On Wed, 25 Oct 2000, Jon Babcock wrote:

> >>>>>>>>>> Thomas Chan <tc31@...> writes:
> > Vietnamese demotic characters, chu+~ no^m, are of the same system (with
> > a few new components), as are "national characters" of Japan and Korea
> > (although some of the latter's as used in Kugyol and other early writing
> > systems may require new components as well).
>
> Would these 'new components' all be amicable to the term 'hemigram'? I know
> nothing yet about chu+~ no^m characters, but the 100 or 200 Japanese kokuji
> would seem to require but few new components.

Most of the Vietnamese chu+~ no^m (chu+~ is written as two U+5B57,
arranged side-by-side horizontally; no^m is U+5583) are simply two
characters pre-existing in Chinese usage put next to each other--one of
them a Chinese synonym, the other a homophone or near-homophone (in
either its Sino-Vietnamese or native Vietnamese reading). e.g., hai 'two'
is written as U+53F0 on the left as a phonetic, and U+4E8C on the right
for its meaning--the latter is of course, the normal Chinese character for
er4 'two'. Likewise, ba 'three' is written as U+5DF4 on the left as a
phonetic, and U+4E09 sits on top of its "tail" on the right for its
meaning--the latter being the normal Chinese character for san1 'three'.
(Contrast this practice with that of Japanese, where the native numbers
were simply written with the characters for the Chinese synonyms, rather
than inventing new characters.) Some more may be seen by clicking on the
fourth image, entitled "Vietnam's chunom script", at
http://www.honco.net/japanese/03/page3.html, and by clicking the last
image, entitled "Chunom on-screen" at
http://www.honco.net/japanese/05/page3.html. The latter shows the chu+~
no^m for the native Vietnamese numbers zero to eight. (kho^ng 'zero'
is simply 'null' and mo^.t 'one' reuses an existing Chinese character
solely for its sound; ba 'three' is miswritten in the picture.)

A few new components would be required, such as the top piece (first
four strokes) of U+7232.

(The scheme used here to write Vietnamese is the VIQR system, which
provides a way to write it in 7-bit environments. A description may be
found at http://www.vietstd.org/document/viqr.htm .)

As for characters in Kugyol (U+53E3 U+8A23) and other Korean usages, I
don't really know enough about it in order to properly judge them.

> > Zhuang characters (how extensive are they?) also
> > seem to follow the same rules. On the other hand, the Khitan, Jurchen,
> > and Tangut characters seem to require much more additional components,
> > and different manners of construction; one might also say the same of
> > some of the newly created characters used in post-1950's China.
>
> Could you say something about what the new methods of assembly might be. No
> matter what definition is used, the newly created post-1950's characters must
> be considered 'Chinese' and a system that could not deal with them would not
> be complete.
> Also, in the newly created 'vulgar characters' of the past 100 years of so,
> were new methods of assembly applied?

I should first say that I'm not a regular user of post-1950's characters
used in the PRC, so my perception of characters and their constituent is
based on an understanding of the "traditional" forms.

I suppose it'd depend on what one considers to be a component in more
recently created characters, such as some post-1950's PRC creations, as we
don't have epigraphy and other sources to consult the entymology of the
pieces. e.g., how many components are in dong1 'east' (U+4E1C) or che1
che1 'cart' (U+8F66)? Is the right half of han2 'Korea' (U+97E9) one or
many components? What about the right halves of zhuan3 'to turn' (U+8F6C)
or chuan2 'to transmit' (U+4F20)? If they are made of more than one
component, then I'd think they are "glued" together in new ways of
assembly--perhaps some kind of overlapping or merger of certain strokes?

On this note, perhaps one might want to try to fit the more
radical (and abortive) "Second Scheme" of PRC simplifications in the late
70's and early 80's into one's system for fanatic completeness.

> > Another character we might want to consider is U+56CD. It's reading,
> > xi3, and meaning, 'double happiness' (referring to marriage), are
> > well-known; yet, none of the three juggernaut dictionaries above contain
> > an entry for it! About the only place it really occurs is for
> > decorative purposes like a wall sign (although I am aware that the title
> > of two movies, from Hong Kong, contain this character). Is it a
> > character, or a not?
>
> Well, in any event, it poses no special problems for a system of hemigram
> notation, if hsi3 U+559C is already considered to be on the list of
> hemigrams. Using Boodberg's annotation for reduplicated graphemes, it might be
> something like, xi2 (the '2' meaning 'times 2', and not as an indication of
> tone), in the same way that, for example, ts'ung2 U+4EC2, would be h2 (h =
> human, Kangxi #9), and lin2 U+F9F4 would be d2 (d = dendrological, Kangxi #75),
> and p'in3 U+54C1 would be o3 (o = oral-ostial, Kangxi #30), etc.

Is there one for trios? A "macro" of sorts for a pyramid structure--a
dozen or two occur in the AD 100 _Shuowen Jiezi_ (U+8AAA U+6587 U+89E3
U+5B57)--would also be handy for some composition schemes (rather than
a combination of a "top-to-bottom" and a "left-to-right" operator). Ditto
for quads.

x y y
x x y y

e.g., U+63B1 U+757E U+6DFC U+54C1 U+8294 U+60E2 U+6676 U+68EE U+7131
U+579A U+946B U+59E6 etc...

> I see I have reverted to my old habit of using Wade-Giles romanization in this
> post.

That seems somewhat appropriate, since we have reverted to not writing
characters directly in these messages, like some older journals.

But seriously, Wade-Giles is still an important skill for sinology for
access to older publications and currently-existing library catalogs, and
one that was taught as recently as last year ('99) in a class I took.


Thomas Chan
tc31@...