On Thu, Aug 21, 2014 at 1:27 PM, Rajesh Mehar <rajeshme...@gmail.com> wrote:
> The little I know of the simplified Chinese character set is that it is a > set of 2 dozen or so pictograms that are then combined with each other to > get other pictograms for other sounds. > > Could anyone else elaborate or correct my notions? > Your description is a bit of an oversimplification. The components of simplified Chinese (sometimes called "radicals") are usually semantic classifiers, used in dictionary lookup, rather than phonetic. While some radicals are used to indicate sound mostly they are related to meaning albeit sometimes only loosely or fancifully. Those pictograms do not represent sounds, so much as words or parts of words. One of my favorite examples of why trying to represent Chinese phonetically is the poem "Lion Eating Poet In the Stone Den" http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lion-Eating_Poet_in_the_Stone_Den in which every word has the sound "shi" (though with varying tones). There are 189 official radicals in simplified chinese, quite a few more than 2 dozen! http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_Xinhua_Zidian_radicals -- Charles
