Re: Chinese Character Decomposition

Hi!

Amanda Babcock <langs@...> writes:
> On Thu, Jun 12, 2003 at 01:41:36AM +0200, Henrik Theiling wrote:
>
> > Another, more specialised question: concerning the character gong4 (in
> > Mandarin) with six strokes ('to share'), radical ba1 ('eight'),
> > U+5171: what is the remaining decomposition after taking away ba1?  No
> > valid character remains after removing ba1.  I decomposed it as
> > 'eight' + 'one' + 'grass' (bottom to top).  Would that be correct?
> > (That does makes sense wrt. 'to share'.)
>
> According to www.zhongwen.com, the character evolved from "twenty"
>
>      |  |
>     -+--+-
>      |  |
>      +--+
>
> and "pairs of hands"
>
>      |  |
>     -+--+-
>      |  |
>     /   |
>
> but I don't know if the historical view is relevant to decomposition.
Thanks! :-)

For my project, it does not help, I think, but for me, it's
very interesting. :-)

It does not help because the radical of that character is definitely
ba1 now, which does not seem to have much to do with the decomposition
that you gave.

It would be sad if I found out that characters cannot be decomposed
the way that I want. :-( Maybe the character simply has no further
decomposition other than ba1 + 4 strokes.  Too bad that would be.

> Nevertheless, zhongwen.com is really cool.
Yeah, I have a bookmark on that site.  Very cool, indeed!

**Henrik