Talk:Chinese character radicals

message: I've incorporated the text from my translation of the French version of this article (Talk:Radical (Chinese character)/French Translation, started by User:Adjusting).  I've tried to integrate the information in the existing text as much as possible, but fairly little of the actual previous text remains.  The Kangxi radicals have been moved to List of Kangxi radicals with minimal change.  So, any issues related to that content should go there.
Please read the new text and check it as well as copy-edit it.  I do know Chinese (poorly), but I am used to looking words up in Chinese dictionaries and I know a lot about the linguistics of Chinese and of CJK languages in general, so I'm not totally out of my depths in this field.  But that doesn't mean I haven't made mistakes or misunderstood.
If someone with administrative privileges wants to delete Talk:Radical (Chinese character)/French Translation when they don't feel it serves any purpose for verifying the translation, I'd appreciate it.
I am preparing the article  Chinese character classification based on the French :fr:Classification des sinogrammes.
--Diderot 13:25, 8 Apr 2005 (UTC)
thread_title: Major revision based on the French version

message: The article doesn't make it absolutely clear, at least not without reading it in its entirety, what exactly a radical is. Surely this is the most important thing here? Does it mean any graphically distinguishable part of any Chinese character? Must it be in other characters? Must it be in the modern, commonly used list of about 200 radicals? Must it be in the older list of about 500 radicals? Must it be used in (at least one, commonly, what?) dictionary as an index, or is the index usage separate and has no influence on the definiton of what a radical is? Is bushu exactly the same thing as "radical" in English, and is it used that way in Chinese/Japanese/other languages? Must the radical(s?) of a character denote meaning, or may it be purely phonetical? ("These examples intentionally use the radical for its semantic value, but this not always the case." says so, but the text above contradicts it at least implicitly by classifying characters as "radical+radical" and "radical + phonetic ideo-phonograms", strongly suggesting that these "phonetic ideo-phonograms" that look like radicals are in fact not radicals)
In short, the article, being a definition of what a radical is, should strive to make it absolutely clear what is meant by the word, and this definition should be given at the beginning. As it is, it seems as if the authors themselves have different contradicting ideas of what the word means.
:Not sure whose comment that was, but I wish to comment on the problem of the term radical, and how it is unfortunately applied to two different animals, the semantic component and the bushou, which may or may not coincide. I believe this will answer part of the above question --
:First, when the earliest European sinologists decomposed Chinese characters, they attempted to apply to them the terms for decomposing the inflected words of European languages, namely radix or radical (the semantic root of a word, which provides its core meaning) and termination (the portion which changes when inflected, showing case, time and mood). Since the majority of Chinese characters are semantic-phonetic compounds, they applied the term radical to the semantic part, but they couldn’t apply the word ‘termination’ to the phonetic part since it does not take a terminal position. 
:Then, the 部首 bùshǒu (section heads) which organize dictionaries somehow got mistranslated as ‘radicals’ as well, creating confusion which has lasted up until the present. Many students are therefore under the misimpression that the component under which a character is indexed in the dictionary is its semantic component. This is not necessarily so, even if it happens to be true in many or even a majority of cases, and a careful examination of the characters under the first half dozen 部首 bùshǒu sections of the dictionary will amply demonstrate this.  
:The solution is to avoid the term ‘radical’ entirely. For the meaning-bearing component, the term widely used by scholars is ‘semantic’ component, while the section heads in the dictionary may be termed simply bùshǒu, and explained to students as, for example, the ‘header’ or ‘key’ or ‘index’ component under which the character is listed in dictionaries. Dragonbones 09:05, 20 March 2006 (UTC)
replies: text: A fuller answer to the above should probably delve into the reasons behind the choices of bushou beginning with Shuowen, such as the study of this by Serruys. Dragonbones 09:11, 20 March 2006 (UTC)
thread_title: Clarification request

message: The external reference "http://www.chinaknowledge.de/Literature/radicals.html - A good detailed introduction on section headers" is a perfect example of the confusion between the two meanings of the word radical. It is also not well written, so I have removed this external link, which will only confuse readers. (In general, I like Chinaknowledge.de, by the way -- but I would expect to see a drastic improvement in that particular page before it would qualify as a useful and informative link.) Here is an example of the confusion, with highlighting added for emphasis:
"The classifiers, determinants or radicals (bushou 部首) of a Chinese character serve to categorize words according to their meaning and to place them into a dictionary...Having a closer look at some characters, wrong attributions can easily be found, for instance the character for dao 到 "arriving" seems to be compounded from a standing "knife" 刀 to the right and the character 至 as a second part. Indeed, all characters deriving from the radical "knife" have the same shape. But looking at the meaning of the character, we see that in fact, the "knife" is not the radical, but the phonetical part of the character (pronounced dao), and the left part is in fact the radical 至 zhi "arriving"." 
You can see that the author alternates between using radical in the meanings of bushou and semantic without explaining the difference, thus completely confusing matters. Dragonbones 09:47, 13 September 2006 (UTC)
thread_title:  deleted confusing external reference 

