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Chinese Characters (Dover Language Guides), by L. Wieger
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For at least 2,000 years Chinese scholars have conducted research into the writing system. In addition to the study of origins and the processes by which new characters are created, Chinese scholarship has been especially interested in creating a rational classification of characters for dictionary use, which would show historical relationships, idea relationships, and phonetic features. This volume, by one of the most profound Sinologists of the twentieth century, summarizes such traditional Chinese scholarship and carries research farther into the analysis of the writing system.
The heart of this book is a series of etymological lessons, in which approximately 2,300 Chinese characters are classified according to 224 "primitives" upon which they are based. For each character Father Wieger gives the modern form, its archaic form, literary pronunciation (Wade system), explanations of origin, semantic content of component parts, related characters, variant forms, quotations of classical usage, and similar material. The explanations of symbolic content are particularly rich, and gather the most important traditional explanations (especially the Shuo-w�n of Hs�-shih) as well as the author's own research.
To make his book more useful Father Wieger has also incorporated a tremendous number of reading aids for the student: listings of the primitives; an index of the characters analyzed, arranged by number of strokes; a listing of 858 phonetic elements, arranged by number of strokes; a listing of about 10,000 characters by phonetic element; a lexicon by transliteration, comprising about 7,000 characters; and a lexicon of about 10,000 characters according to the customary modern system of 214 radicals devised by K'ang-hsi. With this most extensive apparatus students can locate any character they are likely to meet. Indeed, this supplementary material is so useful that it serves the purpose of a dictionary in its own right.
Recent archeological research has, for the most part, sustained the historical analyses of traditional Chinese scholarship and Father Wieger. For the student, however, more important than the historical and classificatory concerns of the book are the analyses of characters in semantic terms. In the Far East analysis of characters has long been taught in such terms, but unfortunately this very valuable mnemonic technique has been largely overlooked in the West. With Wieger's book, however, both teachers and students will find learning easier and more lasting when phonetic components are understood and the relationships are perceived between various characters, between original forms and present forms, and between idea and symbol. Father Wieger's book is an indispensable aid to every student of Chinese and Japanese.
- Sales Rank: #612647 in eBooks
- Published on: 2013-05-14
- Released on: 2013-05-14
- Format: Kindle eBook
Most helpful customer reviews
15 of 16 people found the following review helpful.
Let's set the record straight
By Christopher Tricarick
As Mr. Strong has already noted in greater detail, many of the reviews claiming that the etymology here is outdated are missing the point. Since Wieger wrote this book, archeology has revealed a tremendous amount about the origins of Chinese characters in remote antiquity, and to this degree the ideas presented in this book, which are based upon a consensus reached in the second century A.D., are "inaccurate". But the "personality" of each word in a language is built up over time by all the users of the word, and the ideas they had about the word's origin and nature are, to that degree, of more importance than whatever might have been in the mind of the scribe who first coined it. Here is a comparison. Suppose archeology discovered very ancient texts of Gensis, say, which differ in important respects from the canonical version. The new discoveries would, indeed, be very much worth our attention, but would the canonical Genesis suddenly become "outdated"? It is still the latter, what has been known as Genesis for three thousand or more years, that has helped shape our civilization. In fact, the traditional etymologies are even more worth knowing about even than this comparison suggests. If an authentic older text of Genesis were really discovered, this would gradually change the way we thought about the Old Testament. By contrast, the fundamental nature, idea, "character" of the Chinese characters has been pretty firmly shaped by the ideas about them, settled in the 2nd century A.D., which this book very competently presents. No discoveries about what the graphs originally meant in the Shang is likely to change that.
This book, then, pretty accurately gives the student the ideas of the characters which have shaped Chinese usage throughout history. Secondly, it is a magnificent introduction to ancient forms which, for understanding what lies behind Chinese words, are as useful as a knowledge of Greek and Latin together is for a deeper understanding of the modern European languages. I do not know of any other book, useful for a beginning student of the language, which shows so many of the old forms. Finally, while it is certainly not adequate as a stand-alone dictionary, it has been for me a very useful supplement to the other dictionaries I own. In fact, more than once a rare character which did not appear in any other dictionary turned up here.
The introduction to this book, though brief, is the most thorough, in-depth, and readable account of the nature of Chinese characters that I personally have seen in a book for the common reader. Everyone who studies Chinese should read i--not at the very outset but after a few months, when he will know what Wieger is talking about. The ten pages of that introduction contains more insight and information than DeFrancis' whole book, and far more agreeably presented.
Finally, I would like to say a word about the comment about Wade-Giles. Until pretty much the day before yesterday everyone writing about China used it; unless you want to avoid everything that was written before 1990 or so (including, to name a few examples, Barbara Tuchman's book on China in WWII, Lau's translations of the Chinese classics, or Benjamin Schwartz's World of Thought in Ancient China) and unless you are willing to be in permanent uncertainty as to the pronunciation of many personal and place names in Taiwan, learning Wade Giles, along with learning Pinyin, is something everyone with serious interest in China simply does. It takes about ten minutes. Surely by the time someone is as deeply involved in the study of Chinese characters as to be reviewing a book about their etymology, it is a little silly to object to devoting ten minutes to learning another Romanization system.
18 of 18 people found the following review helpful.
Dated but Valuable
By Charles W. Strong
Some of the reviews of Wieger's book are unfair. Of course it is out of date: the second edition was published in 1927, the same year that the Academia Sinica began to protect the Shang sites at Anyang! Serious study of oracle bones had barely begun, and no-one can reasonably deride Wieger's failure to mention it as "ignorance."
About the year 200 CE, the Shuo-Wen was published, the great dictionary that dominated Chinese etymological thinking until the early 20th century. This was a remarkable intellectual achievement. Chalmers' 1881 book, "The Structure of Chinese Characters," introduces this Chinese etymology to English speakers, but it is extremely concise. Wieger is much more detailed, and in 1923 no less a person than Bernhard Karlgren said, "his work is up to now the best European work on the subject." A popular extension of Wieger's work "Analysis of Chinese Characters" by Wilder and Ingram was published in 1922. The authors make an illuminating remark, "[these etymologies] are the products of Chinese fancy and imagination and to some extent show the workings of the Chinese mind. Therefore they interest us who are students of Chinese thought."
As Karlgren notes, "the small seal of Li Si is in many cases an entirely new script." My point is simple: the etymologies derived from shells and bones are frequently irrelevant to the modern characters. The Shuo Wen's may often be erroneous guesses, but they were a part of the Chinese appreciation of their script for more than 1700 years, witness F.C. Hsu's "Chinese Words," published in 1976 and based primarily on the Shuo-Wen. So, buy Wieger and enjoy it. The mnemonic help it gives you in remembering the characters is deeply Chinese, and far more relevant than anything you can contrive for yourself.
I agree with the remarks Kent Suarez makes in his review and would also recommend Wang Hongyuan's book, though I, too, have reservations.
5 of 5 people found the following review helpful.
Chinese Characters: Their Origin, Etymology, History, Classification, and Signification by Dr. L. Wieger, S.J.
By Stephen C. Callender
This is the book (820 pages) that helped me to be able to memorize Chinese characters! Many years ago I was with a Japanese friend and came across this book. I recognized the importance of this book immediately. The author breaks down the Chinese character and shows the reader how the Chinese character evolved. This is one of my most prized possessions. I recommend this book to anyone who wants to understand Chinese characters and how the written language evolved. The author is a member of the Society of Jesus better known as a Jesuit priest. Jesuits are Catholic scholars that study a subject to the fullest. The author has done just that in producing this great masterpiece. [...]
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