Dave (imported) wrote: Tue Nov 01, 2011 7:21 pm
I know the answer to that!
Over 65,535 characters. How do I know that? Because there were more than the 64 K chips we used to buy for early computers.
Actually, no one knows how many characters there are in Chinese. Characters were still being created to cover new concepts as late as the middle of the last century (and maybe since). For example, there were specific characters created for concepts such as "millimeter" and "kilogram." There were characters developed for the regional variations of Chinese (called “dialects,” but actually separate languages) that were used ONLY in that region. Many characters were created, used for a while, and then dropped from usage.
The closest attempt at a comprehensive listing is the “Great Chinese Character to Japanese Dictionary” (Dai Kan-Wa Jiten –大漢和辞典), which was the life’s work of Morohashi Tetsuji. He began compiling it in 1916, volume 1 was published in 1943 (and the plates destroyed in the war). The final two volumes (14 and 15) were published after his death at the age of 99 in 1982. The Morohashi dictionary has over 50,000 unique characters.
It still doesn’t contain everything needed! One of the works that I read as part of the research for my doctoral dissertation, the Kai-Kokushi (甲斐国志), contained characters that weren’t in the Morohashi. I had to guess at their meanings from the context, though I spent a great deal of time buried in the 13 volumes of the Morohashi that had been published by that time.
I later had fun with the characters and presented a paper on “untranslatable Japanese riddles” at a couple of professional meetings. The paper has not (and probably never can be) published because it relies on Chinese characters that don’t exist in written discourse.
Assuming that the Chinese character set that I can see on the Archive will come through for those who don’t have the characters in memory on their own machine, here’s an example that can, at least, be explained using “real” Chinese characters.
The person asking the riddle writes 木 and asks, “how is this character read?”
Answer: “ki” meaning ‘tree’
Then the person is asked, “how about this one?” 林
Answer: “hayashi” – ‘woods”
“And this one?” 森
Answer: “mori” – ‘forest’
“And, finally this one?”
If you’ve been able to see the characters, they are a progression of one, two, and three of the same symbol. This time the riddler writes FOUR of them, two over two.
The answer is not in the Morohashi and, to the best of my knowledge, does not exist outside of this riddle – “jôngaru” – ‘jungle’ (“Jôngaru” is even from the English word and is neither Japanese nor Chinese.)
Since most of the tellers of these sorts of riddles are adolescent boys, most of them are either obscene or pretended-obscene and are much more difficult to explain in plain English than “Jungle.” I gave my presentation with slides of hand-drawn characters.
“Pretended-obscene” riddles are like the common (adolescent boy) riddle in English:
“What’s long and hard when it goes in and soft and gooey when it comes out?”
“Chewing gum, you must have dirty mind if you didn’t get that one….!”