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BetacommandBot (talk) 13:47, 25 February 2008 (UTC)
thread_title: Fair use rationale for Image:Character Palette.png

message: Are not the terms "Pinyin" and "section header" confused in the first paragraph? These are different things, thus "Pinyin" is not the correct term here?--Wickey-nl (talk) 08:57, 23 March 2008 (UTC)
replies: text: It's saying that "bushou" is Pinyin for the preceding characters, not that Pinyin is synonymous with section header. --JWB (talk) 09:26, 23 March 2008 (UTC)
replies: text: You can easily read: The second meaning is Pinyin, meaning section header.So it would be better:Later, the term was also borrowed for a second meaning, the 部首 (in Pinyin written as: bùshǒu, Japanese bushu, Korean busu), literally meaning "section header", under which a character is listed in the dictionary.--Wickey-nl (talk) 11:19, 23 March 2008 (UTC)
thread_title:  Confusion of "Pinyin" and "section header" 

message: The last line of the current content, "This is of course fundamentally incorrect." is clearly editorial comment and not information. For one, it includes the phrase, "of course" which is a question-begging tactic of intrusive editorialism. If the fifth meaning is in use, then it is just as valid as the others. The historical meaning of the term is not the same as the fundamental or correct meaning of the term and the historical meaning is a tangle of confusion.
Extracting the partial meanings of "radical" from the other four usages and synthesizing a discrete new meaning as a useful term is how languages work and therefore cannot be otherwise than "fundamentally correct." Halfelven (talk) 17:00, 5 June 2009 (UTC)
thread_title:  Editorial comment in text 

message: I'd like to get back to the discussion in the above talk section.
Radical is simply equivalent to bushou. Etymologically the word "radical" was coined by Europeans using a poor analogy to roots in European languages, that are whole words lacking only inflectional endings for tense, number, person, etc., and nothing like the determinatives used in all the logographic scripts that are simply vague categories for disambiguation. The provenance of the word "radical" is not known to most users of Chinese characters and dictionaries, and the etymology is completely irrelevant to modern use. The word is like many words which were coined with a logic that no longer makes sense but has been forgotten.
As for the purported 'semantic' sense: Few people are trained in the origin and classification of Chinese characters, and even among the specialists, it is often unclear or disputed whether a given component of a given character is 'semantic' or not. This cannot be a basis for any fixed classification. As you (Dragonbones) have noted, the character classification scholars avoid the term "radical" entirely, except sometimes using it in its colloquial sense equivalent to "bushou", which is the only meaning the term is actually used for. The 'semantic' sense of radical does not exist at all in current usage, if it ever did, and the people who actually discuss whether character components are 'semantic' use other terms than "radical".
Radical and bushou both properly mean a component that is actually the head of a section in some dictionary or in the particular dictionary being discussed. The distinction between these components and other components that are not section headers is arbitrary and an artifact of paper book dictionary technology. The fact that students often ignore the distinction and simply refer to both as radicals is not "barbaric" as some pedantically complain, but simply reflects that the distinction is arbitrary and only useful as far as it speeds up dictionary lookup in some cases. (For unclear cases, dictionaries in fact often did include entries indexed under the "wrong" radical, with a pointer to the entry under the "right" radical to save space.) The distinction is even less useful with current technology which can look up characters based on any component, whether the "right" radical, the "wrong" radical, or not a radical at all.
The article should simply document radicals (=bushou) and their usage, and does not need to go over controversy about whether they mean "semantic" components as there is no such actual controversy. The split article Section headers of a Chinese dictionary should be merged back into this article or into Chinese dictionary. The article should also drop the tone of horror at "misuse" of the term to mean any character component. --JWB (talk) 03:17, 16 November 2009 (UTC)
thread_title:  Resume split/merge discussion 

