Character Points Reprised

There are a number of visual puns one can make with characters, such as, 女子 for 好。  Does anyone know if there is any history of characters being written separately, and then merging?

The game I suggested last week, leads me to a question about the structure of relationships between characters. Specifically, using moves of substituting, adding or removing one radical at a time, is it possible to get from any character to any other character?

Some complex characters, such as 赢 and 燕 suggest this is not possible. At least, I can’t think of any one radical operations that lead very far towards completely different characters. However, if I loosen the rule to allow operations on any proper subset of adjacent radicals, I could go from 燕 to 熊 and from 赢 to 亡, and it seems that I have escaped these island characters.

Another class of potentially problematic characters are some simple, pathological characters, like 巧 亏 号 以 义， but all the ones I can think of seem to have ways out.

So, my intuition is that since characters are composed from a constrained number of basic radicals (maybe a couple hundred) and the amount of compounding is also constrained (as the matryoshka characters illustrated, and limited patience for writing lots of strokes would suggest), each radical will be used in conjunction with several other radicals. So, there should be a path from any character to any other character using the relaxed rule.

Is this true? Can it be proved? If so, what is the maximum number of transitions required?

There is a game I have played where you substitute one letter at a time to transform an initial word into a target word.  For example, one can turn a goat into a lion:

goat -> gout -> lout -> loot -> loon -> lion

In Hanzi one could play a similar game by substituting one visual element of a character (a.k.a. radical) at a time:

羊 -〉洋 -〉清 -〉猜 -〉狮

For another example, I could turn a wind into a people using the following steps:

风 -〉 疯 -〉 疼 -〉 冬 -〉 尽 -〉 尺 -〉 民

I hope coming up with similar transformations will get the creative juices of some fellow poddies flowing.

This week I thought I would tackle learning characters from another angle.  It seems like there are a few subatomic particles of character construction (the basic strokes), one or more of these strokes come together to form a basic symbol.  For example, 木。 木 can then be accreted into other characters say, 林， and the result can again accrete into a more complex character, 麻。The longest sequences of such acretions that I came up with on the top of my head are 5.  For example, 木-》林-》麻-》磨-》蘑。

Can anyone point out some longer sequences?

I am morning the posts of mine and others that went missing from this thread.  Maybe, when I feel more cheerful, I will speculate about the radical, 贝 （贫贵贴页赏员贱费货负赖贯责赛赢贡财败则赔贺赞质资赚购贲贸坝賏锁赠贬 ）。

厶 is an interesting radical/character. A lot of the places it shows up make me think it is a conveniently recognizable symbol rather than that it contributes any meaning or phonetics: 幺云么鬼能至去离县公台允参髟私育流酸矣勾撤疏套梳弃雄衮宏硫. It is pronounced "si" and supposedly means cacoon (self-absorbed).

BTW, If you want me to continue this thread, respond with a word of encouragement.  I am starting to feel like I am talking to myself.

I am wondering if parallel evolution exits in characters. 乃 looks like it is part of 及，but to the extent that I have looked up the etomology of these two characters, I haven't found any relation.If parallel evolution exits, does it matter? At this point, the visual similarity seems like it might be a useful mnemonic for remembering these two characters.In any case, both are fairly productive radicals:乃 - thus 奶 - milk 秀 - refined 扔 - toss 仍 - still 跥 - tread on 孕 - pregnant 携 - to carry及 - reach, in time 极 - extremely 级 - grade, rank 吸 - breath in 圾 - garbage

Mark,

Your question is very simple and logical but unfortunately I don't think there is a simple and logical answer.  I'm going to answer your question in my customary manner of giving you way too much information.  :-)  Here goes:

Although it goes against most people's modern understanding of how Chinese characters work (the "ideographic" concept), Chinese characters were originally mainly phonetic in nature.  In other words, like a rebus, the symbols initially represented sounds more often than meaning.  For a good example scroll down to the rebus picture on this page and read the paragraph following the picture.

(If you have a lot of patience, I suggest reading the whole page.  It makes the above point extremely well but takes a lot of effort to digest.)

