Botanical.—Herb, grain, rice, wheat, millet, hemp, leeks, melon, pulse, bamboo, sacrificial herb; wood, branch, sprout, petal.
Mineral.—Metal, stone, gems, salt, earth.
Meteorological.—Rain, wind, fire, water, icicle, vapor, sound; sun, moon, evening; time.
Utensils.—A chest, a measure, a mortar, spoon, knife, bench, couch, crockery, clothes, tiles, dishes, napkin, net, plough, vase, tripod, boat, carriage, pencil; bow, halberd, arrow, dart, ax, musical reed, drum, seal.
Descriptives.—Black, white, yellow, azure, carnation, sombre; color; high, long, sweet, square, large, small, strong, lame, slender, old, fragrant, acrid, perverse, base, opposed.
Actions.—To enter, to follow, to walk slowly, to arrive at, to stride, to walk, to run, to reach to, to touch, to stop, to fly, to overspread, to envelop, to encircle, to establish, to overshadow, to adjust, to distinguish, to divine, to see, to eat, to speak, to kill, to fight, to oppose, to stop, to embroider, to owe, to compare, to imitate, to bring forth, to use, to promulge.
Miscellaneous.—A desert, cave, field, den, mound, hill, valley, rivulet, cliff, retreat. A city; roof, gate, door, portico. One, two, eight, ten. Demon; an inch, mile; without, not, false; a scholar, statesman, letters; art, wealth; motion; self, myself, father; a point; again; wine; silk; joined hands; a long journey; print of a bear’s foot; a surname; classifier of cloth.
The number of characters found under each of these radicals in Kanghí’s Dictionary varies from five up to one thousand three hundred and fifty-four. The radical is not uniformly placed, but its usual position is on the left of the primitive. Some occur on the top, others on the bottom; some inclose the primitive, and many have no fixed place, making it evident that no uniform plan was adopted in the original construction. They must be thoroughly learned before the dictionary can be readily used, and some practice had before a character can be quickly found.[292] The groups occurring under a majority of the radicals are more or less natural in their general meaning, a feature of the language which has already been noticed (page [375]). Some of the radicals are interchanged, and characters having the same meaning sometimes occur under two or three different ones—variations which seem to have arisen from the little importance of a choice out of two or three similar radicals. Thus the same word tsien, ‘a small cup,’ is written under the three radicals gem, porcelain, and horn, originally, no doubt, referring to the material for making it. This interchange of radicals adds greatly to the number of duplicate forms, which are still further increased by a similar interchange of primitives having the same sound. These two changes very seldom occur in the same character, but there are numerous instances of synonymous forms under almost every radical, arising from an interchange of primitives, and also under analogous radicals caused by their reciprocal use. Thus, from both these causes, there are, under the radical ma, ‘a horse,’ one hundred and eighteen duplicate forms, leaving two hundred and ninety-three different words; of the two hundred and four characters under niu, ‘an ox,’ thirty-nine are synonymous forms; and so under other radicals. These characters do not differ in meaning more than favor and favour, or lady and ladye; they are mere variations in the form of writing, and though apparently adding greatly to the number of characters, do not seriously increase the difficulty of learning the language.
Variants of other descriptions frequently occur in books, which needlessly add to the labor of learning the language. Ancient forms are sometimes adopted by pedantic writers to show their learning, while ignorant and careless writers use abridged or vulgar forms, because they either do not know the correct form, or are heedless in using it. When such is the case, and the character cannot be found in the dictionary, the reader is entirely at fault, especially if he be a foreigner, though in China itself he would not experience much difficulty where the natives were at hand to refer to. Vulgar forms are very common in cheap books and letters, which are as unsanctioned by the dictionaries and good usage, as cockney phrases or miner’s slang are in pure English. They arise, either from a desire on the part of the writer to save time by making a contracted form of few strokes instead of the correct character of many strokes; or he uses common words to express an energetic vulgar phrase, for which there are no authorized characters, but which will be easily understood phonetically by his readers. These characters would perchance not be understood at all outside of the range of the author’s dialect, because the phrase itself was new; their individual meaning, indeed, has nothing to do with the interpretation of the sentence, for in this case they are merely signs of sound, like words in other languages, and lose their lexigraphic character. For instance, the words kia-fí for coffee, kap-tan for captain, mí-sz’ for Mr., etc., however they were written, would be intelligible to a native of Canton if they expressed those sounds, because he was familiar with the words themselves; but a native of Shensí would not understand them, because, not knowing the things intended, he would naturally refer to the characters themselves for the meaning of the phrase, and thus be wholly misled. In such cases, the characters become mere syllables of a phonetic word. Foreign names are often transliterated by writers on geography or history, and their recognition is no easy task to their readers.[293]