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Copyright 2019, Larry Wall Unless otherwise noted, everything in this directory may be distributed under the terms of the Artistic License, version 2.0 or later. This project is an attempt to decompose all CJK characters into named radicals. Some of the names are standard radical names, some are the names of other characters, and some are completely made up. The goal is to have a system of mnemonics, not to try for a traditional radical naming scheme. Nevertheless, where practical I've tried to use the standard radical names and meanings. One problem is that there are multiple standards to pick from here. I originally started with just the Japanese characters, so there may be a slight resididual bias toward Japanese meanings, but when I have a choice between a radical name that is a purely Japanese interpretation and one that also related to the semantic space of the Chinese borrowing, I've opted for the Chinese-related meaning, even if it's not the usual Japanese gloss (or Chinese gloss) for that particular character or radical. For similar reasons, some of my names are not the modern meaning in any CJKV language, but can be mnemonically related via the etymology. For instance, the original "clam" symbol is called MORNING in KangXi, but means "dragon" in Chinese (and zodiacal Japanese). But many of the derived meanings apparently relate to the idea of a clam shell opening up, like a pair of lips, or the daytime sky opening up like a clamshell. So "clam" it is. For infrequently used names I've often just run the component part names together--the goal in such cases is merely to get a unique name, not to be particularly meaningful. Since the names are picked primarily for their mnemonic value, it should never be assumed that the particular word I've chosen is somehow the one and only "real" meaning...though of course I've tried to come close to the core meaning if there is one. In particular, some of the mnemonics chosen here may make more sense to an English speaker than to a Chinese speaker. A speaker of Chinese is likely better off remembering characters based on the phonetic radicals, since Chinese characters are partially phonetic and partially logographic. Our treatment here is mostly logographic, which is just as much of a distortion as treating Chinese as mostly phonetic. As usual the truth is somewhere in the middle. In any case, the decompositions in here largely take the approach: "This piece LOOKS like that so we'll pretend that's what it really is." Please, please do not assign any etymological significance to accidental lookalikes. Chinese is full of symbols that have fallen together or fallen apart over time, either accidentally or intentionally, and every honest scholar of Chinese admits that there is a great deal of guesswork in many of the derivations, especially in some of the more obscure corners of the orthography. As a vague approximation for some of that scholarly work, this project is even less reliable. PLEASE DO NOT TAKE ME FOR A CHINESE SCHOLAR. Also, be aware that Unicode characters vary in font genericity; the plane 0 characters often list several variants construed to have the same meaning, while the individual variants may be found (sometimes) in the plane 2 extensions. Another difference you should be aware of is that the planes tend to count strokes differently. (This is because the base plane contains unifications of characters can be written three or four different ways, while the extensions mostly contain characters written one way, so you can talk about the variants as different characters.) For instance, the radical for plants, 艹, is counted as six strokes in the base plane (because it's a variant of 艸), but as four strokes in the extensions, whether written as 艹 or 艹. In general, count yourself lucky if you come within a stroke or two of the stroke count listed here. Finally, there are plenty of mistakes in here, due to bad fonts, bad eyesight, or just bad thinking on the part of the author. Sucks to be us... When one exists, the simplified character gets a lowercase name, while the corresponding traditional character gets an uppercase name. A variant or alternate form of the traditional character will usually be prefixed with a lowercase v (followed by a digit in the case of multiple variants, but note that we just use "v" to mean the "v1" variant). No meaning should be attributed to the digit. There's no system here, except that the higher digits tend to be rarer so I came to them later. Some of my early variants use '-ish' or '-y' suffixes, for example, the various variants of "Good", "good", "goodish", "goody", in parallel with "Whoa", etc. These are only general rules, so don't expect complete consistency. In particular, lowercase is often used for traditional forms that have no simplified form. Contrariwise, some lower/uppercase names overlap because I wanted to use the same name for two entirely different characters, or for two minor variants of the same character. There just aren't that many good short words in English. (For similar reasons I don't apologize for using some of the earthier short words supplied by English. :) In the cases where we have named a phonetic syllable after its sound, it is typically uppercased: Mang, Li, Xi, etc. If a character has the special codepoint 0000 with ? for a grapheme, it means that Unicode does not (yet?) contain this pattern as a separate character, so it must be described indirectly. In general, I haven't added these pseudo-characters unless the patterns occur four or five times within other characters, with a slight bias to adding a pattern sooner if it seems to have some etymological significance as a unit of meaning, and later if it just seems to be accidental juxtaposition. (In that sense, it's a bit like the distinction between constellations that are star clusters vs those that are mere asterisms.) For description of the location of each subradical, we use suffixes after a dot to indicate their position. Basic positions: ⿰/⿲ ⿱/⿳ l left t top c center m middle r right b bottom ⿴/⿵/⿶/⿷/⿸/⿹/⿺ o outside (can have multiple insertions, 𠼡=bow.o126) i inside (only one direction, usually, 𠼡=sigh.i1,work.i2,work.i6) Direction of insertion is 0..7 for 45° rotations clockwise: 0 ⿵ n 太=big.o0 處=Tiger.o0 1 ⿹ ne 㢧=bow.o1 2 e 𢎛=bow.o2 3 se 头=big.o3 4 ⿶ s 凷=bin.o4 5 ⿺ sw 㲌=fur.o5 彪=Tiger.o5 6 ⿷ w 匛=box.o6 𧆬=Tiger.o6 7 ⿸ nw 在=dam.o7 𧆸=Tiger.o7 8 ⿴ completely surrounds inner glyph (8 sides) 㘞=closure.o8 9 ⿴ has internal extension ticks, lines, marks 丼=well.o9 ⿻ x overlapped/shared without obvious containment 甴=mouth.x,tack.x (note that c/C and m/M below already imply some overlap) Spreaders: C anti-c, that is, split l+r (or wider than the c thing) 粥=2bow.C M anti-m, that is, split t+b (or taller than the m thing) 呂=2mouth.M V Vertical, 3 or more in a stack, usually nothing inside ☰ =3h.V H Horizontal, 3 or more in a row, usually nothing inside Ⅲ =3v.H T triple 众 is 1*guy.tc 2*guy.bC Q quad 𠈌 is 4*guy.CM or 4*guy.MC in a square Generally, if it's ambiguous whether to describe crossings vertically or horizontally, I've chosen to use c/C to describe things in the horizontal dimension rather than m/M in the vertical dimension. But sometimes I do both... Approximators: ~R Rotation (replication implies rotational symmetry, e.g. 𦮙.b) May be annotated with 45° rotations 0..7 clockwise ~F Flipped (replication implies mirror symmetry) May be annotated with location/axis of flip ~S Stolen from or shared with another piece May be annotated with location of piece shared ~oid A descriptive subshape that isn't really a subradical (a 止 contains 上 but they are really different shapes) ~like A miscellaneous could-be-confused-with lookalike An isolated single slash (/) gives a vague idea of alternation. Note that the first alternative is usually going to be the "correct" one, and subsequent alternatives are just other ways it would be possible to decompose the character, in case someone looks them up that way. An isolated double slash (//) is used mostly on radicals to indicate that the subparts are merely descriptive of shapes, and should not be recursively expanded for search purposes. Because they are not recursively expanded, we use a bit more redundancy of description for the subparts that people might search on. For instance, we might put both 电 "electric" and ⺃ "hook", even though electric would expand to hook if we did that, which we don't, so there.
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Breakdown of Unicode CJK characters into pieces by name.
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