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beirne -



Quote:

It seems obvious that the 4 dots can't represent legs on the horse since those same dots appear in
the symbol for fire and fish and birds which neither have four legs. Can anyone offer any proof
for that meaning of the 4 dots--as legs?

Looking into the history of 鱼 and 鸟 it looks that the 4 dots occurred somewhat by accident but
do have some relation to the animal. For 鱼 the 4 dots are the tips of the upper and lower fins
and the two tips of the rear fins (dorsal, anal, and caudal fins to be technical). The fin tips
got pushed to the bottom of the character over time. There is a video on Youtube showing this.
Wenlin has an even clearer example but I don't have the image online anywhere handy.

For 鸟 the dots are a combination of clawtips and the tail. No real logic on why it ended up at
four, probably to make it look like other animal characters. There is a Youtube of that too.



Quote:

In my plan above, I'm stuck on the very first, most popular character. What does a ladel in the
(rising) sun have to do with genitive as well as simple and composed adjectives? It appears I will
need help in connecting characters ideas into the meaning especially in the case of abstract ideas.

That's the trouble with this sort of system. It works on enough characters to make it look
plausible, but in a lot of cases you are back to plain memorization, or come up with elaborate
stories like the one about the magic spoon. Use these tricks where you can, but understand that in
most cases the components of the characters don't supply a whole lot of meaning. One of the first
illusions broken when learning Chinese is when you find out that most characters aren't pictures
of anything. Next is when you discover that most characters aren't formed on meaning, but rather
are something akin to a rebus. Then you find that the rebuses were done a long time ago when
characters were pronounced differently. This doesn't mean that you can't take advantage of the
more pictographic characters, or the ones that have meaningful components or the ones that provide
good sound clues. You just can't expect there to be a system based on these that will work
everywhere.



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imron -

This is the book I was talking about. 汉字书写入门.










hhjk9901 -



Quote:

And when you look at the characters 量liáng, 查chá and 昼zhoù, all of which have the 旦
component, you can see how useful this approach is.

Interesting topic!

查

It's shape follows 木 and it's pronounciation follows 且 in ancient. So it's lower part 旦 is
just an evolved form. (By <<说文解字>>)

Someone may ask me why 查 is pronounced as 'Cha2' instead of 'Qie 且'.This deal with the ancient
chinese pronounciations. The ancient chinese has more than 4 tones.

In ancient China, 查/阻/咀 have the same pronounciation.

I am an English learner. My english is not good. Hope you can understand.










m.ellison -

There are two new books on this principle, by Matthews and Matthews and by Heisig and Richardson.

The Heisig book (which has not appeared yet) is the subject of its own thread in this forum.










Volapuk49 -

I went to Professor Tienzen Gong's site: http://www.chinese-word-roots.org/

This describes the book which began this entire discussion. It is back in print.

Here is what especially got my attention. The ordering info:

Buy now (paper back) $400, new edition, 305 pages. (No return)

I sent him an e mail asking how he arrived at this price.

Any substantive comments? Has anyone actually used this book?












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