If the Chinese Vocabulary is set to a standard of symbols and icons, how can they come up with new words?

Question

My question is, don't they lose creativity by the loss of coming up with new words? If they did come up with a new word, say, in English, someone came up with "jabberwocky"...they (the Chinese or Japanese) would have to create a new symbol or 'icon' for that word, and most people wouldn't have a clue how to pronounce it or what it means. Doesn't that strike anyone as sort of crass?

Answer 1

There are alot of chinese characters. Those can be combined in various ways (putting two or three or more together) to make new words. So they don't actually create new icons, just find new ways to combine them.

Answer 2

In English, each "word" has its meaning. However you shouldn't think of Chinese characters as an equivalent to "word" in English. A single character can't usually make a intact meaning. It usually takes two or three or something characters to make a "word" you mean in English. Thus, it's very easy to creat new words, easier than in Englih. Chinese language has a easy grammar, so you just combine the characters with the meaning you want to creat a new word.
On the contrary, coming up with new characters is unusual. This kinda thing happens mostly when you want to name something about new tchnology, such as Calsium. When the new characters are created, the prononciations usually depend on the radicals.
There are still some strange new characters created recent decadses. A character forms with a sqare with the character means book inside means library. It's prononced in three syllabals, which is extremely strange. The character "meter" with the radical of "oral" reads in two syllabals, meaning "English meter"--feet.

Answer 3

Human creativity is limitless. How many songs there are, and new ones are created all the time. It's the same with language. And you also learn new words, new meanings and new pronunciations all the time. For you it's natural. You also don't always know what a certain thing means or how it is pronounced, so you ask sb or you get to know it after some time. The same thing with Chinese people. It just seems strange to you.

Answer 4

The idea that every word in Chinese has a distinct sign is a myth. There are only a few hundred radicals in Chinese. These are combined to make most symbols. One radical is of a word that sounds like the word to be written, the second radical is of a word that means something similar. So the character for "agate" (ma with falling-rising tone) is a combination of the characters for "gem" (yü with falling tone) and "horse" (ma also with falling-rising tone). Another type of character is composed of two radicals whose meaning suggests the word, so that "peace" (an with level tone) is a combination of the characters for "roof" (mian with rising tone) and "woman" (nü with falling-rising tone). Any new character can be constructed in this manner.

But the most common way for new words to enter Chinese is through compounding. Many words, if not MOST words in Chinese are actually compounds and have two or more characters to write them. For example, the verb "to depend on" is yikao (I'll ignore tones). Each of those syllables has a different character, so the written form of this verb is TWO characters long. The truth is that Chinese is NOT a picture system with one character per word, but is, at its heart, a SYLLABLE system, with one character per syllable. Most syllables have more than one possible character for various reasons, but if a word is longer than one syllable (as most of them are), it has more than one character in its written form. So the word for "diary" in Chinese is yiben riji, with three characters, the word for "dictionary" is yiben cidian, three characters, "diagram" is yizhang tubiao, three characters. (Some of the radicals used in these words are two syllables long.)

So Chinese is quite flexible in adding new words to the language and fluent readers of Chinese would have no problem understanding a new sequence of characters since there is a close relationship between the sound and the meaning in the radicals.

Answer 5

In Chinese, we do not represent one thing with one character (or in your words, a symbol / icon) or else we would have run out of symbols to represent so many new things in the world.

Each Chinese character can mean a thing in its own right but usually combines with others characters to reflect its meaning. In other words, a Chinese character can be a 'word' in itself but can also be a 'morpheme', hence a part of a word.

For example, the Chinese character for 'car / vehicle' is 'che'. But it can combine with the Chinese character 'huo' meaning cargo / load to form 'huo-che', to mean 'lorry'. But when combined with the character 'feng' meaning wind, it means 'windmill' , with 'pao' , which means the action run, it means 'race car'.

Thus,
huo (cargo / load) + che (car) = huo-che (lorry )
feng (wind) + che (car) = feng-che (windmill)
pao (run) + che (car) = (pao-che) race car

That's why a finite set of Chinese characters can actually be manipulated to represent new things or ideas coming in to being every day.

Answer 6

Not really, from what I understand, they can also put signs together... e.g. water + dog=otter or stuff like that, so putting symbols together they can exercise their creativity and create metaphors.... no language is exeunt from changing and innovating