新説解 慣例
Sources
The former two draw their references from the third, and these together are considered official interpretations as understood by the Chinese. The last one uses a novel method of explaining characters in context, but is marred by largely only considering the modern forms rather than forms as originally conceived, thus it is less reliable.
Entry Structure
This reference work only uses characters present in the Table of General Use Chinese Characters (通用汉字表). It subscribes to the traditional six-script (六书) classification:
- PICTOGRAM. Fairly easy to understand, as they directly draw what they represent; however, many of these are subject to phonetic borrowing, obscuring their modern meanings.
- IDEOGRAM. The most straightforward type, representing simple concepts in an easily understood manner.
- IDEOGRAMMIC COMPOUND. As the name implies, these are combinations of simpler glyphs (pictograms or ideograms) whose meanings together indicate much more abstract concepts.
- PHONETIC BORROWING. The most difficult to understand for non-Chinese speakers, as their meanings are often completely different to what the glyph seems to represent. These must be memorized manually, though this work seeks to adopt different methods of explaining these types of characters.
- PHONO-SEMANTIC. Composed of two distinct or indistinct components: a semantic glyph to indicate the meaning, and a glyph used to indicate pronunciation. Due to their more difficult to understand nature, they are listed at the end of radical sections, with explanations to tie to semantic component together with the meaning when not apparent. Like Phonetic Borrowings, they must be remembered manually, though one may find it considerably easier to do so.
- SPECIALIZATION. This work defines specialized characters as glyphs derived from a certain base glyph, e.g. with certain components changed, to indicate meaning or act as a disambiguation for an otherwise phonetic loan.
Characters are simplified following the basic provisions:
- Characters simplified identically in both China and Japan use the simplified form.
- Characters not simplified in China use the traditional form.
- Characters are never simplified to contain any of the cursive components 纟、见、讠、贝、车/东、钅、门、页/头、饣、马、鱼、鸟.
Variant forms (differing in the Unicode code point) are displayed in parentheses after each character. Where the derivation is trivial, it should be interpreted the same as the orthodox entry; otherwise, another analysis will be given for these characters.
As the New Simplified Character standard is not widely used anywhere in the world, many of its graphemes are nonexistent or at least poorly supported in Unicode and the majority of existing fonts. This dictionary makes use of substitutions via the most visually similar variant form present in the main CJK Unicode block, denoted by an asterisk (*).