message: Since the title of the article is "Radical (Chinese character)", why does it suddenly start using Japanese names in the "Type of radical and position" section? This seems out of place. Maybe it would be better if it had the Chinese names as well? 
Jww1066 (talk) 14:03, 14 August 2010 (UTC)
replies: text: Possibly, but my understanding is that Chinese and Japanese classify radicals somewhat differently, and the section covering Japanese kanji probably does not apply in the same manner as it does in Chinese hanzi.  —Preceding unsigned comment added by 76.164.248.148 (talk) 20:03, 4 January 2011 (UTC)
replies: text: Regardless of the correctness of the actual information, the flow is screwed. This is the first mention of kanji anywhere in the article, and it happens abruptly and without explanation in a section titled "Type of radical and position" -- a topic which would seem to be equally applicable to Chinese use. 86.181.170.47 (talk) 03:43, 22 March 2011 (UTC)
replies: text: Should use Bushou explanation of radicals, it is the Chinese form. Possibly use this as a reference page?Carmelator (talk) 08:43, 22 May 2011 (UTC)
replies: text: Is the abruptness due to the split-off of Section headers of a Chinese dictionary? How about if that was reversed? --JWB (talk) 01:44, 23 May 2011 (UTC)
replies: text: Not sure how relevant the article split is to this particular issue, but, while we're on the subject, I don't see any reason for the split. Everyone calls the "section headers" in Chinese dictionaries "radicals", don't they?. Even Section headers of a Chinese dictionary agrees that these so-called "section headers" are in practice called "radicals", but then says it will avoid the term, which is weird for a start. Why would you want to not call something by its usual name? And then this article refers the reader to Section headers of a Chinese dictionary for what it calls "the most common meaning of the term". Why would "the most common meaning" of a term not be explained in that term's article?  It seems that some previous editor(s) have been of the opinion that the term "radical" is mired in confusion, and the only way to present the information clearly is to split the articles. I don't personally see why it's so confusing. Maybe "radical" can be used to mean some slightly different things, but one of them is these so-called "section headers", so why don't we just explain so in this article? 86.160.82.79 (talk) 02:40, 2 July 2011 (UTC)
replies: text: I have made a couple of small changes that I think help present the article split in a better light. Mainly, I have removed the big warning at the top of the article directing users to Section headers of a Chinese dictionary for "the most common meaning of the term", which seems silly to me. This article always had its own section "Section headers of a Chinese dictionary", so the structure now allows a self-contained article here describing all the meanings of "radical" (including a summary of the "Section headers of a Chinese dictionary" meaning), plus a link to the main article on "Section headers of a Chinese dictionary" which thrashes out that specific subject in more detail. If I have the time and inspiration I also hope to cull some of the sound of axes being ground from this article. 86.160.213.101 (talk) 01:43, 9 August 2011 (UTC)
thread_title:  Why does it switch to Japanese terminology? 

message: All the way back on 20 March 2006, Dragonbones made an excellent suggestion on this Talk Page: Avoid the term "radical" entirely. I propose to make an attempt to do just that, rewriting the portions in question of the various articles that cover or mention radicals, semantic indicators, section headers etc.
This article is the place to start, and I'm beginning with baby steps, trying to ensure that when readers consult this key article they'll find a presentation consistent with what is written in other articles.
First, I'm tempted to be bold and revise unilaterally the current description of 采 as an associative compound, but I'll solicit input first. I wonder how anyone can doubt that 采 is a phono-semantic compound, with 爪 the phonetic indicator and 木 the semantic indicator. A comparison of the Old Chinese readings of 爪 and 采 makes this rather evident; see the readings given by Sagart/Baxter, the ABC Etymological Dictionary of Old Chinese, Starostin's database etc. (If 爪 as phonetic indicator seems counterintuitive, it's only because we're accustomed to seeing it in the role of semantic indicator.) Does anyone possess evidence that weighs in favor of regarding 采 as an associative compound?
Second, in the References section, a note runs as follows: When an etymon (original "root" form of a graph, such as 采 cǎi "to pick", in 採 cǎi "to pick") is analyzed alongside the remaining element(s), it cannot be said to be playing only a phonetic role. For instance, operating under the two misconceptions that a) all characters have exactly one semantic and one phonetic part, and b) each part can only play one role, many would mistakenly dissect 採 as comprising 扌 shǒu "hand" semantic and 采 cǎi phonetic. However, being the original graph, it must necessarily impart its original semantic meaning (showing as it does a hand picking from a tree) as well as its sound.
Two questions, just to clarify my understanding. 1) What evidence is there for the point of view that regarding all characters as having exactly one semantic and one phonetic part is a misconception? 2) Why must an original graph necessarily impart its original semantic meaning, as opposed to, let's say, a broader conceptual significance? (Evidence would be great, but simple logic will suffice.)
Thanks. Lawrence J. Howell (talk) 05:51, 29 May 2013 (UTC)
thread_title:  Character category; Questions about note in References section 