Now that we understand that Chinese characters were pictographs borrowed for sound, for a moment let's look at another writing system that did the same thing, namely Egyptian.  Check out the way hieroglyphics were formed.  Notice that the meaning elements (some call them radicals) are known as determinatives in this case.  I cited this article because it gives a very clear example of how a semantic (meaning) element is added to phonetic elements when needed.  The same was done with Chinese characters, just much more often.  (Also, note the house and fish hieroglyphics which appear in one of my later references below)

OK, now to finally answer your question.  The answer (or nearest possible approximation) can be found on this page.

The short answer is a quote from the above page:  "Earlier scholars, and a few still today, consider that the complex characters of this category were formed chiefly by adding a phonetic determinative to a semantic base. The popular names given to the semantic element reflect this view. It is frequently referred to as a 'radical'.... The semantic element is considerably less often called a 'signific' or 'determinative.'

"Noel Barnard, who has done some of the most important research on this aspect of Chinese, is firmly of the opinion that the phonetic element is the real core of compound characters. For the most part semantic elements were added to phonetic elements, not the other way around (Barnard 1978). This is the prevailing view among most specialists today. I [John DeFrancis] hold strongly to this opinion also."

Read the rest of the article for a very thorough consideration of the subject (that is, if you've still got curiosity left after reading my long post  :-) .

As to directly answer your question, that is what makes a component suitable to be used as as semantic component ("meaning radical", "determinative", etc.), it appears that scribes chose the component that most logically corresponded to the meaning.  I would say the prime criterion for this would be universality.  To use 鸣 which you posted above as the example, according to one scholar 口 originally had two different pronunciations, one of which we'll call kou, meaning mouth, and the other we'll call ming, meaning a sound made by the mouth (the modern mandarin pronunciations, not the original ones).  Depending on context the reader would read it the appropriate way (as is still the case with many Chinese characters today, eg. 长，重).  However, at one point scholars decided they needed to differentiate the two sounds.  So they wanted to add a semantic component to the ming pronunciation - meaning a sound made by the mouth - and thought, what would be a good element to remind people of a sound made by the mouth?  What about a bird singing?  So they added 鳥 as the semantic/determinative/radical, making 鸣.  Of course, it's all speculation today.  We don't know whether scribes ever went through the process I just described for this particular character.  But, to me at least, this does seem to be a likely possibility.

Along this line, the components used the most (ie., the most universal) became somewhat obvious over time.  That's why KangXi could be fairly confident about choosing them for his list of radicals.  (Not that he was even close to 100% correct, though.)

Another thought: what if English were written in hieroglyphics?  Actually, it is.  In the same way Chinese is written in what used to be hieroglyphics.  Compare these images:
http://www.usu.edu/markdamen/1320Hist&Civ/slides/17alphabet/letters.jpg
http://www.phoenician.org/alphabet_phoenician.GIF

(Side note:  If we trace both Chinese/English characters back to their origins, 牛=A 手=K 水=M 鱼=N 目=O 首=R 齿=S etc.  Get it?)

One last resource for ruminating on this point is found here.

If this post left you suffering from information overload, don't say I didn't warn you.  :-)

I have liked to focus on radicals that are somewhat mysterious, but this week I picked a straight-forward one, 鸟，which is evidently a pictogram of a bird.  鹅 (e)、鸡 (ji)、鸽 (he)、鸭 (ya)、鸦 (ya)、鹊(que)and 鹰(ying) are kinds of birds.  An Island is a kind of bird seat， 岛(dao)and 鸣(ming) is the cries of birds.  So, it seems like this character fairly consistantly is used to contribute meaning.  I am a bit curious what makes a character/radical particularly suitable to be a meaning radical.  Any speculations?

This week, I am later than I hoped to be in posting to this thread, but I have a new point about character composition.  柬 caught my attention.  It seems to be 束 embellished with an upside-down 八。What is interesting is that the original character is altered rather than placed next to another radical.  There may be something similar going on with 鸟 and 乌。I am not sure.  Anyway, while embellishing an existing character seems to be a relatively rare composition technique, it seems to be in the toolbox.
Recapping earlier postings, altogether, we seem to have the following methods of creating a new character:
1. Placement of another radical beside, above or below an existing one (e.g. 说）
2. Placement of another radical between two symetrical components of an existing character (e.g. 街 ）
3. Distorting a existing character to fit in a new radical (e.g. 激 魔 )
4. Making a sandwich (e.g. 衰 )
5. Using radicals to imitate a pictogram (e.g. 燕 ）
6. Add a few strokes to an existing character (e.g. 柬)

Have I missed any?

