Chinese character variants
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- čas přidán 17. 05. 2024
- Although large dictionaries contain tens of thousands of characters, the majority of these are variant forms which are almost never used in daily life. This video introduces the variants that were used and explains how they had their own standard, meaning that they would be written more or less the same way across more than a thousand years, throughout East Asia. The video also shows how we can use a Tang dynasty dictionary called Ganlu zishu to examine variants in manuscripts.
Thank you for the video. I am Chinese speaker, and it’s often sight that the writing is politicised (simplified vs traditional), and a lot of people changes how they think of you or react to you when you use either one of them, even used as name-calling labels. It is very nice to learn that the conflict is manufactured and I hope more people can learn about this and move on to meaningful conversation.
What a wonderful attitude!
我在研究所的統計學教授，出生於美國，母語是廣東話，她會抱怨我（母語是英語的美國人）比她認識更多的漢字。 這可能是因為我花了太多時間研究《辭海》字典，並研究《道德經》。 就是在那本兩卷本的字典裡，我學到了很多異體字，其中一些異體字出現在不同版本的《道》中。 謝謝你的演講，讓我想起了大約 35 年前我的工作。--郭愛德
Thanks for watching! We are all obsessed with dictionaries. 😀
Very cool story , despite academical writing still clues me English ways of arranging sentences .
读得出像英文翻译过来的句子。😅
Obviously this is written by Google translate
那麼看他的說法他是ABC 可能真的不會說中文 但是至少根據他的說法他會說粵語
Exploring different variants of a character sounds really interesting
It definitely is
Excellent! One consequence (an important one, I think) of understanding the way "variants" were deployed and why "standard" forms were not necessarily standard is that one immediately sees a fatal flaw in efforts to rationalize ideographically the forms of all the characters we lazily think of "standard."
Good point! Yes, the history of the script is typically envisioned in terms of the standard forms, even though there were many other forms too.
This video relates a lot to a project I did of creating an in-the-middle alternative character set to Simplified and Traditional Chinese, "改革字 Reformed Chinese characters", which combines the best of both sets and includes many historical variants e.g. 餐→湌 (recorded in Eastern Han's 說文解字 Shuowen Jiezi)、農/农 → 莀 (recorded in Song dynasty's 古文四聲韻 Guwen Sisheng Yun)、鱗/鳞 → 魿 (recorded in Song dynasty's 集韻 Jiyun)
This is an amazing idea. I never liked 农 since it looks too much like 衣。
Yes, very good idea!
thats a fascinating idea, and in fact you can find some of these still in use to this day as variants. The signage design culture in Hong Kong in particular uses variants quite frequently, I've even seen a more simpler version of 湌, 飡 with only two dots
Very interesting, I wonder what makes a character a variant and not an entirely separate character, sometimes variants take upon a distinct identity over time like 做 and 作, or that it's treated as separate in one area like 憑 and 凭 in japan, but treated as variants in another area like china. Do you know any websites I can use to easily look up variant relationships from the ganluzishu? Nice video by the way.
You are right, it is sometimes just a perception. You can treat it a variant or a separate character. Just like dialects, some dialects are so different that they would qualify as separate languages, and vice versa.
Thanks! Finally someone who is capable and willing to give some explanation of history contexts of this topic. All I would hear or read so far in the past 40 years was a simple: "and here is a simplified variant we use today." Japanese has the same problem.
I have another question, coming from Japanese: there is the phenomenon that similar characters also share similar pronunciations, and the clue is when some graphemes match phonemes. I recently bought a decicated dictionary about that for Japanese. I was not that much into Chinese, but I have a small old soft cover booklet about Chinese homophone comparison which might be from the 1950s.
Would You have a chance to make a video about this topic? I am aware that the same character has very many different readings across China, which also have changed over time, and depending on how and when they came to Japan from South or North China, the Japanese also have different "ON" readings for the same. But I only know that as a matter of fact. I wonder if You have some deeper insight into this, how Chinese writing influenced its neighbor countries over the centuries.
