Greetings, fellow scholar. You are ready to join Master Zicius on the journey! Before you do, please find below some useful, basic information about the Chinese language that will enhance your experience. You will not even have to learn the language to appreciate the beauty!
- Character vs Word
Because the Chinese writing system shares very few similarities with other non-Chinese writing system, the definitions of “character” and “word” can be slightly confusing. For example, “we” is 我們. It is one “word”, but two “characters”. A word can be formed with multiple characters, and a single character can have a multiple word meaning.
For the purpose of clarity, we will define “character” as one single Chinese logogram.
- Radicals
Some Chinese characters, especially simple, older ones, have been used multiple times in history to construct new and different characters. In order to avoid confusing readers by reusing characters, many of these recycled characters received a “radical” as an attachment.
A radical in Chinese is usually either a character or a stylized version of a character, which provides the reader with the new “context” of the character it is attached to, thereby creating a new meaning.
For example: 女 is the radical for “woman”, and is usually attached to characters that are related to the female gender.
馬 = horse, pronounced “ma”
女 + 馬 = 媽 = mother (the woman you call “ma” is your mother)
The character 馬 was chosen for its pronunciation “ma” (as a phonetic loan), and a radical for “woman” was attached to the word to create the character for “mother”.
In short, radicals allowed existing characters to be reused to create new ones by providing a new and different context.
- “Archaic” meanings and forms
Some characters, especially ancient ones, used to mean something that they no longer do today, or used to look a way that they no longer do today. It is a a natural result of a language that has gone through millennia of changes and evolution – old meanings are lost, new ones are acquired, old characters transform into newer, different characters.
For this reason, some characters would appear like they do not belong if their modern definition is used. However, if their archaic meanings or forms are used, the interpretation will yield very different and often intriguing results.
This is the time capsule element.