1.6 The Sound Half Predicts the Reading — Epoché
What you will be able to do Find the sound component in a two-part character and use it to guess the pronunciation. Read a family of characters that share one sound component, and say what the other component contributes in each. Say what kind of thing the guess usually gets right and what it usually gets wrong. Recognise a character whose sound component no longer predicts anything, and stop trusting it. Prerequisites : 1.5, where the four devices were introduced and the fourth was named as the one that built most of the script. Go back to it if you need to: 1.5 Characters . This is the most useful lesson in the volume. English speakers coming to Chinese are told that characters carry no pronunciation, and it is not true. Most characters carry an approximate pronunciation, in plain sight, in one of their two halves. The approximation is rough enough that you cannot read aloud from it with confidence, and good enough that it turns thousands of unrelated shapes into a few hundred families. Learning to see the families is what makes the second thousand characters much cheaper than the first. One sound component, five characters Start from a single character: 青 qīng, whose own meaning is the blue-green of growing things, and by extension freshness and youth. Now watch it appear as the right-hand side of other characters, each time with a different component on the left. Character Meaning Left component and tone 清 zh qīng clear; clean; pure Water ( 氵 ) on the left. Same syllable, same tone as the sound component. 请 zh qǐng （ 請 ） to ask; to invite; please Speech ( 讠 ) on the left. Same syllable, third tone instead of first. 情 zh qíng feeling; emotion; circumstances Heart ( 忄 ) on the left. Same syllable, second tone. 晴 zh qíng fine; clear (of the weather) Sun ( 日 ) on the left. Same syllable, second tone. 睛 zh jīng eyeball; the eye, as in 眼睛 yǎnjing Eye ( 目 ) on the left. Here the guess fails on the initial consonant. Four of the five are qīng, qǐng, qíng, qíng. The vowel and the final consonant are constant, and the tone moves. The fifth is the warning: the same component, read jīng. That distribution is typical, and it tells you what to expect from the device. The sound component is very reliable about the shape of the syllable and unreliable about the tone; and most families have a member or two where it has drifted further than that. The left components, meanwhile, are doing exactly what the previous lesson described. Water gives you clarity, speech gives you asking, the heart gives you feeling, the sun gives you weather, the eye gives you the eye. None of them tells you the word. Each of them narrows the field so far that one syllable is enough to finish the job. The characters The family in sentences Read these aloud. Say the pinyin before you say the sentence, so that the different tones on one syllable are something your own mouth has done rather than something you have read about. The first sentence has the sound component on its own; the rest have it doing its work inside a character. Chinese English 他是个有为的青年。 [1] He is a promising young man. 请上车。 [2] Please get in the car. 能看清吧？ [3] You can see it clearly, can't you? 明天是晴天。 [4] Tomorrow will be a fine day. 他心情不好。 [5] He's in a bad mood. Put the second and third sentences side by side and you have the family at work: 请 qǐng and 清 qīng differ in the component on the left and in the tone, and a reader who knows the family reads both without hesitating. Three of these characters are not rare. In the corpus this course takes its sentences from, 请 is the seventy-seventh most frequent character out of three thousand four hundred, and 情 and 清 are also inside the first five hundred. One sound component has bought you five characters, and the commonest of them you will meet constantly. A second family, with the sound component on the right again The sound component is not always on the right: in 雹 báo, hail, the same component sits underneath the rain component, which is a reminder that you are looking for two parts and not for a fixed position. In the three characters below it is on the right. The component is 包 bāo, whose own meaning is to wrap, and a bag or a parcel. Character Meaning Other component and tone 饱 zh bǎo （ 飽 ） full; having eaten enough Food ( 饣 ) on the left. Same syllable, third tone. 抱 zh bào to hold in the arms; to embrace Hand ( 扌 ) on the left. Same syllable, fourth tone. 跑 zh pǎo to run Foot ( 𧾷 ) on the left. Third tone, and the initial has moved from b to p. Chinese English 我吃得很饱。 [6] I'm full. 不要跑！ [7] Don't run! Notice what the b and p of this family have in common: they are made in the same place with the same lips, and they differ only in the puff of air. Sound components drift, and in a family that has held together they often drift along lines like that one, from b to p, from d to t, from g to k. In such a family a wrong guess is wrong by a small step rather than by a wholly different consonant, and it is often close enough to help you recognise the word when you hear it said properly. The next section shows a family where that is not true. Where the guess fails Now the honest half of the lesson. Take 说 shuō, to speak or to say, which is the thirty-second most frequent character in the corpus. Its right-hand side is 兑 duì, and nothing about duì leads you to shuō. Follow the same component into other characters and it scatters further: 税 shuì is tax, 脱 tuō is to take off, 锐 ruì is sharp. Four members of one family, read shuō, shuì, tuō and ruì. Chinese English 我会说汉语。 [8] I can speak Chinese. There are three reasons families come apart, and it helps to know them so that failure does not feel arbitrary. The first is time: the sound components were chosen for a language spoken more than two thousand years ago, and the sounds of that language have shifted unevenly since, so members of a family that once rhymed no longer do. The second is simplification, which in the twentieth century replaced some components with s