"Lewis Perin" > wrote in message
news
> "Alex" > writes:
>
>> When I say outermost I guess I'm thinking of something like
>> ? where the radical is 'silk' instead of roof or person.
>
> Does "outermost" mean "leftmost"?
>
>> Can you give an example of one that confused you?
>
> If by "confused" you mean I initially guessed wrong about which was
> "the" radical, well, there are so many. Statistically, I suppose the
> leftmost turns out to be "the" radical most often, so I usually try
> that first.
>
> By the way, would you *please* quote the context you're responding to?
> Google Groups can be persuaded to do that.
>
> /Lew


There is no confusion actually.

There are broadly 3 stages in the development of a chinese character:
Ideograph (Pictograph), Phonetic Borrowing, Pictophonetic Writing. These
stages often overlap. What is known as "radical" usually comes from the
Ideograph - the basic form of a character which would mostly stem from a
primitive drawing.

Looking at the example Alex cited, "? " (suo - meaning to shrink), it is not
difficult to see that the left-side character is the "radical", while the
right-side character is a compound, or pictophone consisting of a roof,
under which are 2 characters - the left is a man, the right, in its earliest
form, was a drawing of a mattress; together, it depicts a man lying on a
mattress under a roof - this character is mainly pronounced as 'su' - to
take shelter.

Alex mentions that the left-side character is that of "silk", which isn't
wholly correct. For simplicity of reference, we often call it 'si', meaning
silk.

Putting the 'si' meaning "silk" and 'su' meaning "to take shelter" and
coming up with 'suo' meaning "to shrink" doesn't seem logical now does it?

That's because the left-side character is not pronounced as 'si', nor does
it indicate "silk". It is pronounced as 'mi', meaning 'fine silk'. In old
chinese, it was written that the silk spun & twisted by 5 silkworms is
called 'mi', while silk spun & twisted by 10 silkworms is called 'si' (hence
the chinese character for 'silk' is written as 2 'mi'). From this character
derives the meaning to "make finer, to twist and tighten". A skein of silk
twisted and roped around a shelter limits the space, hence the meaning "to
shrink".

However, etymology is not exact science, and there are characters which
scholars can only offer the best guesses at how they arrive at the final
meaning.

The right-side character means to "take shelter", but it can also mean "a
unit of measurement" (pronounced as 'xiu', usually to measure a night); so a
rope to tighten a unit of measurement can also mean "to shrink".

Danny