Chinese Characters: Their Origin, Etymology, History, Classification and Signfication. a Thorough Study from Chinese Documents

By Léon Wieger

For at least 2,000 years Chinese scholars have conducted research into the writing system. In addition to the study of origins and the processes by which new characters are created, Chinese scholarship has been especially interested in creating a rational classification of characters for dictionary use, which would show historical relationships, idea relationships, and phonetic features. This volume, by one of the most profound Sinologists of the twentieth century, summarizes such traditional Chinese scholarship and carries research farther into the analysis of the writing system.
The heart of this book is a series of etymological lessons, in which approximately 2,300 Chinese characters are classified according to 224 "primitives" upon which they are based. For each character Father Wieger gives the modern form, its archaic form, literary pronunciation (Wade system), explanations of origin, semantic content of component parts, related characters, variant forms, quotations of classical usage, and similar material. The explanations of symbolic content are particularly rich, and gather the most important traditional explanations (especially the Shuo-w n of Hs -shih) as well as the author's own research.
To make his book more useful Father Wieger has also incorporated a tremendous number of reading aids for the student: listings of the primitives; an index of the characters analyzed, arranged by number of strokes; a listing of 858 phonetic elements, arranged by number of strokes; a listing of about 10,000 characters by phonetic element; a lexicon by transliteration, comprising about 7,000 characters; and a lexicon of about 10,000 characters according to the customary modern system of 214 radicals devised by K'ang-hsi. With this most extensive apparatus students can locate any character they are likely to meet. Indeed, this supplementary material is so useful that it serves the purpose of a dictionary in its own right.
Recent archeological research has, for the most part, sustained the historical analyses of traditional Chinese scholarship and Father Wieger. For the student, however, more important than the historical and classificatory concerns of the book are the analyses of characters in semantic terms. In the Far East analysis of characters has long been taught in such terms, but unfortunately this very valuable mnemonic technique has been largely overlooked in the West. With Wieger's book, however, both teachers and students will find learning easier and more lasting when phonetic components are understood and the relationships are perceived between various characters, between original forms and present forms, and between idea and symbol. Father Wieger's book is an indispensable aid to every student of Chinese and Japanese.

• Format: Paperback
• Language: English
• ISBN: B00398VOY6
• ISBN13: 9780486213217
• Release Date: June 1965
• Publisher: Dover Publications
• Length: 832 Pages
• Weight: 2.28 lbs.
• Dimensions: 1.5" x 6.2" x 9.2"

Customer Reviews

Dated but Valuable

Some of the reviews of Wieger's book are unfair. Of course it is out of date: the second edition was published in 1927, the same year that the Academia Sinica began to protect the Shang sites at Anyang! Serious study of oracle bones had barely begun, and no-one can reasonably deride Wieger's failure to mention it as "ignorance." About the year 200 CE, the Shuo-Wen was published, the great dictionary that dominated Chinese etymological thinking until the early 20th century. This was a remarkable intellectual achievement. Chalmers' 1881 book, "The Structure of Chinese Characters," introduces this Chinese etymology to English speakers, but it is extremely concise. Wieger is much more detailed, and in 1923 no less a person than Bernhard Karlgren said, "his work is up to now the best European work on the subject." A popular extension of Wieger's work "Analysis of Chinese Characters" by Wilder and Ingram was published in 1922. The authors make an illuminating remark, "[these etymologies] are the products of Chinese fancy and imagination and to some extent show the workings of the Chinese mind. Therefore they interest us who are students of Chinese thought." As Karlgren notes, "the small seal of Li Si is in many cases an entirely new script." My point is simple: the etymologies derived from shells and bones are frequently irrelevant to the modern characters. The Shuo Wen's may often be erroneous guesses, but they were a part of the Chinese appreciation of their script for more than 1700 years, witness F.C. Hsu's "Chinese Words," published in 1976 and based primarily on the Shuo-Wen. So, buy Wieger and enjoy it. The mnemonic help it gives you in remembering the characters is deeply Chinese, and far more relevant than anything you can contrive for yourself. I agree with the remarks Kent Suarez makes in his review and would also recommend Wang Hongyuan's book, though I, too, have reservations.

