瓩 - The only Chinese character pronounced as 2 syllables?
I left a bait in an earlier post 伊辛巴耶娃 to 伊娃 :
… Doesn’t matter if you don’t read Chinese — each character is always a syllable (except for 1 character, which I will not tell here; let me know if you know the answer).
Kevin at timelysnow.com wants to know the answer. Here goes:
The Pinyin on this page (near the bottom) has a wrong tone — /qian/ should be in the 1st tone, not the 3rd. But clearly, a single character, 2 syllables:瓩 (radical 98 瓦+3, 8 strokes, cangjie input 一弓竹十 (MNHJ))
[edit] References
- KangXi: not present, would follow page 748, character 8
- Dai Kanwa Jiten: character 21450
- Dae Jaweon: page 1156, character 14
- Hanyu Da Zidian: volume 2, page 1422, character 5
- Unihan data for U+74E9
瓩 (pinyin qiǎn1wa (qian1wa3), qiǎn2wa (qian2wa3), Wade-Giles 3, 3)
It’s used quite frequently in Taiwanese publications, where in Mainland it’s written separately as two characters, 千瓦, also pronounced as qian1-wa3.
Interestingly, the same character exists in Japanese and Korean. In Japanese it actually means kilogram, not kilowatt. I suspect this one was made in Japan. It was not on Kangxi Dictionary — Watt was probably not born then. I suspect it was created in Japanese and then borrowed back into Chinese in the 1920’s to 40’s. But I have not way of proving now.
How did I find this out? It goes back to when I was bored in elementary school, and flipped through a half torn 新华字典 (New China Character Dictionary) and was stunned to find the character. I am pretty sure there is not another example like this in the modest New China Dictionary because I must have tried a thousand times to replicate my discovery.
Well, you probably argue that there is another case. For $38 USD you can buy one of these:
which is a pretty traditional paper-cut that you’d put on your windows during the Lunar New Year. What seems to be a single character is actually composed of 4 characters: 招财进宝 (but in traditional characters).
Good find, but I challenge you to find its unicode.
August 27th, 2008 at 6:32 am e
Weird, because it’s also clearly two morphemes. I’m not surprised that it’s written 千瓦 in the Mainland.
August 27th, 2008 at 8:56 am e
The idea that 瓩 was made in Japan is correct!
According to Gendai Kanwa Jiten (Kimura & Kurosawa, 1996),
瓩 (kilogram) was made in Japan by integrating 瓦 and 千.
瓦 (gram) was used because its pronunciation is similar to [gram] in English.
Similarly, 瓧 (decagram), 瓰 (decigram), 瓲 (ton), 瓱 (milligram), 瓸 (hectogram), 甅 (centigram) are all real Japanese kanji.
August 30th, 2008 at 7:32 am e
Fascinating! All of the 瓦+X characters make prefect sense (now that I know why 瓦 was gram). A key difference between Japanese and Chinese, though, is that they should all have a monosyllabic pronunciation, according my intuition as a Chinese speaker.
There is one mystery, then: how did it turn from kilograms to kilowatts?
This seem to run against the obvious speculation that the character was imported during the Japanese occupation in the 30’s. One would think they’d keep the same meaning. It seems the borrowing was sometimes after, when the idea of 千瓦 kilowatts was common in the language. Then someone stumbled on this Japanese kanji 瓩 and decided to copy it.
It’s still one of the oddities in the history of Chinese characters, other than the character 曌 (pinyin: zhao4) thrown together by 武则天.
September 27th, 2008 at 8:28 am e
Two updates for this posting.
1. why did Chinese people turn the meaning of 瓩 from kilogram to kilowatt?
This seems that Chinese character 瓦 sounds like /wat/ and used as the symbol for watt before 瓩 was imported from Japan. I can imagine some Chinese people got confused when they read Japanese book where 瓩 was used for kilogram.
2. The most complicated Chinese character
Someone introduced Biáng in Biang biáng noodles as the most complicated Chinese character.
http://www.cynical-c.com/archives/010723.html
To see the picture of the character and know what biang biang noodles,
please go to Wikipedia and search for Biang biang noodles!!
September 27th, 2008 at 11:34 am e
Nobuyuki — thanks for the link to biang2. The syllable is oddly not present in the Standard Chinese (Mandarin) and must be a dialect thing. I’d agree with the scholars who claim that the noodle shop made it up, because I can’t see any rational for the composition of the character. It’s a very interesting find, though.
As to 瓩, ironically it went through the same process in Chinese as in Japanese, i.e., the 瓦 is the phonetic radical that, in this case, represents “gram” in Japanese and “watt” in Chinese. I bet someone saw the Kanji and decide to borrow it to Chinese. Evidence? I guess someone would have to look up newspapers and EE textbooks back in the 1920-30’s.