Derived characters

While I was still at the Chinese department, during our lectures on Chinese writing, our professors taught us about 6 Chinese character types: pictograms (象形字), simple indicatives (指事字), semantic compounds (會意字), phono-semantic compounds (形聲字), phonetic loans (假借字) and derived characters (轉注字). (For further reading on Chinese character types see this post).

While they explained the first 5 quite in detail, when talking about the last sixth category, we were told that these still require further research and that no one really understands them well. Or so they said.

望 wang4 'hope, expect' is a derived character. Let's look at its definition from the 說文解字 (100 CE) dictionary first:

望：出亡在外，望其還也。从亡，朢省聲。

It took me quite some time to figure out what this means. 出亡在外，望其還也 is the definition itself. After quite a bit of research on all the characters in the definition I think the translation should be: 望: To run away (from home) and disappear. Looking into the distance for the disappeared one. The从亡，朢省聲 part defines the elements in the character. It says:  formed by 亡 wang2 ‚perish, disappear‘ semantic and a reduced 朢 wang4 ‚full moon‘ phonetic.

If you look closely at the朢 character, the 臣 chen2 ‚subject, servant‘ element at the top left has been replaced by 亡 to form 望.

Now the theory goes, that derived characters are characters where one element in an existing character that has a sound we need for a certain new character is removed and replaced by another element to form this new character. The original character acts as a phonetic element and the newly inserted character acts as the semantic element. 

Some other examples:

毀 hui3 ‚destroy, ruin‘ formed by 土 tu3 ‚earth, soil‘ semantic and a reduced 毇 hui3 ‚beat grain‘ semantic. The 米 mi3 ‚rice‘ element has been extracted from 毇 replaced  by 土. The residual combination of 臼 and 殳 would be an inexistent character.

浸 jin4 ‚soak‘ formed by 氵(水) shui3 'water' semantic and a reduced 侵 qin1 ‚invade’ phonetic. 侵 qin1 ‚invade‘ originally meant ‚to proceed‘ and was formed by 亻(人) ren2 'person' semantic and 帚 zhou3 'broom' semantic (today written with 又 instead of 巾 at the bottom). It was thus a semantic compound (a person sweeping the floor with a broom ‚proceeding‘ in a certain direction), not a phono-semantic compound. The 亻(人) ren2 'person' semantic has been replaced by 氵(水) shui3 'water' semantic in浸, but帚 zhou3 'broom' has phonetically or semantically nothing to do with 浸 and is just a residue of 侵 after亻(人) ren2 'person' has been removed.

畿 ji1 ‚territory around the capital‘ formed by 田 tian2 ‚field‘ semantic and a reduced幾 ji3 ‚several, few, how many?‘ phonetic. The 人 ren2 ‚person‘ element at the bottom left has been extracted from幾 and replaced by 田. This character is even more messy, because originally 幾 was written as a combination of two 幺 yao1 'small‘ over戍 shu4 'patrolling soldier' with the meaning ‚dangerous‘ (small patrolling soldier or few patrolling soldiers, danger, dangerous). In the幾character it just so happens to be that scholars responsible for the formatting created a character where the left bottom part of 戍 resembles 人 ren2 ‚person‘ which was then substituted by 田 to form畿.

Another interesting example is遊 you2 ‘wander, walk around’. To understand its etymology we have to go two steps back. The base character for 遊 you2 is汓 qiu2 ‘float, hover, drift’. Later a phono-semantic 游 you2 ‘swim, float; walk around, travel’ was created with the original meaning ‘movement of a flag in wind’ (㫃 yan3 ‘flag’ semantic jammed into 汓 qiu2 ‘float’ phonetic to create 游). Finally 遊 you2 ‘wander, walk around’ was created by removing氵(水) shui3 'water' and replacing it by 辶 (辵) chuo4 'go, walk' semantic. If you remove辶 from 遊 what is left is a non-existent character, only a residue of游 without 氵with no meaning or sound.

The key difference between these derived characters and phono-semantic compounds, where one part of the character represents the sound another part its meaning is, that while phono-semantic compound characters can be nicely separated into two full-quality standalone characters, derived characters cannot, or if separated, standalone characters will not represent their original phonetic values as was the case with 浸 jin4 ‚soak‘. You can separate 清 qing1 ‚clear‘ into氵(水) shui3 'water' semantic and 青 qing1 ‚green, blue‘ phonetic, or 情 qing2 ‘emotion’ into忄(心) xin1 'heart, mind' semantic and青 qing1 ‚green, blue‘ phonetic, but you can’t separate望 that way. 亡 wang2 'perish' is the semantic element in 望 but the rest is a non-existent character, in other words 月 over 壬 doesn't exist and means nothing. It is just a leftover of the original 朢 character after 臣has been removed.