Tai Chi Journal

Chinese Characters and Calligraphy

I'm taking a day off from Tai Chi. I've been pushing rather hard recently to increase my proficiency at the various exercises I've been doing — with a fair amount of success, I must say, especially with regard to my balance and body control when Tai Chi Walking! But my knees and various other of my joints and body parts have gotten a bit stiff and sore. I think a day off is indicated.

Meanwhile, I am interested in learning more about how Chinese is written, and particularly the art of Chinese calligraphy. There appear to be several books available on the subject. At left is Johan A. Bjorksten's Learn to Write Chinese Characters. (Click on the image to "Look Inside" the book at Amazon.com.)

Bjorksten says the beautiful characters of Chinese writing are of four types. One type is the pictograph. An example is the character for the word men, which means "door," and which is pronounced "MUN."

men "door"

This character actually looks something like the paired doors which are familiar as the entrance to a saloon in the American West. Bjorksten shows the ancient version of the modern character, and it looks even more like swinging saloon doors. That's why it's a pictograph: it looks like what the word means.

By the way, I'm borrowing the images of Chinese characters which I show herein from the Chinese Character Dictionary at www.chinalanguage.com. You can click on the images to get more information. Except in their basic form, they don't look much like the flowing characters in Bjorksten's book. They are referred in the Character Dictionary to as "glyphs." I assume that, as represented online, they are no more calligraphic than any letter of the English alphabet printed in an ordinary book.

Bjorksten's second character type includes characters depicting abstract concepts. One of these

shang "above"

is shang, "above" (pronounced "SHAHNG"). Although it is not literally a pictograph, or stylized picture of some object, it does manage to convey the idea of "over" or "above," no?

Then there's the abstract concept, "good." In Chinese, it's hao (pron. "HOW").

hao "good"

Bjorksten says it comes from a picture of a woman holding a child! In the ancient version, the woman is quite obviously the figure on the left, the child on the right. The crossmember on the "modern child" is an abstraction of the "ancient child's" outspread arms.

The third type of character is the phonetic-radical combination. An existing character is used over again — "borrowed" — but its meaning is changed. The pronunciation of the new character — the "phonetic" — is usually that of, or at least hinted at by, the pronunciation of the borrowed character. But the addition of a "radical" to the way the borrowed character is written marks it as having a different meaning.

For example, take cao (pron. "TSOW").

cao "grass"

Bjorksten says it is made up of a phonetic, zao ("ZOW" or "DZOW"), which by itself means "early" — a fact which is irrelevant here — and a radical sitting atop it whose general meaning is "plant." In the case of cao, that general meaning becomes the more specific one of "grass."

zao "early"

To the right, I show the Chinese Character Dictionary rendering of zao. It is easy to see that there is no "extra" element in the zao character, as there is in cao. Accordingly, the radical in cao is the "hat" that has been placed on top of zao. It looks to us Westerners like goalposts with the crossbar extended out on each side.

So the concept is clear: the pronunciation comes, with minor changes, from one part of the character, the phonetic; the meaning, from the other part, the radical. In this case, the pronounciation is the same for zao and cao except that the leading consonant changes from "Z" or "DZ" to "TS."

Bjorksten goes on to give us English speakers a way to visualize this phonetic-radical hybridization process. Suppose in English it were necessary to represent the verb "to read" as a phonetic plus a radical. For the phonetic we would very likely choose a word such as "reed" — a word whose meaning has nothing to do with reading.

Rather, "reed" is a homophone of "read," giving the intended pronunciation. But the meaning of the word we are cobbling together will come from, Bjorksten says, a separate radical that is added to the phonetic. The radical we'd choose might be "eye," since the eye is used for reading. The "eye" radical would indicate which homophone in the "read"/"reed" group is intended.

So our cobbled-together word would be pronounced "reed," but, as written out, it would look more like "eye-reed." Clumsy, admittedly, in a language which like English is written with an alphabet. But in a language like Chinese which is written with stylized pictures or glyphs, elegant indeed! Bjorksten says that over 95% of Chinese characters have been formed in this elegant phonetic-radical hybrid fashion.

In the history of spoken/written Chinese language, which goes back 6,000 years, there has quite obviously been a sloshing back and forth between sound and meaning. This fact accounts for Bjorksten's fourth major type of glyphs: characters borrowed without adding a radical.

An example is lai ("LIE"), originally meaning a kind of wheat, but now meaning "to come."

lai "to come"

This character was borrowed from its original meaning to represent the verb "to come." I assume that, in spoken Chinese, the word for this particular kind of wheat and the word for "to come" are homophones — they have the same sound, the "LIE" sound of lai. But in this particular case, for whatever reason, the meaning of the original phonetic was not overridden or modified by the addition of a radical. Chinese readers just know to ignore the "kind of wheat" meaning in favor of that of "to come."

And so we see that written Chinese is a language of great complexity, compactness, and elegance — a perfect candidate for the calligrapher's art!

posted by eric @ 10:22 AM