Got that one in my mail yesterday:

网友评中国最牛十个汉字 认识五个可称大师 武汉晨报

　　一. 最色的汉字“姦”

　　这个字读“奸”，好似奸的异体字。《说文》解释为“私”“窃”的意思。常言道:“三个女人一台戏”，这个字充满了色情 和暧昧的情调。

　　二.最滑的汉字“鱻”

　　三条鱼，味道鲜美。这个字读作“鲜”，同时，也是鲜的异体字。原指生鱼，解释为 “新鲜”，“明丽”的意思，也指鲜美，应时的食物。

　　三.最闹的汉字“猋”

　　这个字读作“标”。三条狗纠缠在一起，象形 字，表示狗奔跑的样子，引申一步，是迅速，飙升的意思。

　　四.最顶的汉字“麤”

　　这个字读“粗”，也是“粗”字的异体 字。从字形上看，一头大鹿两头小鹿，死死地顶在一起，似乎彼此混搅，非常有力气。可是，实际只表达了动粗的意思。

　　五.最畜生的汉字 “羴”

　　这个字读“山”，也是“膻”的异体字。掉进羊群里还能闻见什么好味道啊?臊气!有句成语叫做“趋腥附膻”，所谓“膻”就是羊肉的 味道。

　　六.最敏感的汉字“毳”

　　这个字读作“脆”。三根毛指的是毛发。医学上专门有“毳毛”一词，指人体表面除头发、 阴毛、腋毛外，其他部位生的细毛，俗称“寒毛”。既然是“寒毛”就非常敏感，它代替人体传递冷热寒暑的细腻感觉。

　　七.最残忍的汉字 “蠱”

　　这个字读“古”。古人把许多有毒的虫子聚敛到一起，让它们彼此吞噬，互相残杀，最后剩下的就是“蠱”——这玩意性情残忍，毒性最 烈，放在食物中，足以致人死命。

　　八.最昂贵的汉字“赑”

　　这个字读“必”。“贝”就是钱，一上两下三个“贝”字码在一 起,表示用力的样子。俗话说得好，饭好吃，钱难挣。金钱，名位所在，必然削尖脑袋往里钻，怎能不费劲呢!

　　九.最土的汉字“垚”

　 　这个字读“尧”，形容山高。并不是意外的巧合，在“金，木，水，火，土”这五行中，每个字都可以摆成品行结构，都能派生出一个截然不同的汉字。虽然是一 副土头土脸的模样，但是核心是霄拔巍峨，直插云霄。

　　十.最具力量的汉字“犇”

　　这个字读“奔”，也是“奔”的异体字。 一头牛就力大无穷了，何况三头牛成队列一起前进，那力量不言而喻了。这个字实际是“奔跑，急匆匆”的意思。

Mark

I always enjoy reading your entries to this post. You make me feel guilty for not spending enough time studying characters. Balance is tough to find.

@baomingguang - great site. I can see you put a lot of work into this.

I am having a "seven degrees of seperation" feeling about characters.

This week I am contemplating 兼，which strikes me as another odd looking character.  I have read that it is a pictgram of a hand holding two bundles of grain stalks, and that it means holding two jobs at once. It occurs in 歉 (appologize/deficient) 嫌 (dislike) 赚 (to earn/swindle) 谦 (modest) 廉 (inexpensive,incoruptable).  Most of them are pronounced something like _ian, and the meanings give me the impression that persons with multiple goverment posts were regarded as a little shady.

The seven degrees of seperation feeling comes from, last week I encountered 歉 while exploring 欠，which itself is linked to the week before's 曷 by 歇。

@bao guangming, my bad that I am not as diligent as I should be in checking against your site.  I do use it as a source, really.  Also, I use Firefox on a netbook, and there is some text that doesn't fit on my screen and seems to overlay screen area's you didn't intend.