For Reference & Pleasure

If you've heard of the excellent Zhongwen.com website, note that you can look up a word there and often find the corresponding Wieger lesson number in THIS book. Very helpful.-------------------------I bought this book in '96 and am still enjoying it. While I agree with many other reviewers who say this book is not for beginners, I was shocked to see reviews posted here that call it grossly out of date, or even useless.If you have some experience with Chinese characters and would like to delve into their origins, Wieger's book provides hundreds of brief etymologies. Are they correct and accurate? Ahem, no comment. I'm not a linguist. But they have definitely helped me to remember characters' meanings when I see them later in a newspaper or a letter.Nitty gritty: + You can find ancient forms next to the modern (merely 2000 years old?) forms here. Very interesting, and I have yet to find these forms on the Internet. Also, you may see more than one variation of a character. + The etymologies: Translated from French, which was translated from - i think - German, they have an archaic flavor. You might like that, and you might hate it. Still, the etyms are what this book is all about. Printing: bad, but the paper hasn't yellowed, even in my humid climate. Indexes --How do you FIND these tasty etymologies?: - Radicals - Phonetics (alphabetized) - the old k'ai, hsien & chou, not kai, xian and zhou. - the 224 'Primitives' Series: Aside from the indexes (indices) mentioned above, there are also "phonetic series", lists of words that have not the radical in common but instead...that other part. The phonetic clue. Not all the words in each series sound exactly alike. For example, you'll find ch'ing4, sheng1 and hsin1 together in one group. But, they all share the same phonetic clue, and are thus placed in the same lesson as well. Bottom line - if you fail to find a word, but then turn to a word that merely _reminds_ you of the former, and there's a good chance of finding the word you're actually looking for.Final word on the etymologies: If you're a linguist, there must be better sources out there (and you probably have them). The angry reviewer from Wulai wants to see this book out of print, but until she posts the title of an alternative source, these snippets are USEFUL, at least in helping one memorize characters. They make this book one of my favorite sources of pleasure reading. How many language books can _You_ still call pleasure reading after 5 years?

Outdated, but useful

If you're looking for a book giving the latest information on the history and development of Chinese characters, this is NOT the book you want to use.Having said that, this book can still be very useful to you in learning Chinese characters. The vast majority of Chinese characters are NOT the charming "sun plus moon equals bright" type of pictographs. They are a two-part composite, with one character (the radical) carrying the general semantic meaning of the compound, and the other character giving an indication of the sound of the compound. (for an excellent discussion of this, see John DeFrancis' The Chinese Language - Fact and Fantasy.) What Wieger presents is a scheme of 858 phonetic series, and by learning the sound(s) associated with these series you get, in essence, multiple characters for the price of one. So forget about his outdated etymologies, and use his information only when it's vivid and makes the character easy to remember. Otherwise, make up your own mnemonics. But the sound-carrying parts of characters - his "phonetic series" - repeat themselves over and over again in different compound characters. And being familiar with the more prolific phonetic series will make the memorization of new characters much easier.

Dated but Nonetheless Interesting and Instructive

Translated from the French 4th edition, Wieger's 'Chinese Characters' is a excellent resource for Chinese etymology, given paucity of such works available in western languages. It basically outlines the origins, etymology, history, classification and signification of Chinese characters, based on thorough, albeit old, study from Chinese documents. It comprises an introduction, which furnishes explanations on the history, types, and analysis and classification of Chinese characters, followed by some 200 etymological 'lessons' covering the origin and derivation of particular basic characters and parts thereof. There is also a small section contain facsimile copies of the oldest specimens of Chinese writing. Finally, there are three lexicons (containing at a rough estimate some 10,000 characters each, which arrange characters grouped according to their phonetic component, their radical (semantic component) and their pronunciation respectively, each entry of which gives the character, its pronunciation and its meanings. Its coverage of Chinese characters is both comprehensive and succinct.This book will prove to be an absorbing read for anyone interested in Chinese characters and their origin. However, without casting aspersions on the quality of the research and the accuracy of the text, I'm not sure that this text is an authoritative reference on character etymology. (I'm not saying it isn't, although I doubt a work of such scope could be without error.) Nonetheless, I find this book very useful for learning characters, particularly the lexicon listing characters according to their phonetic component, since learning lists of characters arranged in this order makes it much easier to remember than learning them arranged according to radical or pronunciation, since characters grouped this way are both similar in shape and in pronunciation. The Romanisation system used is the Wade system, which is somewhat old, and the meanings given for the characters are very brief, with no usage notes. Also, the characters described by the book are traditional characters; no mention is made of the simplified. The research upon which the book is based is almost a century old.Notwithstanding all of the above, I find that the merits of the book far outweigh its shortcomings, and, for its price, is certainly an interesting guide to the etymology of Chinese characters as well as being a passable reference work for learning characters. I would recommend it to anyone quite curious about Chinese characters and its history. It might, however, prove quite boring to the casual reader who has only a mild curiousity and does not wish to learn about the etymologies of individual characters.