Chinese character radicals
A radical, or indexing component, is a visually prominent component of a Chinese character under which the character is traditionally listed in a Chinese dictionary. The radical for a character is typically a semantic component, but it can also be another structural component or an artificially extracted portion of the character. In some cases, the original semantic or phonological connection has become obscure, owing to changes in the meaning or pronunciation of the character over time.
The use of the English term radical is based on an analogy between the structure of Chinese characters and the inflection of words in European languages. Radicals are also sometimes called classifiers, but this name is more commonly applied to the grammatical measure words in Chinese.
History
In the earliest Chinese dictionaries, such as the Erya, characters were grouped together in broad semantic categories.Because the vast majority of characters are phono-semantic compounds, combining a semantic component with a phonetic component, each semantic component tended to recur within a particular section of the dictionary. In the 2nd centuryAD, the Han dynasty scholar Xu Shen organized his etymological dictionary Shuowen Jiezi by selecting 540 recurring graphic elements he called. Most were common semantic components, but they also included shared graphic elements such as a dot or horizontal stroke. Some were even artificially extracted groups of strokes, termed "glyphs" by Serruys, which never had an independent existence other than being listed in Shuowen. Each character was listed under only one element, which is then referred to as the radical for that character. For example, characters containing or are often grouped together in the sections for those radicals.
Mei Yingzuo's 1615 dictionary Zihui made two further innovations. He reduced the list of radicals to 214 and arranged characters under each radical in increasing order of the number of additional strokes—the radical-and-stroke method still used in the vast majority of present-day Chinese dictionaries. These innovations were also adopted by the more famous Kangxi Dictionary of 1716. Thus the standard 214 radicals introduced in the Zihui are usually known as the Kangxi radicals. These were first called in the Kangxi Dictionary. Although there is some variation in such lists – depending primarily on what secondary radicals are also indexed – these canonical 214 radicals of the Kangxi Dictionary still serve as the basis for most modern Chinese dictionaries. Some of the graphically similar radicals are combined in many dictionaries, such as and the 月 form of.
After the writing system reform in mainland China, the traditional set of Kangxi radicals became unsuitable for indexing Simplified Chinese characters. In 1983, the Committee for Reforming the Chinese Written Language and the State Administration of Publication of China published The Table of Unified Indexing Chinese Character Components . In 2009, the Ministry of Education of the People's Republic of China and the State Language Work Committee issued The Table of Indexing Chinese Character Components, which includes 201 principal indexing components and 100 associated indexing components.
Shape and position
Radicals may appear in any position in a character. For example, 女 appears on the left side in the characters 姐, 媽, 她, 好 and 姓, but it appears at the bottom in 妾. Semantic components tend to appear on the top or on the left side of the character, and phonetic components on the right side or at the bottom. These are loose rules, however, and exceptions are plenty. Sometimes, the radical may span more than one side, as in 園 = + 袁, or 街 = + 圭. More complicated combinations exist, such as 勝 = + 朕—the radical is in the lower-right quadrant.In many characters, the components are distorted or modified to fit into a block with other elements. They may be narrowed, shortened, or have different shapes entirely. Changes in shape, rather than simple distortion, may result in fewer strokes. In some cases, combinations may have alternates. The shape of the component can depend on its placement with other elements in the character.
The shape 阝 is indexed as two different radicals depending on where it appears in the character. Placed on the right, as in , it represents an abbreviated form of ; placed on the left, as in, it represents an abbreviated radical form of.
Some of the most important variant combining forms are:
- → 刂 when placed to the right of other elements:
- * examples: 分, 召 ~ 刖
- * counter-example: 切
- → 亻 on the left:
- * 囚, 仄, 坐 ~ 他
- * counter-example: 从
- → 忄 on the left:
- * 杺, 您, 恭* ~ 快
- → 扌 on the left:
- * 杽, 拏, 掱 ~ 扡
- * counter-example: 拜
- → 氵 on the left:
- * 汆, 呇, 沊 ~ 池
- * counter-example: 沝
- → 灬 at the bottom:
- * 伙, 秋, 灱 ~ 黑
- * counter-example: 災
- → 犭 on the left:
- * 伏, 状 ~ 狙
- * counter-example: 㹜
Semantic components
Thus, although some authors use the term radical for semantic components, others distinguish the latter as determinatives or significs or by some other term.
