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+--- Thread: What makes a radical a radical? (/thread-12942.html)
What makes a radical a radical? - Dairwolf - 2015-08-12
Hey everyone! After a while I started learning kanji with Heisig again. This time one of my goals is to know the differences between radicals and Heisig´s primitive elements (to know which ones are also traditional radicals and which ones were made up by Heisig).
After creating a chart that compares both systems, I realised I don´t really get what makes a radical a radiacal. To make my problem a little clearer, I´ll gi e some examples.
立 and 日 both are radicals, and so is 音. Another example is the following:
厶 and 冂 are radicals, and so is the combination of those two radicals (sorry, couldn´t find it as a single character).
So these two examples show radicals that are made up of parts that are radicals themselves.
No I was wondering: What determines whether two radicals in combination become a new radical or not? Why, e.g., isn´t 易 a radical? Heisig made it into a primitive, which makes sense to me, because when you see it as the part of a kanji, you kind of perceive it as a radical.
Also, there are a lot of kanji parts that would make a lot of sense as radicals, e.g. the right upper part and the right lower part of 俸 (which again Heisig made into primitives).
Might it be that there are just so many different combination of strokes that could be perceived as a radical that the people who created the radical charts just stopped at some point?
I hope my post is not too confusing... Thanks in advance for any help!
What makes a radical a radical? - kapalama - 2015-08-12
Note: primitives are any set of marks that you or Heisig decide to treat as a unit, for the purposes of using the RTK method.
Radicals (some of which are assigned Heisig Meanings) are decided by the historical study of Chinese writing.
What makes a radical a radical? - Katsuo - 2015-08-12
There is a standardised set of 214 radicals that was devised about 400 years ago in China to classify the kanji. It’s not ideal, but most modern dictionaries use it.
I also made a chart to compare the radicals with Heisig’s primitives several years ago.
What makes a radical a radical? - Taishi - 2015-08-12
I think it's easier to think about radicals as central pieces of characters used to look them up in a dictionary, instead of as "common sub-characters". If every common sub-character would be a radical, the list would be huge. 曷既易昜复棥亲章啇忝喬奉夆享亨各圣 etc would all likely be radicals, and it would also become even harder to distinguish what is a radical and what is not. E.g. 槻窺 both contain 規, so should this be a radical as well? I guess my point is that you have to stop somewhere, or the whole point of radicals is lost. Too few and you'll have to look through tons of pages before finding the right character even though you're looking under the right radical. Too many and you'll have to look through the radicals instead, and would also increase the risk of looking up the wrong radical, which brings me to my next point.
If both 亻 and 奉 were radicals, it would increase the risk of people looking up the wrong one. Since we already have 亻, the need for 奉 as a radical is decreased. Same thing for 捧棒.
All this said, there are a few radicals, that are neither complex in shape nor common in occurrence as radicals. 高 and 音 are both examples of this. Even though 高 itself is common, the only time it is used as a radical, is for 高 itself (except for a whopping 4 very rare characters listed in 漢字源). For 音 the only other character except for itself is 響 and 韻 (and a few rare characters). This does make some radicals feel pretty arbitrary, but I think this just means that function > frequency.
Last but not least, I'd say that 形声文字, in other words character built up like 意符+音符(meaning component + sound component), has a big impact, seeing as over 90% of all kanji are 形声文字. Many of these are so called 会意兼形声文字, basically meaning that the 音符 is also an 意符, meaning that both components make up the meaning, but only one gives the sound. This however does it pose an issue, as in most cases the 音符 is NOT the 部首.
In 俸 for example, both 亻 and 奉 contribute to the meaning, but only 奉 represents the pronunciation, so 亻 is the radical. In the list of potential radicals I listed above, most, if not all of them play the role of 音符 in other characters. And I guess the reason 音,高 and 青 etc are radicals, is because of the way they appear in other characters, (䯨髞 韴韷 静靘) that make them fit the 形声文字 style of making characters, in a way that the characters above don't.
This post isn't supposed to be THE correct explanation on why radicals are what they are, but just my attempt at being intuitive about radicals, just some food for thought. I kind of improvised as I typed so I'm sorry if the post is a mess :<.
TLDR: Consider that the initial purpose of the radicals, might not be what you first thought it was. Rather than a way to categorize/collect all common shapes, it's but a tool to make the indexing of characters easier.
What makes a radical a radical? - SomeCallMeChris - 2015-08-12
By the by, well over 90% of the time, the radical is the left element when there is one (休む), the top element (花),
the enclosing element (道), the line-through element (中), or the entire thing (田).
