Radical (Chinese characters)
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A radical (from Latin radix 'root') or root character or rather class character (Chinese 部首, Pinyin bùshǒu; Japanese bushu; Korean 부수 busu), is the graphic or semantic assignment component of a Chinese character (also of kanji and hanja). This assignment is often obvious, sometimes purely traditional and only traceable from the historical development of the character, sometimes quite arbitrary. In reference works, characters are indexed by radicals and can be found that way. "Radical" is actually a misnomer, since they have no original "root" character at all, but were added later in linguistic history for classification purposes.
The figure shows how the radical 2 (the red vertical line) is contained in various characters:
In the Chinese dictionary, the lemmas are arranged according to radicals. These are arranged according to the number and shape of the strokes. This system of recognizable elementary characters has survived to the present day. The number of radicals, which was 540 in the 121 lexicon Shuowen Jiezi (說文解字 / 说文解字, Shuōwén jiězì - "Explanation of Characters"), has been steadily reduced.
The number of 214 radicals was fixed by the renowned Kangxi dictionary (康熙字典, Kāngxī zìdiǎn) of 1716 under the Kangxi emperor. During the reform of characters in 1955, the radicals were also changed and their number increased, so that dictionaries for simplified characters often now use 224 or 227 radicals instead of the traditional 214 radicals. In the modern large dictionary Hanyu Da Cidian and in the character dictionary Hanyu Da Zidian, on the other hand, the number of radicals was reduced to 200.
Radicals from 1 to 126 (the red numbers indicate the number of dashes)
Radicals from 127 to 214 (the red numbers indicate the number of strokes)
Function of a radical
The easiest way to look up a Chinese character in a modern dictionary, if you know the pronunciation, is to search alphabetically for the pinyin or Wade-Giles transcription of the character in question. But you can only do that if you know the pronunciation. Most of the time, however, you have to look up characters of which you know neither pronunciation nor meaning. The most common method is to look up the radical of a character.
To do this, the radical of the character must be recognized (which can sometimes be difficult, see below), where a radical table helps, which is ordered by the number of strokes of the radical. Then count how many strokes the character has in addition to the radical. Under the number of the radical and the number of additional strokes, all characters are then listed for which this applies - usually only a handful.
A stroke is anything that is drawn in one go. This is often not immediately obvious to the untrained, but the amount of structures is relatively limited. Once you have internalized some basic rules (strokes almost always go from left to right or top to bottom, rarely have more than one kink), you can quickly identify the number of strokes in most characters. In the example 中 'middle', there is a square in addition to the radical, the vertical stroke. This is drawn with three strokes, because the top and right edges are drawn in one go.
However, the classical radical system also has clear weaknesses. Especially the identification of the radical can be difficult, because it is not clearly separated from the rest in some characters and there are several candidates in other characters. It is also possible that changes have occurred in the composition of several radicals to form one (usually complex) character. Modern lexicons try to reduce this problem by being error-tolerant and listing characters not only under the correct radical, but also under those that can easily be mistaken for it. Another disadvantage is that the subdivision by radicals is not uniform - for some radicals there are only a handful of characters, for other radicals thousands of characters, so that even with identified radical number and stroke number one sometimes still has to choose among dozens of characters.
There are a number of approaches to developing better organizational systems to look up Chinese characters more quickly and easily. The best known are the quadrilateral index and the SKIP system.
Nowadays, many of the renowned dictionaries are also available in electronic form on smartphones or tablets, which have excellent handwriting recognition capabilities, largely eliminating the need for searches that rely on radicals.
Radical 53 and its use
Character encoding
The 214 radicals are contained in the Unicode block Kangxi radicals. They are compatibility equivalents (but not canonically equivalent) to the characters they form without additional strokes. For example, radical 65 U+2F40 (⽀) and the character U+652F (支) written with it are distinguished.
Questions and Answers
Q: What is a Chinese radical?
A: A Chinese radical is the part of a Chinese character used to list the character in a Chinese dictionary. It usually serves as a semantic indicator, giving hints to the reader about what the whole character means.
Q: What does "部首" mean?
A: "部首" (Pinyin: bùshǒu, Japanese bushu, Korean busu) means "section header", which refers to the place where a character is listed in the dictionary.
Q: How many unique ideographs exist for all words and morphemes that make up a language?
A: People can only make so many unique ideographs for all words and morphemes that make up a language.
Q: How many radicals are said to be used in daily life?
A: It is said that nearly all characters used in daily life are made up of just 214 radicals.
Q: What is an example of simpler characters combining to form more complex ones?
A: An example of simpler characters combining to form more complex one is the complex character 明 míng meaning "bright" or "tomorrow", which is made up of the radicals 日 rì meaning "sun" or "day" and 月 yuè meaning "moon" or "month".
Q: Is there an equivalent term for Chinese radicals in cuneiform and Egyptian hieroglyphics?
A: The equivalents in cuneiform and Egyptian hieroglyphics are called determinatives.