Two other meanings of 欠 (from Nciku) are:

1. to yawn

2. to raise slightly (a part of the body)

I guess when you open your mouth, you raise a part of your body slightly. The words in your list relating to opening the mouth are

a. 嗽 (sòu - not suo)

b. 歌 (gē)

c. 吹 (chuī)

d. 饮 (yǐn, which also means TO drink)

Arguably, when you are happy, you also raise your mouth, leading to a possible derivation for

a. 欢 (huān)

b. 欣 (xīn) - which Nciku and Yellowbridge both define as 'happy', not 'appreciate'.

Related to your meaning of 'owe', Nciku also gives a meaning of 'lacking' or 'deficient'. This leads to the following possibilities:

1. another meaning for 歉 (qiàn) is deficient.

2. other meanings for 次(cì) are second, secondary, inferior - also related to 'lacking'.

3. 欺 (qī) also means to cheat, so the victim is 'lacking'.

4. 砍 (kǎn) - to chop or hack - so again the 'victim' will be lacking.

5. 软 (ruǎn) which also means 'weak', 'feeble', 'poor in quality'

I have no suggestions for 款 (kuǎn), 歇 (xiē) or 欧 (ōu).

I have drawn a long bow with a few of those, but I think there is a pattern. So, perhaps the meaning of all these words have morphed over time, and we need to look at the early meanings.

This week I am contemplating 欠.  It used reasonably frequently itself, meaning, to owe.  It is another character where it is not easy to find a pattern among the characters it contributes to as a radical, though.  The meaning and pronounciation seem to be all over the place: 欢 (huan - happy) 嗽 (suo - cough) 歌 (ge - song) 次 (ci - ordinal) 欺 (qi - take advantage) 吹 (chui - to blow, especially cows :) 歉 (qian -apology) 款 (kuan - bank account) 欣 (xin - appreciate) 砍 (kan - to chop) 软 (ruan - soft) 歇 (xie - to rest) 饮 (yin - a drink) 欧 (ou - Europe).

This character has been a source of mystery for me.  It's hard to track down early versions of it.

Modern forms of characters rarely mirror their original components.  For example, take the character 燕 which seems to be composed of 廿口北 and 灬.  Now look at the ancient forms at
http://chinese-characters.org/meaning/7/71D5.html

See how the bird form was stylized to use other components instead?  I wonder who came up with that bright idea?

So I surmise 曷 wasn't actually formed of 日，勹，人 at all but was modified from its original form to use these components.  I searched high and low for an older form of this component and found only one bronze form, no oracle bone forms.  You can see it here:
http://chinese-characters.org/meaning/6/6E34.html

It looks like a pineapple between two round shapes (口 mouths?).  That doesn't help much into determining its original meaning, which is often the case.  I'm going to keep trying to track the origin of this one down.  In the meantime, there are some large seal forms containing this component at the following pages that still show something similar to the "pineapple" shapes.
http://internationalscientific.org/CharacterASP/CharacterEtymology.aspx?characterInput=%E7%A2%A3
http://internationalscientific.org/CharacterASP/CharacterEtymology.aspx?characterInput=%E6%9C%85

This week I am contemplating 曷. It seems to be an old question word (who, when, what...), but I think it is seldom used now.  Probably, it contributed phonetically to 喝 drinking and 渴 thirst.  I am not sure how 揭 reveal, 竭 exhaust， 歇 rest, and 葛 vines/creepers relate. I guess they are probably also phonetic contributions where the pronounciation has drifted over time.  I also don't have much insight into its interior structure. Although, it seems to be made up of 日，勹，人 and maybe a modified, 匚 (a fairly complex character, but I haven't found any precursor characters that use a proper subset of two or more of these four characters.)