Nelson's Kanji Dictionary (a cleverly easy to use paper dictionary now made obsolete by computers) made this observation and changed only a relatively few kanji to make that the consistent rule for lookups. It's still the first guess guideline in traditional dictionaries, or any other time you have to hazard a guess at the radical of a character.
What makes a radical a radical? - kapalama - 2015-08-12
SomeCallMeChris Wrote:Nelson's Kanji Dictionary (a cleverly easy to use paper dictionary now made obsolete by computers) made this observation and changed only a relatively few kanji to make that the consistent rule for lookups. It's still the first guess guideline in traditional dictionaries, or any other time you have to hazard a guess at the radical of a character.Nelson's uses the traditional radic/al system. Halpern (SKIP) and Spahn/Hadamitzky(SKIPpish) use a nontradiitonal approach.
How would you say computers make any of them obselete?
What makes a radical a radical? - SomeCallMeChris - 2015-08-13
kapalama Wrote:Nelson's does not use the traditional radical system, but rather a refinement of the traditional radical system as I explained; anyway, the point here is that there is an almost-consistent system to radical assignment (which Nelson refined to make totally consistent in his dictionary).SomeCallMeChris Wrote:Nelson's Kanji Dictionary (a cleverly easy to use paper dictionary now made obsolete by computers) made this observation and changed only a relatively few kanji to make that the consistent rule for lookups. It's still the first guess guideline in traditional dictionaries, or any other time you have to hazard a guess at the radical of a character.Nelson's uses the traditional radic/al system. Halpern (SKIP) and Spahn/Hadamitzky(SKIPpish) use a nontradiitonal approach.
How would you say computers make any of them obselete?
Anyway, the point I was trying to make here is that there is this almost-consistent pattern to which kanji elements can be considered radicals, which is potentially useful if you have any search-by-radical features in your dictionaries. Or if you just care, as the OP seems to care, about what makes a component into a radical.
The reason Nelson's in particular is obsolete is that it had a super-clever way of letting you flip the page edges to find the exact spot where your character would be, as long as you were familiar with stroke counts and the left-top-enclosure-through system (I forget the rest tbh; I think if the top is multi-element the bottom can be the radical, if left is multi-element then right can be the radical. At one time I actually used the system and it was very easy ... for a paper dictionary. Then I got my first 電子辞書...)
Anyway, the reason Nelson's system is obsoleted by computers is because we can quickly select multiple character elements and get to our character. The SKIP sytem is arguable not obsolete because there are electronic versions of it, although TBH I don't find it easier than component select. And, of course, handwriting recognition is getting extremely good and is the ultimate direct lookup that doesn't care about any system at all. Handwriting recognition is my preferred lookup method, although I can understand it may not have obsoleted all other methods.
In any case, it is unimaginable to me that any paper dictionary method is faster than the currently popular computerized methods for character lookup, and that's why all purely paper methods - or methods that can only be imitated in computers by scrolling through long lists - are obsolete now.
What makes a radical a radical? - kapalama - 2015-08-13
I have to think you just did not use that many paper Kanji Dictionaries (as opposed to Kokugo dictionaries) before you used Nelson, because the system used in the Nelson's I have owned is the same "barely usable for the learner" system as every other Kanji dictionary except Halpern and Spahn/Hadmitzky uses. Including all the Japanese language Kanji dictionaries. I checked the four I could find quickly and yep, it's the same system. The Nelson is more useful because it listed more compounds, and more English than the Japanese language Kanji dictionaries, but the broken lookup system is the same.
(Actually pulling Nelson out right now and look at it again makes me remember how amazingly not useful the Nelson was compared to Spahn/Hadamitzky and Halpern, and why it was buried deep in a pile of books. Only listing compounds by the leading character, not showing the Chinese forms, not including okurigana, copying the Japanese tic of not including the actual character you are looking up when presenting compounds. Th list of usability flaws in basically endless. The perfect example of an author forgetting his target audience.
Yeeech.
I have no idea why that dictionary was ever popular, and I can see why you switched to electronic dictionaries as fast as possible, and think of paper dictionaries as being superseded. Nelson is easily superseded by almost any other dictionary, on any number of grounds. I was always confused about who exactly a dictionary like that would be useful for. When it was the only English language Kanji Dictionary, I understood. But after Halpern and Spahn came out, it was weird to see the New Nelson make the exact same usability mistakes as the Old Nelson in the interest of conforming to 'the classic' . And the authors had awareness of the Spahn/Halpern dictionaries, even citing them in the forward.)
I think one thing that makes electronic dictionaries work for you is that you have familiarity with the character elements enough to actually recognize them. But that's a enormous leap for anyone asking questions like "What is a radical?"
BTW which electronic dictionary do you use? Can it take phone photo input and lead you straight to the entry?