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Adding local short description: "Types of Chinese characters", overriding Wikidata description "the traditional etymological classification of hanzi into 6 categories: pictographs (象形), ideograms (指事), semantic–semantic compounds (會意), phono-semantic compounds (形聲), phonetic loans (假借), “derivative cognates” (轉注)" |
→Phonetic loan characters: 假借 is not a rebus. Tags: Mobile edit Mobile web edit |
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As Japanese creations, such characters had no Chinese or Sino-Japanese readings, but a few have been assigned invented Sino-Japanese readings. For example, the common character {{Nihongo2|働}} has been given the reading ''dō'' (taken from {{linktext|動|lang=ja}}), and even been borrowed into written Chinese in the 20th century with the reading ''dòng''.{{sfn|Seeley|1991|p=203}}
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''Jiajie'' ({{Lang-zh|c=假借|p=jiǎjiè|labels=no|l=borrowing; making use of, literally "false borrowing"}}) are characters that are "borrowed" to write another morpheme which is pronounced [[homophonous|the same]] or nearly the same. For example, the character {{wikt-lang|zh|來|來}} was originally a pictogram of a wheat plant and meant ''*m-rˁək'' "wheat". As this was pronounced similar to the Old Chinese word ''*mə.rˁək'' "to come", {{Lang|zh|來}} was also used to write this verb. Eventually the more common usage, the verb "to come", became established as the default reading of the character {{Lang|zh|來}}, and a new character {{wikt-lang|zh|麥|麥}} was devised for "wheat". (The modern pronunciations are ''lái'' and ''mài.'') When a character is used as a rebus this way, it is called a {{Lang-zh|c=|p=jiǎjièzì||w=chia3-chie(h)4-tzu4|l=loaned and borrowed character|labels=no|s=|t=假借字}}, translatable as "phonetic loan character" or "[[rebus]]" character. (An example using symbols familiar to English-speakers would be if a beekeeper wrote "This year we bottled £124 weight of honey".)
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