The character/radical I am exploring this week, 酉，is both different and linked to last week's, 昔。I am not sure of the historical etomology, but 酉 looks like it is 西 with an extra line.  When I look up 酉，it seems it is the "tenth earthly branch" and something to do with the year of the rooster. However, it looks like a bottle, and many of the characters it contributes to seem to be something that you can put in a bottle, or related to the results of things found in bottles.  (酒 liquor， 酱 sauce，醋 vinegar ) are liquids you might find in a bottle. ( 酸 sour， 酷 bitter ) are flavors you might find in a bottle.  ( 醉 intoxicated，醒 regaining consciousness ） might be after effects of partaking of what is in the bottle. (酋 tribal chief，酬 compensation ）might have some relation to quantities of bottles. 醋 is the connection with 昔。However, 酉 has nothing to do with the character most frequently used to indicate bottle, 瓶。

昔 is an interesting character/radical.  I don't recall seeing it used in any modern text that I have read, but supposedly it means something like former, in the past.  What happened in the past might be: you went  猎 for  喜鹊 with an old flame.  During this expedition there was an accident involving a 蜡烛. Because of burn injuries to your old flame, you 惋惜 him/her, and let him/her 借 some money. You quickly found out this was a 错, because this made your current S.O. 吃醋  and  threaten the two of you would 分散, unless you agreed to some 措施 to prevent similar incidents in the future.

I've been wondering, does a typical Chinese person spend as much time analysing the characters as we do when they are learning to write? Could the average person in China talk about the etymology of the characters?

This week's character of note is the stalwart 高 （tall). Add a hand, and it is 搞 (to do in a sort of willful way).   敲 is a knock on the door, or pounding of a nail.  Add grain and it is a manuscript or a stalk of grain, 稿. 膏 is ointment, but I wouldn't have brought it up if it didn't add to my menagerie of mutant characters with 毫 and（in the least) 豪 (grand).  It seems the last two replaced a bit of the original character with transplanted bits.

Mark, et al.

Are you aware of book called 'A Dictionary of Chinese Characters - accessed by phonetics' by Stewart Paton?

It groups the characters in terms of their phonetic component, which as Mark says, are much manageable groupings than by radical.

Anyway, a PDF of the book (about 250 pages), can be found here.

I calculated the frequency at which each radical/character is used to compose other characters and stored the tabulation at http://huamake.com/radicalfrequency.htm

I thought this might be of interest and maybe helpful in selecting a study strategy for studying 汉字。

Some comments about how I did the calculation: First, the universe of characters that I am counting are the the characters in the HSK A, B and C lists (甲乙丙）[I believe the list of characters one needs to study for the Intermediate Level HSK.]

The counts are not transitive, meaning that if A is a radical in B, and B is a radical in C, I only add a count to B when I tabulate for C, but don't add a count for A.

I have found that when decomposing characters there is often some judgement required to determine what radicals a given character is composed of. There are doubtless cases where my judgement was in error, or someone else would judge differently.

There are almost certainly some errors in the character composition data that I used to make the calculations. (flawless data entry is not one of my strong suites.)

I am only counting for simplified characters.

Just when I thought I'd gotten to be bottom of the character construction toolbox, I took a close look at 衷。 It seems someone decided to slice 衣 in half, like a roll in a sandwich shop and stuff a 中 between the two slices.

I suspect when there is one example, there are more, but I don't know of any other examples of inserting additional radicals between non-symetric portions of an existing character.  Can anyone suggest other examples?

At least for the time being, I have run out of general observations about written Chinese.  So, I will try to make a small story to make another semi-useless character/often used radical more memorable.

This is my 卑 （inferior) story.  Our hero spotted a 牌子 （sign) which informed him where to get his 啤酒 (beer). Unfortunately, he got into an accident on the way home and ruptured his 脾 (spleen). After he succumbed to his injuries he required a 碑 （memorial plaque).

There is yet another method of character formation that I have not mentioned in this thread before.  It appears to be somewhat rare, but definitely seems to be in the character inventor’s toolbox.  Specifically, it seems some characters are composed of a left and right radical, not always a repeated radical, but similar in stature and girth.  Occasionally, another radical will climb between them, somewhat like a pet or small child joining its parents in bed.  街 and 辩 seem to be results of this process.  It also seems that once a character has let on that it is a permissive pair of parents, other characters come along to snuggle up.  行 and辡being the permissive parents in my example，衡 and 瓣 would be examples of other interlopers.

