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Most Helpful Customer Reviews
6 of 7 people found the following review helpful:
2.0 out of 5 stars
Bad printing & binding; average 'folk etymology' content,
By
This review is from: Tracing the Roots of Chinese Characters: 500 Cases (Mass Market Paperback)
Overall, the book is a low-quality, PRC printing and binding, below Western standards; mine is coming undone after opening it only a few times, and some pages are faint, uneven, or otherwise unclear in places.Explores the origins of 500 graphs in typical mass-market style, with focus on pictographs, one per page, with cartoons, rather than on the majority category of phonetic compounds and their actual evolutionary processes. Acceptable for the casual peruser, but not accurate or informative enough for the serious student of etymology. Like all such books I've seen now on the market, explanations are extremely brief, without references, and without noting competing theories, occasionally misleading the reader into thinking that his are the single, correct explanations, even though a handful of the readings are idiosyncratic or outdated (to be fair, most are correct). Examples: yao1 (now 'die young'), he defines as 'to bend' (following the outdated Han dynasty Shuowen and ignoring the established evidence that it means 'walk quickly or run, rush' based on zou3 'walk' and ben1 'rush'); bai2 (now 'white'), which he describes as 'a burning candle' (ignoring the two major theories that it is a loan of 'thumb' and 'head'); yin1 'prosperous; last Shang1 capital', which he describes as a man being beaten with a stick, despite the obvious presence of a graph for 'pregnant woman' which is probably playing a phonetic role and may even be its etymonic root (pregnant --> multitudinous, flourishing, prosperous). Li is inconsistent in mentioning semantic and phonetic components in compounds, with omissions in graphs such as the role of ji4 'a mortar' in jiu4 'owl; old; ancient' regrettable. Polyphony is ignored; there is no mention of the role of li4 'tripod cooker' in two common compounds pronounced ge2, 'separate' and 'belch, hiccup', implying a second reading of ge2. Beginning students will not be able to make some of his leaps. For example, at ji1 'chicken' he mentions one component is phonetic, but does not mention its pronunciation or meaning; nor is there mention at the entry for that component, xi1, that it is phonetic in ji1 'chicken'. Similarly, decomposing ming2 'name', he fails to mention the origin or pronunciation of its top component (xi1, xi4), identifying it only as 'night' (although the illustration does show it correctly as the moon). Entries are sometimes slightly confusing, e.g., at wan4 '10,000': "Its original meaning was 'scorpion'. ... Later, it was loaned to be the numeral ten thousand, and was written as [ ]." This is somewhat unclear as to which meaning was written [ ], scorpion, or 10,000, and the printing quality in my copy was so poor as to render the graph [ ] illegible. The 3-page preface, covering the history of the Chinese script, writes pinyin only, sans tones, for Chinese words, and a few minor details are incorrect (e.g., those oracle bones using turtle shells were mostly the plastrons, not the carapace, or back shell, as Li states). Otherwise the overview, albeit brief, is generally correct. There is a stroke index by simplified char., while the main entries are conveniently ordered by pinyin. A sequel with another 500 graphs was published as Evolutionary Illustration of Chinese Characters in 2000. Beijing Language & Culture University Press, ppbk; ISBN 7561908520. I don't plan to buy it.
3 of 4 people found the following review helpful:
5.0 out of 5 stars
Interesting and worth having,
This review is from: Tracing the Roots of Chinese Characters: 500 Cases (Mass Market Paperback)
Because this book has been slammed by an earlier reviewer, I feel compelled to offer a more positive view.I bought TRC:500 Cases more than 10 years ago in Beijing (this edition has a 1993 copyright). It's one of several books I brought back from China that I cherish. If you are looking for an academic book on the early history of Chinese characters, this may not fit the bill. But it is scholarly, and has been accurate whenever I have run across character etymologies in other sources. The pictures, though a bit saccharine sometimes, are entirely legitimate since the characters covered are pictographic. This is a book you can learn something from. Finally, as other reviewers elsewhere point out, if you don't offer alternative sources in your review then tearing down legitimate works, like TRC, is to no one's advantage.
4.0 out of 5 stars
flawed but very useful,
By
This review is from: Tracing the Roots of Chinese Characters: 500 Cases (Mass Market Paperback)
As usual, I agree with most of Kent Suarez's criticisms, although the binding of my copy has held up very well. One of the great merits of the book is its presentation of graphs: bone and shell, bronze, small seal, Li Shu, Kai Shu, grass, and cursive. Its great weakness is the text, which varies in approach from character to character and seldom provides information on the components of the characters or on the changes in the composition of the characters as the forms evolved over time. The drawings are of little actual value. And finally, the English of the translation is not as good as it should be. I am giving this four stars because the characters are common ones that students may run across, the "etymologies" are almost always accurate (although sometimes hard to decipher), the graphs are helpful, and most of all because none of the other popular books in English does nearly as much, most of them being inaccurate and inadequate. In other words, it fills a useful niche and doesn't have much competition. I also have the second volume, which has the same strengths and weakness, but the translation presents more problems and it sometimes sends the reader to other entries by giving the character, which is of little help since the book is organized alphabetically. Nonetheless, the two books together provide useful information on 1000 characters, and I would like to see a third volume published.
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