"Chinese characters are simple drawings of the concepts they represent."
This is what I had been told since I was little, and it always
fascinated me. But it's not exactly true. They once were drawings, but
only some are still recognizable. There are some obvious ones (like "mountain"
and "mouth"
),
but most are now impossible to see. For instance, imagine you needed
to come up with characters to represent the concepts "square" and
"circle." Well, here's what they came up with: square
and circle.
Not exactly the most instantly-recognized icons for those concepts... I'd fire that designer.
"Chinese characters are so complicated!"
Compared to our letters, yes, they're complicated. But they're not
letters; they're words. The number of strokes is about the same as an
average English word's. It would be more accurate to say, "The Chinese
compress all their words into squares!"
The reality is that Chinese characters aren't that
different from our own words. They're made up of subparts, and in a
remarkably similar fashion to our own. For instance, there's a portion
of each character which tells you whether it's related to, say, water,
or fire, or body parts, or something. They call this the "radical" or
the "root" of the word. It functions almost exactly like root words in
English do... i.e., "geo" in an English word signals that the word is
in some way earth-related, while in a Chinese character, three particular strokes
do the exact same job. Every character has a single radical, which
gets adorned with various doodads to help differentiate it... some
characters are so elaborate,
it's hard to guess which part is functioning as the radical. It's
important to know, though, because Chinese dictionaries "alphabetize"
words by sorting them into groups that share the same radical, then
sorting all the "earth" words (for instance) according to how many
additional strokes are necessary to complete the character. Which is
fairly useless unless you're already an expert at the language... but
then, so are our dictionaries, if you're trying to figure out how to
spell "psychology."
Dim sum
(a traditional meal of Chinese dumplings)
is literally "speck heart,"
or maybe "a little touch of heart," depending upon whether you want the
translation to sound silly or poetic. The first character, "dim," means
speck, or dot, or little piece. The left half of it represents the
color black, and the right half is a phonetic that tells you it's
pronounced "dim." They have so many words pronounced "dim," they need a
way to tell them apart. That's what the "black" part does; it lets
them know this is the "dim" that means "speck," rather than the ones
that mean heft, estimate, flaw, shuffle, tiptoe, shop, remember, goblet
holder, bamboo mat, and chronic malaria. No, seriously.
The second character, "heart," is one of the most
commonly used radicals; in Chinese it doesn't just represent the
emotional center, but also the intellectual center of a person; the
mind. This
is the basic shape; it represents an actual anatomical heart with ventricals and lobes and gushing blood... but it gets squashed and stretched
like a Tex Avery cartoon to fit where it needs to.
The way the sub-parts assemble into a whole concept can be wonderfully lyrical. For instance, here's the character for "love."
The part in the middle you'll recognize as heart, and the part above
it represents holding or carrying. The bottom part represents
perseverence through obstacles. "Love" is therefore written as a little
picture poem: "That which perseveres inside our heart, in spite of
obstacles."