In calligraphy context, 高 with the ladder form is closer to bronze script or seal script e.g.from繹山碑(& 亯 from大盂鼎 which is also a building) that might be why it was seen as standard. Also in clerical script, the ladder and mouth would be practically the same both written with two horizontal and two vertical strokes. Great video btw 🪜
Thanks!
Variant forms for characters can commonly be seen in handwritten documents and film posters from the 20th century in Korea. There was a divergence between the standard forms used in printed text and the variants found in the handwriting of the last generations of Koreans who regularly wrote Chinese characters.
However, younger Koreans, to the extent that they have learnt Chinese characters, only know the standard forms and aren't familiar with most variants at all.
I don't know how the traditional Korean variants compare to those used in other regions of the Sinosphere. I'm guessing there are both commonalities and differences.
Interesting! My impression is that there are many shared variants, which partly derive from shared manuscripts and prints. For texts in Classical Chinese, China obviously always remained the primary source.
Even in Vietnamese writing, variant characters are commonplace and variants not used in CJK do also exist.
That is so interesting!
The cardinal sin of simplifed Chinese isn't that it's a "variant", but rather they deliberately used a single character to represent two previously unrelated ones. 干, for a very prominent example, is used in place of 幹 and 乾, two very different words.
That makes the simplifed Chinese process not just using a less common/complicated variant, but actively destroying a portion of the character set, even commonly used ones.
I like the expression “cardinal sin”. 😀
Could you share your experience learning running and cursive script, and the resources that you find useful? Many thanks.
Sure, will make a video about this! Thanks for the tip!
@@TheChineseAlphabet yes please make a video on it. always intrigued if there's any logic to cursive script
@@freemanolI've learned/write with some cursive chinese, and there is actuallly a very set logic to chinese cursive; one cannot just make up character forms, they're established convention also
Interesting, indeed. Thank you very much for the sharing.
Thank you!
Fantastic video. I'll admit I didn't come into this expecting much, but this is really good overview of the subject.
As a side note, variant characters are particularly frequent inHong Kong. The most prominent in my mind is 廣塲, which shows its phonetic relationship with 傷 much better.
干禄字書で「通」とされている字の一部は日本漢字が引き継いでいますね。軽、継、属、塩、様、隠、従、争、叙 etc...
Yes, definitely. And this is also true for modern simplified characters in China. Quite a few of them are already in the Ganlu zishu.
I know this is a terrible simplification, but it almost feels as if we had a dictionary of all typos and shorthands anyone has ever used in English.
It is a little bit reflective of the way spoken language shifts over time, when you are reading for meaning and have the support of context especially in copied documents, there is tolerance for change in spelling. I don't know enough to analyse it deeply, but I'd guess changed elements could be either an extra or missing stroke, a shorthand, a similar pronunciation clue or a similiar meaning or a shift between meaning and sound, or even a reflection of a new or local pronunciation cue. Just like speech, it really is hard to keep anything standardised. We can be grateful as English speakers we're still pretty able to read things which are 500 years old, and with only a little effort some middle english as well going back a bit further. Old English is like another language though.
Good point! I think it is in a way like spelling in English, which was all over the place before the 18th century. That was normal. Then dictionaries came along and industrialization and spelling became codified. But regardless how a word is spelled, it is the same word and the context often makes it unambiguous.
Very interesting! I didn't know that the character 髙 was used in China as well. Here in Japan we often use non standard characters and many variants, and sometimes there are characters like 佛 that are more common than the standard 仏.
Yes, the situation in Japan is particularly interesting because so many earlier traditions continue to be used. So much complexity!
仏 is Shinjitai version of 佛 and 佛 is traditionally used everywhere else in Asia anyway so that would explain its popularity
The Chinese scripts are ideogram - the larger the corpus depelops, the wider the lexical compilation becomes.
I guess that it follows the Pareto curve where 20 percent of the characters are used 80 percent of the time .
That’s right! It definitely pays to learn the most common ones as soon as you can.
