Radicals and their Relation to the Chinese Culture and Society
While the Chinese language developed along with Chinese society and culture, the characters, like graphic time-capsules, still reflect the lifestyle, ideology, and beliefs of the ancient Chinese’ creators. They also offer insight into areas of Chinese culture such as fine arts, literature, customs and conventions. This is especially true for radicals, which were derived from the oldest integral characters. For example, radical 女, is written as in oracle bone inscription. It is the image of a woman kneeling down with two hands crossed. From this pictograph, we can guess that in ancient China it may have been common for women to spend most of their time kneeling as they did domestic chores. Or perhaps the posture indicates an inferior status, and from this we can assume that women’s social status in ancient China was very low.
The radical 父 is another example. Its ancient pictographic form, , looks like a man holding a stone axe. We can imagine that males were often attack enemies in order to protect their tribe. We could also infer that China was in the Stone Age at the time of the character’s inception. Because characters capture the unique way ancient Chinese conceptualized their world, learning radicals not only helps us learn Chinese characters, but also introduces us to Chinese culture and history as well.
By now, I hope that you have had a general understanding of why students of Chinese need to learn radical. I hope you enjoy your exploration of Chinese radicals!