message: I propose merging Section headers of a Chinese dictionary, which was split from this page in June 2008, back into this article.  Currently this article is a discussion of three meanings of "radical" and why you shouldn't use them.  The first doesn't seem to be used by anyone, while the third is the one everyone uses, but they have to go to Section headers of a Chinese dictionary for the relevant content.  Now it's true that "radical" is something of a misnomer for the part of a character used for dictionary lookup, but that's established usage, including in Jerry Norman's Chinese ().  While "Section head" is a literal translation of 部首 bùshǒu, it hasn't caught on in the English-language literature, and it's not our role to campaign to change English usage.  The "radical" article should have the content readers will expect (currently in the "section headers" article).  The article should also point out that these aren't "roots", and that while they're often also semantic indicators (which Norman calls "significs"), they aren't always.  But these are relatively minor points that can be covered in short sections.  Kanguole 15:55, 25 June 2013 (UTC)
thread_title:  Proposed merge 

message: Given what is in the Japanese article, we need a new article or to seriously rethink the naming of this article
(ぶしゅ) is not even listed as Japanese hiragana let alone the katakana that modern English readers use to distinguish the ON-yomi of 部首.
Given the revisions to simplified Chinese and the teaching of Vietnamese under the Hanoi regime, radicals need to be re-thought as no longer "Chinese" except to the Chinese ... but this is English wikipedia !
please consult https://ja.wikipedia.org/wiki/%E9%83%A8%E9%A6%96 and note the title as ja.wikipedia.org/wiki/部首
NOT "chinese" anything !
To view kanji as Chinese after the simplifications of China and Japan ( not to mention ignoring Korea and Vietnam) is like insisting on calling English "Gallicized Low-German" - which Anglo-Saxon + Norman French might seem to be if one were ignorant of the Danish and the Norse in the language at the time of the Battle of Hastings.  Or calling English a "Low-German dialect with a half-Gallic lexikon" ( which standard English surely is at a first glance by an objective non-European linguist, given the range of variation across extant natural languages.)
What is more, contemporary Japanese can be taught to language-X speakers by varying the choice of radical - and indeed, various sets are used even to teach Japanese to English-speakers, as is the case with the 181 bushu used at www.quickkanji.com and the different set at jisho.org and the often invented set used by the very popular and successful Heisig "Remembering the Kanji".
"traditional Chinese radical set" would be only a section in an ENGLISH article on 'radical' for characters in CJK+Viet writing systems ...and then there is Okinawan ... or will Wikipedia declare that "colour" is written "color" in English ?
This issue is especially pressing as Japanese language chauvinism itself radically distorts an objective view of kanji ... not to mention the Chinese view of those characters used in China today which in fact have comes back to them from Japan.
Is there a non-European linguist who is neither Chinese nor Japanese who could be consulted ? Perhaps from India or from an Arab university ?  From a Baltic university ? From Budapest or Helsinki ? Further: see recent work on Anglo-Franco-German bias in "scientific" linguistics since its beginnings up to and including Chomsky and beyond. Chinese-bias among native Nippon scholars is itself a huge problem which an editor needs to be aware of - unless we are to repeat the biases of E. Britannica, E. Universlis ...
G. Robert Shiplett 13:22, 1 March 2014 (UTC)
replies: text: Actually it's a bit like calling the letters used to write English a Latin alphabet.  Do you have a proposal?  Kanguole 14:40, 1 March 2014 (UTC)

text: The title of this thread is "New article needed in light of Japanese article", but I wonder if it was meant to say "New article title needed". Certainly, I cannot imagine that we need a whole other article to explain the use of radicals in kanji separate from their use in the Chinese characters used in China. I agree that there should be more (i.e. some) mention in the article of Japanese and Korean issues/terminology; there used to be a section "Position of radical within character in Japanese", but it was not properly integrated with the article, and there was no explanation of how/why the information was specific to Japanese, and eventually someone deleted it. I don't personally have a problem with the present article title though. 86.160.86.139 (talk) 02:01, 12 March 2014 (UTC)
thread_title:  New article needed in light of Japanese article 

message: 也 is a very complex phonetic component. Besides the examples listed in the table, it is also used as the phonetic component 'yi' for the following characters:
匜 扡 衪 訑 貤 迆 酏 釶 柂 袘 迤
I feel like this point should be mentioned, but don't know how it should fit.
Steven Daniels (talk) 06:20, 20 March 2015 (UTC)
replies: text: That table is offtopic for this article, as 也 isn't a radical.  Maybe Chinese character classification#Phono-semantic compound characters would be a better place for it.  Kanguole 13:12, 20 March 2015 (UTC)
replies: text:  I found this off-topic table to be confusing, which is why i moved it to Chinese characters#Phono-semantic compounds. --SelfishSeahorse (talk) 09:38, 20 August 2019 (UTC)
thread_title:  Possible Ammendments to the 8 phono-semantic compounds with phonetic part 也 (yě) 

message: "Usually, the radical is also the semantic component, but that is not always the case.[6]" Could sb. please add an example at least? --Backinstadiums (talk) 15:10, 14 December 2017 (UTC)
thread_title:  Example needed