I think it's more of the result of cumulated "mistakes". It's not like nowadays in which long distance communication is pretty easy and standards can get well spread, and whenever two places got disconnected (which is like most of the time in the history) there is a chance for variants to spawn because people write things slightly differently (or very differently if some simplification become popular), and the difference will likely stay when the two places got reconnected.
And for how easy it is such thing could happen, there's a good example in recent time. For a total of maybe less than 50 years of disconnection, there's some variation in the writing between Taiwan and mainland China, and that's even when only comparing the Traditional Chinese characters. They look very similar but is somewhat different. When counting simplified words both sides also don't simplify in the exact same way.
That’s true that the use of simplified characters on the Mainland and non-simplified in Taiwan and Hong Kong is a major variation for which we know the reason. From a distance of more than a thousand years the reasons are not always apparent. Plus, we know “how the story ends” and that influences our perspective.
@@TheChineseAlphabet I was talking more about the traditional Chinese characters that's being used in mainland. Simplified Chinese isn't a good proof because it's a deliberately chosen standard, but if even the traditional characters have some variant, that proves that character variation happens naturally without enforcement, further proving that it makes no sense to try arguing on which way of writing is "the original".
Wow, such a good content. I admire it's insightfulness and broadness of knowledge you have.
Thanks for watching!
As a japanese learner....thank u!
You’re most welcome!
I wonder if japanese has the same thing. I know about Ryakuji as an unofficial simplified, but it could be cool to learn for shorthand writing.
Every manuscript culture has such variants, this is the nature of manuscripts. Japan is a land miracles in terms of variants, lots of exciting things…
Cood video. I appreciate that it goes into great depth.
Glad it was helpful!
Glad I didn’t learn Chinese beyond basics at the middle school
This was not meant to scare you away from learning Chinese! Quite the opposite… :)
@@TheChineseAlphabet Thnx! 👍
Can I have 08:10 dictionary name
It is called Ganlu zishu 干禄字书, by Yan Yuansun
@@TheChineseAlphabet Thanks for the info
With this video I learned I should discriminate simplyfied characters for being ugly even though I already knew that some of them are actually older than the traditional characters, but still traditonal just looks better and has more information to keep the character in mind
Yes, some of the modern simplified characters have a very long history, and some of them were at one point the standard. It is also true that the non-simplified forms often have more logical structure and so it is easier to remember them.
in terms of utilizing your own personal methods of memorizing the characters you use regularly, isn't that completely subjective? The simplified chinese taught in chinese public schools can be just as important and "pretty" to any given person.
you'd be surprised to know that even the "traditional" characters were simplifications, and many of the "simplified" versions have been commonly used for hundreds of years.
always having an opinion on which is good/bad, making false dichotomies, won't help your learning process
Simplified script makes sense in handwriting for the masses, and the masses just want to be read and write in the most basic way possible.
When Simplified was first used, a lot of books that were in print were printed in traditional so the people might have been forced to read traditional writing as well.
Even today, Chinese people have “standard characters” as promoted by the government and “vulgar characters” as commonly used by the people in random scribbles like restaurant orders. The University of Pennsylvania once had a little blog that talked about different linguistic topics but then devolved into random observations of Chinese writing, thinking that the random simplification of a Chinese character in a restaurant order scribble would lead to phoneticization of the whole language. I think the person just wanted a shorthand for himself or herself.
@@MsZsc Well I am just telling my opinion that I think simplified characters do look ugly. When somebody else thinks they are pretty, that's ok. I won't fight
Chinese pictoglyphs were invented by Black Egyptian Kemet who migrated from the west and introduced Afrikan scientific methods to asia
Nope, they're developed independently to each other.
The chinese script. The single biggest impediment to Mandarin ever becoming a global lingua franca.
Well, the Chinese language is already used by A LOT of people. So it depends what you mean by lingua franca… :)
i don't think the chinese cares whether you or the world speak their language. they are not an evangelist abrahamic civilisation.
Yet, one of the most beautiful, if not the most, beautiful writing system in the world. 汉字很棒！
The Chinese language is mostly used in China and possibly Japan if you count one of their three character sets with minimal usage elsewhere.