wheat" and "come") sounded the same or close to it a long time ago. So it was borrowed for its phonetic value, while the form was irrelevant to the meaning "to come," and the character for "wheat" had a component added to distinguish it from "come": 麥. Another example is 花 when it's used to mean "spend." The original meaning is flower (and still is), but of course "flower" and "spend" have nothing to do with each other. They needed a character to write "spend," so they borrowed 花 because it's pronounced the same.

 

Being clear on that notion will solve a lot of misunderstandings, in my experience.

 

To answer your question, while 木 was originally a picture of a tree, and thus meant "tree," its meaning has evolved over time into "wood," at least in Mandarin. It might mean "tree" in other Chinese languages, though, I don't know. As renzhe said, the modern Mandarin word for tree is 樹.

 

As an aside, I find it's more helpful and accurate to think of characters (not words) in terms of their functional components rather than radicals. The radical (部首) is simply the section of the dictionary that the character falls under (if you look at the word 部首, it literally means "section heading"), and doesn't always have anything to do with the actual structure of the character.

 

For some reason, people like to talk about characters as being composed of multiple radicals, but by definition, each character only has one radical. It may have multiple components (偏旁), though, and they can be meaning components (義符) or sound components (聲符). Oftentimes the meaning component means something different than it would as a standalone character, because it lends meaning to the character via the form of the component rather than via its meaning as a standalone character.

 

That might be a little confusing, so let me try to clarify. For instance, 大 means big by itself. It was originally a picture of a big person (it still kind of looks like a stick figure, right?), so as a meaning component it usually represents a person rather than the meaning "big." So the popular story about a big 大 sheep 羊 being beautiful 美 isn't really accurate. 美 was originally a person 大 wearing a headdress (which was later corrupted into something like 羊). As a picture of beauty, a person wearing a headdress makes a lot more sense than a big sheep, right?

 

I don't know of anything in English that teaches this, but 亼 was originally an upside-down mouth 口 (it makes more sense if you know the older forms). That's really helpful to know, IMO. For instance, now 合 is easily explainable. It's just two mouths (口 and 亼), and the meaning of "join" isn't too hard to get to from there.

 

The problem, as I alluded to, is that there isn't really anything in English that gets this stuff right. Until something better comes out, which is only a matter of time, your best bet when you're learning a new character is to consult Wenlin or Rick Harbaugh's book (or both). I say the book rather than zhongwen.com, which is the website version, because I find the book much easier to use and the website doesn't render all the components the right way.

 

I've probably overwhelmed you, but hopefully you or someone else will get some use out of it. At the very least, if you're clear on the difference between words and characters and know that characters are comprised of functional components rather than radicals, you'll be on the right path. For the nitty gritty particulars, you'll have to do the best you can until something better gets published.

[fabiothebest]

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.

[xiaokaka]

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).

[Yang Chuanzhang]

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？)?

[xiaokaka]

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.

[imron]

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).

[OneEye]

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.

[Demonic_Duck]

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" . Having said that, to be fair it normally gets replaced with "号" in spoken Chinese.

[Nathan Mao]

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.

[OneEye]

...none of which are examples of 日 used by itself.

[Nathan Mao]

...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)

[imron]

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.

[OneEye]

Presumably when it takes a direct object?

[imron]

but not necessary, e.g. 日！

See also jokes about the names of previous North Korean leaders.