Some of you may know some history and something of deeper significance about this method of character formation, than I do.  To me it is just kind of a mystery and yet another thing to watch out for when decomposing characters.  I have no idea if the motivation is phonetic, based on meaning, or just happenstance. However, it definitely does seem that some paired radicals are re-used this way and others are not.  For example, to my knowledge, 林 is not used this way, even though sticking something between a couple of trees would seem like it aught to be an apt metaphor for something.  木鸟木  might be a handy wait to write some word that meant 林子大了什么鸟都有。

I have found a few, otherwise pretty useless characters, that show up as radicals within other characters at a surprising frequency. There are several of these but 隹 seems to be one of the more itriguing ones. It seems to be defined as, "a short tailed bird"; not exactly something I think about once every 3 minutes, and not super simple to write. However, it shows up in medium to high frequency characters like, 谁、准、推、堆、维、罐、催、雄、焦、集、难 and several others. (who, standard, push, pile, to maintain, jar, to urge, hero, burnt, gather, difficult)

Perhaps, this particular bird has a cultural significance that I am not aware of, or it was once used as primarily a phonetic character like， say 斯 and 尼 are often used today. I don't know.

Anyway, it seems like a useful group of characters to memorize together.

@chengye, some of the invented bits did end up as independent characters.  Take, 龙， for example, which gives me a feeling that some of the decisions about what to simplify were more art than science, to put it charitably.

Anyway, my next epiphenette is that sometimes when an already composite character is used as a radical, only one component gets distorted in the new character.  For example, there is a fang (放) in 激. I didn't spot it though, because only the 方 got squashed to accomodate the 白 in the new character.

I have run into a few other of these types of cases, but I don't remember which characters, at the moment.  Anyway, this phenomena once again forces me to expand my thinking about the structure of Chinese characters.

Hi mark

A lot of parts were newly created for simplified characters, and this is the reason you can't find the right part of 经 in any unicode lists.

A tale of three radicals.

Changye, thank you for your explanation.  I found it very helpful.  I probably should have known there wasn't a completely rational explanation, just the usual human forces of fashion, happenstance, politics, etc.

Speaking of which, some of the simplifications in Simplified Chinese strike me as haphazard.  For example,  the six characters: 话 警 龙 咙  经 and 巠, can illustrate my point.

The 讠in 话 is a simplification of 言， but it wasn't simplified in 警.  The 龙 in 咙 would stand as a counter example to any theory that simplifications were limited to left side radicals.  And while the right hand portion of 经 is a simplification of 巠, it doesn't seem to exist as an independent character in the simplified character set (e.g. there doesn't appear to be any unicode representation of the simplified form by itself.)

Go figure.

Hi mark

The etymology of "次" is "a man spitting/watering", and "盗" means "皿 (dish) + 次 (mouth watering) = I want eat the dish (> steal)". "羡" naturally means "I want to eat sheep > envious". This typd of characters are called "会意字" (ideogrammic compounds).

http://chinese-characters.org/meaning/6/6B21.html

> Is an up down layout choosen for asthetic reasons; to keep the layout of the character reasonably square, for example?

Chinese characters are not industrial products, so there was no strict rule for making them, although I think there was some tendency/trends based on asthetic reasons or something like that. 

> What makes the ones chosen the most suitable choice?

I don't think that's necessarily true.

> Once you have invented your new character, how do you persuade others that its composition is the right choice?

For example, in the era of Oracle bone scripts, only a small number of people such as national leaders and diviners used Chinese characters, so these people didn't need to persuade ordinary people to use them.

Later the situation changed. A lot of characters were (arbitrarily) invented by ordinary people (mainly intellectuals) and the number of Chinese characters dramatically increased, but most of them didn't become popularly used. "Natural selection" worked. It was not a matter of "persuation".

康熙字典 (1716) contains about 50,000 characters (including a lot of variants), and 中华字海 (1994) more than 80,000 characters, but most of the characters listed in these dictionaries haven't been popularly used until now.

On the contrary, some of them only exist in dictionaries. Of course, there were tons of characters that were not listed in dictionaries.

Ok, I am still trying to get a little deeper into the head of whoever woke one fine morning, thousands or hundreds of years ago, and decided it would a fine day to invent a new character.  To that end, I have found five characters that contain, 次.  (Six counting itself.) 

http://huamake.com/web2_0.htm?chardef=on&charpro=on&theChar=%25u6B21

None of them have a side radical.  So, I am not clear whether the radical on top is supposed to be the phonetic component, or the one on bottom is, or if something else entirely is going on.  It is fairly easy to believe that 次 is the phonetic component of 资,姿 and 瓷.  羡 is a bit more of a stretch, and  盗 is a great big leap, which makes it hard to come up with any hypothesis that the radical on top or bottom is always the phonetic component.

