8.6: Creating new characters

Characters, you now know, represent words; and since words are constantly being added to spoken languages, there needs to be some way for new words to be represented in the writing system. In language, new words are typically formed from old by processes such as extension (‘shuttle’ extended from ‘part of a loom’ to ‘reusable spacecraft’), compounding (‘spaceship’), coinage (‘blooper’), borrowing (‘sputnik’), or sound symbolism (‘screech; blip’). In alphabetic languages, these can easily be represented in writing. But in logographic scripts, the process is more contrived. In Chinese, where new characters are needed (to represent new words) they are almost always formed on phonosemantic principles: a graph chosen for its suitable sound is combined with a radical of appropriate meaning. We can illustrate from the graphic representation of two types of words: onomatopoeia (words inspired by sound) and terms for chemical elements in the periodic table.

3.5.1 Representing sounds – onomatopoeia.
A good source for onomatopoeia is manga style comics. [Incidentally, the word manga is a Japanese rendition of the Chinese mànhuà ‘comic; cartoon (unrestrained-drawing)’.] The list below contains a selection of graphic representations with their pronunciation. They are taken from comics published in Hong Kong in the late 20th century. Though the comics are written in Mandarin, the language – and particularly the onomatopoeic expressions – may have been influenced by Cantonese, so some Chinese speakers may find items on the list strange or non-standard. Northerners, for example, might be more used to the expression pāchā (啪嚓) for ‘splash’ (as well as ‘crash’) than pāle (啪嘞). But the point is that comics represent not only a genre in which the written language converges on the spoken, but one that is less subject to the usual prescriptions and constraints associated with writing and publication. Authors of comics (particularly in a place like Hong Kong in the late 90s) are freer to create their own words and use the resources of the written language to represent them as they see fit. The fact that graphs used to represent sounds in these comics are not all found in dictionaries (nor in printing sets) shows how productive the process of forming phono-semantic characters is.
As befits the genre of anime, onomatopoeia are usually drawn in highly stylized animated graphs whose very size and shape adds to the effect. In the examples below, the radical element is consistently the ‘mouth’ radical, 口, which has the effect of signaling that the graph represents a sound. (In the list, boxes 嘞appear where a version of the character with 口 is unavailable in the standard character set. Speakers may give different readings for the graphs, particularly their tones.)
graph contains the equivalent English noise,
and pronunciation: phonetic element: or event:
啪 pā 拍 pāi bang
啪嘞 pāle 拍,勒 pāi, lè exploding noise
嚓 cā 察 chá screech
唧 jī 即 jī spurt
嘭 pēng 彭 péng popping noise
叮 dīng 丁 dīng light metallic noise; ping
噹 dāng 當dāng heavy metallic noise; bong
嘞 lóng 隆 lóng reverberating noise; boing; boom
嘞 fú 伏 fú swishing noise
嘞 shā 夏 xià hissing or whizzing noise
嘞 kǎ 卡 kǎ enormous crashing noise
啵 bō 波 bō rain drumming on the ground
3.5.2 Atomic elements
Characters also have to be created for more formal genres of writing. The periodic table of elements, for example, contains names of elements long known to Chinese science, such as mercury, 汞 gǒng (工 gōng over 水 shuǐ ‘water’) and lead, 鉛 yán. But there are also many recently discovered elements for which names have had to be provided. These names are created on the traditional pattern of phonetic and radical. So, for example, the first set below (all gasses) are compound graphs consisting of an appropriate phonetic element combined with the gas radical (气); the second set (all metals) are formed with the metal radical (金); and the third set (all stony or sandy elements) are formed with the stone radical (石).
graph phonetic radical
Helium 氦 hài 亥 hài 气gas
Neon 氖 nǎi 乃 nǎi 气 gas
Argon 氬 yà 亞 yà 气 gas
Thorium 釷 tǔ 土 tǔ 金 metal
Palladium 鏷 pú 菐 pú 金 metal
Uranium 鈾 yóu 由 yóu 金 metal
Silicon 硅 guī 圭 guī 石 stone
Phosphorus 磷 lín 鄰 lín 石 stone
Sulphur 硫 liú cf. 流 liú 石 stone 

Notice that, unlike the graphs for onomatopoeia which are often the result of informal coinage, making use of imperfect phonetic elements, the graphs for new atomic elements (like other technical additions to the language) are formal coinages that display
complete regularity. A reader unfamiliar with the name of a particular element can read off the pronunciation in terms of a common word with which s/he is sure to be familiar. Regardless of whether it proceeds formally or informally, the phono-semantic principle of character construction reduces the complexity of the writing system by reducing the amount of information needed to read or write it.
Note that while the compound construction of characters may be useful for native speakers encountering highly specialized words in written texts, or for language learners trying to find useful connections between characters that will allow them to retain them, the way a character is or has been constructed is unlikely to bear directly on the process of reading. Regardless of how they came to have their current form, characters are processed as words or parts of phrases, and even if the eye occasionally comes to rest on a character and sees the aptness of its form, such actions are – with the possible exception of reading certain kinds of poetry – a lapse from reading rather than part of the process.