Outlier Chinese Character Dictionary. Is this unique, and is the research solid?

Sorry to spam your inbox. I've just managed to dig my original comment out of Google Chrome's cache files. Here it is below in the interest in transparency.


I'm on the way out the door so this is a little rushed. Apologies in advance for typos or if I messed up anything. If you have other questions let me know and I can reply in a few more hours.

it is the only dictionary that teaches functional components and how they work

I mean this claim is ultimately just silly unless they mean that it holds your hand. Any typical Chinese dictionary is organised by radicals, and any decent dictionary is going to follow that the 月 on the left of 腰 is actually 肉.

Is this the only source that describes functional components in a logical and accurate way?

I guess people's ideas of what is logical might vary. But no <a href="https://code.google.com/p/eclectus/">it's certainly not the only one</a>. "The only one" claim is usually better treated as "the only one the devs are aware of" or "ours is special and different and that other one doesn't count". Maybe I'm wording that somewhat cynically but I don't mean it to be. The point is that it's 2015, and these guys on Kickstarter are far from the first group of people to think of this idea.

They divide functional components (is that a widely used term? I've never heard it elsewhere) into the categories of form, semantic, phonetic, and empty components. I'm aware of semantic and phonetic components, but do the other two work the way they describe? Is this really the correct breakdown of character components?

It's kinda the correct breakdown. The issue is that semantic + phonetic components aren't the only way characters are formed. Some are pseudo-pictographic like 黑 for 'black' (it's a picture of wood in an airtight box on top of a fire, which is how you made charcoal). It can be the phonetic component, e.g. as in 嘿 ("hey!"), but there are other ways characters come about. But generally yes this is a fair explanation of the breakdown.

Are there any sources that describe the modern written Chinese's semantic components without resorting to traditional radical lists?

It's hard to describe it without resorting to traditional characters, because most of the explanations you're given is stuff like "this is a picture of X on top of Y so it means Z, get it?"

I'm aware of the jiǎntǐ Zhōngwén bùshǒu, but how reliable is that list?

What do you mean about how reliable it is? It's just the list. It is what it is. Those are simply all the radicals that exist in the character set.

Note that 'radical' does not mean just component. It's a specific and set classification system.

And are there accurate sources on phonetic components?

Kinda? Things like some keyboard input method are based on the fact that all the components are almost always simpler characters. Even something like 齉 is made up of a bunch of smaller pieces. The left half is 鼻, 'nose', which is itself made up of 自 ('self')+田('field')+丌('pedestal'). The last one is much less common by itself but the others are. 囊 means 'bag' and made from 中 + 冖 + 襄 ('to assist'). You can then take 襄 and continue to break it down smaller. The point here is that this is all compounding. The most complex characters are going to be made up of combinations of simpler characters.

They claim to be creating the only English dictionary that accurately describes semantic and phonetic components, as well as pointing out "empty components" that look etymologically linked but aren't.

Presumably like 肉 which now looks like 月 as a radical?

Are there other sources for understanding character components and composition, and how accurate are they? I've seen it claimed that Zhongwen.com has inaccuracies and still bases itself too heavily on radicals.

To be honest a lot of the analysis that the average person in China gives is also just as incorrect as zhongwen.com. Your best place to start is actually probably going to be wiktionary, which gives composition data for almost all the CJK characters they've got. <a href="http://en.wiktionary.org/wiki/%E8%B4%9B">Here's an example</a>:

贛 (radical 154 貝+17, 24 strokes, … composition ⿰章⿱夂貢)

You can then click on 章, 夂 and 貢.

Sorry for the rambly post, I'm not very knowledgeable about Chinese orthography and I'm struggling to articulate my questions about this.

No worries. The most important things to remember are 1) it's a mostly regular simple system that just looks complex and 2) Things change, just like in English, so characters that might seem to mean one thing based solely on composition may actually mean something quite different.

It's best not to rely on the compositions <em>too</em> much anyway, and once you're more proficient at speaking Chinese you won't need to anyway because you'll be able to just intuitively know a lot better.

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