Many radicals are artificial extractions of portions of characters, some of which are further changed when applied, as explained by Serruys, who therefore prefers the term "glyph" extraction rather than graphic extraction. This is even truer of modern dictionaries, which cut radicals to less than half the number in Shuowen, at which point it becomes impossible to have enough to cover a semantic element of every character. A sample of the Far Eastern Chinese English Dictionary of mere artificial extraction of a stroke from sub-entries:
- in and
- in
- in
- in
- in
- in.
Phonetic components
| Phonetic part | pinyin | meaning | Character | pinyin | meaning |
| 臼 | "a mortar" | 舅 | "maternal uncle" | ||
| 臼 | "a mortar" | 舊 | "owl; old" | ||
| 虎 | "tiger" | 虖 | "shout" | ||
| 鬼 | , now "ghost" | 魁 | "leader" | ||
| 鹿 | "deer" | 麓 | foothills | ||
| 麻 | "hemp" | 麼 | "tiny" | ||
| 黃 | "yellow" | 黌 | "a school" | ||
| 羽 | "feather" | 翌 | "next" | ||
| 齊 | "orderly" | 齎 | "to present" | ||
| 青 | "verdant" or "youth" | 靖 | "peaceful" | ||
| 青 | "verdant" or "youth" | 靚 | "to ornament; quiet" | ||
| 青 | "verdant" or "youth" | 靜 | "quiet" |
In some cases, radicals chosen for their phonetic sense also have a coincidental semantic association.
Simplified radicals
The character simplification pursued in the People's Republic of China and elsewhere has modified a number of components, including those used as radicals. This has created a number of new radical forms. For instance, the character, when used as a radical, is written 釒 in traditional writing, but 钅in simplified characters. This means that simplified writing has resulted in significant differences not present in traditional writing. An example of a character using this radical is.Dictionary lookup
Many dictionaries support using radical classification to index and look up characters, although many present-day dictionaries supplement it with other methods. For example, modern dictionaries in PRC normally use the Pinyin transcription of a character to perform character lookup. Following the "section-header-and-stroke-count" method of Mei Yingzuo, characters are listed by their radical and then ordered by the number of strokes needed to write them.The steps involved in looking up a character are as follows:
- Identify the radical under which the character is most likely to have been indexed. If in doubt, the component on the left side or at the top is often a good first guess.
- Find the section of the dictionary associated with that radical.
- Count the number of strokes in the remaining portion of the character.
- Find the pages listing characters under that radical that have that number of additional strokes.
- Find the appropriate entry or experiment with different choices for steps 1 and 3.
In order to further ease dictionary lookup, dictionaries sometimes list radicals both under the number of strokes used to write their canonical form and under the number of strokes used to write their variant forms. For example, 心 can be listed as a four-stroke radical but might also be listed as a three-stroke radical because it is usually written as 忄 when it forms a part of another character. This means that the dictionary user need not know that the two are etymologically identical.
It is sometimes possible to find one and the same character indexed under multiple radicals. For example, many dictionaries list 義 under both 羊 and . Furthermore, with digital dictionaries, it is now possible to search for characters by cross-reference. Using this "multi-component method", a relatively new development enabled by computing technology, the user can select all of a character's components from a table and the computer will present a list of matching characters. This eliminates the guesswork of choosing the correct radical and calculating the correct stroke count and cuts down searching time. One can query for characters containing both 羊 and 戈 and get back only five characters to search through. The Academia Sinica's 漢字構形資料庫 Chinese character structure database also works this way, returning only seven characters for this query. Harbaugh's Chinese Characters dictionary similarly allows searches based on any component. Some modern computer dictionaries allow the user to draw characters with a mouse, stylus or finger, ideally tolerating a degree of imperfection, thus eliminating the problem of radical identification altogether.