Page:The Chinese language and how to learn it.djvu/22

 鮫犭狡女姣糸絞 口人子魚山日月 鼻齁齈齉 魚鱭鱔 風飄 齁鼻鼻

THE CHINESE LANGUAGE and it is |(, a shark ; %, a dog, and it is % w ily, or crafty ; -fc, a woman, and we have ^, handsome ; $*, silk thread, and we get |, to bind around, also to strangle. Now, all these characters, and many more with the same sound symbol, are read chiao, but, as is shown, they each have a different meaning in accordance with the character which is added to the symbol. "We thus divide Chinese characters into two parts one, the sound indicator, to which the name " phonetic " is generally given ; the other, the idea indicator, which is commonly called the " radical." Every character in the Chinese language, unless it happens to be a radical itself, is divisible into these two parts. The radicals are limited in number, there being only 214 of them altogether. Some of them, such as J mouth, ^ man, ^ son, jf^ fish, jl| hill, sun, /J moon, are obviously pictorial, but a large number are certainly not pictorially suggestive. The character J|, pi, for instance, is a radical, and means a nose, but neither in this, its modern, nor in its primitive form can it be said to have the slightest resemblance to that organ. Yet we know, when we see it in combination, that the compound character must have something directly or indirectly to do with the no.se. Thus, through the nose ; the radical on one side giving the clue to the meaning, the phonetic on the other giving the clue to the sound. One or two more instances will suffice. Radical jf^ y-ii, a fish ; jjijif chi, a mullet; j|f! shan, an eel. Radical JU, feng, wind ; HJ, p'mo, to be blown about. It will be noticed in this last character that the radical is on the right hand side, and not on the left. It seema probable that at one time it was always in a fixed position, but that variations were adopted for the sake of symmetry. There are now many Chinese characters the radical of which is placed at the top, below, or at one or other side, and in a few instances its position i& determined by the fancy of the writer. Besides being an indicator of the meaning, the radical has a further, and most important, value. By its aid it is possible to find any character in a dictionary of the Chinese language, whether purely native, or prepared for the use of the foreign student. Let us take the character Ifjj for an ex- ample, the radical of which is ML, a nose. Now count the number of strokes in the phonetic. If we look up the radical J|L in
 * p| hou, to snore, fj| nung, a cold in the head, ||| nang, to speak