[classical music]
Many people know that chinese is written with symbols called characters
basically, little pictures used to represent the different words in the language
But for those not familiar with Chinese characters,
it can be hard to see why, for example, this means "east"
or why this one means "uranium"
And what makes it seem all the more difficult is that
there are thousands and thousands of different characters you need to know
But all these tens of thousands of characters
are made up of just a little over 200 basic pictures called "radicals"
Once you know what they mean,
it's not that hard to learn all the rest of the characters.
Now here's a commonly used example of how the radicals can fit together
Take a look at this one
It's supposed to be a picture of the sun
Back in ancient times it was written like this
which looks a little more like a sun
Then consider this radical
which is meant to be a picture of a tree
In its earliest form, it was written this way
but maybe the modern version better resembles a tree
Now when you combine the tree with the sun
you get this, which is the character for "east"
Why does it mean "east"? Because the sun rises in the east
and this is supposed to be the rising sun
peeking through the branches of a tree
While this particular character uses only picture elements,
most other characters also include a radical that shows you
more or less how to pronounce them.
Take this radical for instance
It's meant to look like a jug
and it's one of the ways Chinese has to say "because"
This may seem a little odd
but it makes sense when you consider that if A happens because of B...
then you could say that A flows out of B
the way water flows out of a jug
Now this "because" character is pronounced "yo" in Mandarin
and so it's often used as radical in other words that have the same or similar pronunciations
For example, the character for "grapefruit"
is the "tree" radical combined with the "yo" radical
This is because the word for grapefruit is pronounced "yo" -- the same syllable
but with a different tone
Or consider this radical. It's used for "metal"
It sort of looks like a mountain with mineshafts cut into it
When you add the "metal" radical to the "yo" radical
you get the character for "uranium"
since the Chinese word for uranium
is also pronounced "yo"
This part-picture part-phonetic method shows up in other writing systems
Such as the ones used by the ancient Egyptians
and the ancient Mayans
It's worth noting that back in the 1950s
the newly formed People's Republic of China
simplified many of the characters
to make them easier to write
For example the character for "dragon" used to be written like this
which sort of looks like a dragon's head
but nowadays in mainland China it's written like this
which is easier to learn, but doesn't look very dragon-like
By coincidence, China wasn't the only place where
a communist revolution changed the way people write.
When the Marxists came to power in Russia, they too made changes
cutting a few letters out of the Russian alphabet
... but that's another story
[Stay tuned for Easter Egg at end of video...]