The Discovery Of Genesis

Easy Lessons in “Character Building”
consists of two parts, a signific radical and a phonetic
portion. The former gives in a general way something
of the meaning of the character, while the latter
suggests its pronunciation.4
This is an example of how such a phonetic character
is formed. The Chinese colloquial word for mofher
is “ma.” In order to develop a character for this word,
,\S’ the coiner of the new character chose a common plionet-
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fflO,h6V
ic radical possessing the sound, “ma,” $, a horse, and
combined this with the radical + for woman. Thus the
new character 4% means a mother, but not a horse
-k WOMLVI. In other words, the phonetic portion no longer
WJt7X7” has pictographic or ideographic meaning, and therefore
one analyzing the character from its constituent parts
,ro
3
would not understand it. The structure of many of
horn these characters in use today is obscure since the phonetic
aspect of Chinese has changed drastically during the
intervening millennia.
There is a point of controversy among linguists as
to whether some characters are ideographic and whether
the constituent radicals were intended to be literally
translated or phonetic, with part of the components
used only for sound and not for meaning. Since with
the passage of time the original sound of the phonetic
has been lost through regional modifications in dialectic
changes, large numbers of characters are left with neither
ideographic nor phonetic meaning. Hence their composition
appears haphazard and devoid of practical sense
today. In other words, the majority of Chinese characters
do not tell a story and if “translated” would be
quite nonsensical.
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