Is an up down layout choosen for asthetic reasons; to keep the layout of the character reasonably square, for example?

I imagine there would be lots of choices for characters with approximately similar sounds and meanings to the ones chosen to compose these characters.  What makes the ones chosen the most suitable choice?

Are some characters better as phonetic components and others for contributing meaning?

Once you have invented your new character, how do you persuade others that its composition is the right choice?

As a side note, the two components of 次 appear independently in other characters, as in turn, do the two components of 欠.

Hi guys

It's very important to look into ancient pronunciations of Chinese characters when talking about etymologies of Hanzi. Below is very rough (and not accurate!) history of pronunciation change, from old Chinese to modern Mandarin.

寺 zio > zio > sy > si
持 dio > dio > chi > chi
诗 tio > tio > shi > shi
特 dok > dok > te > te
待 dog > doi > dai > dai

等 deng > deng > deng > deng

果 guar > gua > guo > guo
课 kuar > kua > kuo > ke

Please be noted that these sounds are NOT completely accepted ones in academic circles, they vary from scholar to scholar, as is often the case with reconstructed old sounds. The same often holds true for etymologies of Chinese characters.

Right parts of Chinese characters are generally a phonetic part, but some of them are both phonetic and semantic part. For example, "寺" is the original character of "持", and this means that the right part of "持" naturally represents both sound and meaning.

I am skeptical. Almost every text I have looked at has mentioned something about characters being composed of a meaning component and a pronounciation component.  To me, this seems unsatisfying on a couple levels.

meaning: since the meaning component is usually associated with a large number of characters, the meaning it conveys can't be terribly specific.

pronounciation: in most cases, using modern pronounciation, this component usually sounds like a second cousin of the pronounciation of the character it is part of.  I also think that China is as close as it has ever been to having a standard dialect, now, and language drift would make the pronouciation component less relevant over time.

So, I think there is probably a more complete explanation of how charaters were composed, but I haven't seen any more in depth exploration of this question.

waiguoren - the side-word radical is pretty much never phonetic, rather it gives meaning, in both your examples the other part gives a phonetic clue.  for example,  compare  课 with 颗， 棵，窠，骒， 髁， all either ke4 or ke1, and    果 with裹，猓，蜾， 馃， all guo3.  Sometimes there are multiple paths for the phonetic part to give a hint to.

In general, I'd point out that this kind of analysis is what www.zhongwen.com (despite being organzed around traditional charecters, even if using simplified those wonderful charts the author built, showing pieces being added to each charecter, are too valuable to pass up) is built on, and is also what the book Reading and Writing Chinese by McNaughton(there are both simplified and traditional versions) is organized around.  If you find that method of learning and analysis useful (I certainly did), then looking into those resources would probably be a very good idea - might as well take advantage of these extensive works. 

Yes. Interesting observations, people!

I am a long, long way from being able to read and write effectively, but have noticed a few idiosyncrasies of the written form of the language.

Like Mark said, 'there about a billion characters with 讠on their left side'. One that always intrigues me is 课 (ke4). But if we take away the讠 it becomes 果 (guo3).

Here, the sound/meaning relationship illudes me.

Simon is correct,

Over 90% of chinese characters are radical - phonetic types. The X is the phonetic part. Im sure changye could tell us much more.

More often than not, the X is related to pronounciation, not meaning. In the case of the temple, however, the pronounciations differ a bit. But it's possible it has had several pronounciations, or the characters are so old that their pronounciations have shifted significantly. Or, more likely, a combination of the two.

Oh, and if you add a speech radical, you get poetry. Here I'd bet it's pronounciation: 寺 sì becomes 诗 shī. Also, adding a mountain gives you 峙 zhì, "peak". Also pronounciation, I'd bet. As is probably 持 chí.

Possibly 待 dài, 特 tè and 等 děng used to share a different, now unused, pronounciation of 寺. They sound relatively similar. That's my theory, anyway.

(Edited for typo)