Chinese Characters

Rating:
Summary: Worth Having on your Bookshelf
Review: Books published by Dover tend to have certain similarities: they tend to be books that were considered primary reference sources in their (usually eccentric) field at one time, but are now outdated and while their contents are frequently interesting, possibly useful and occasionally enlightening, they should not be considered authoritative except in the sense that they reflect scholarly opinion of several generations past.

Fr. Wieger's book should be treated in this manner. We have a great deal more resources regarding the evolution of the Chinese writing system at our disposal now than when he wrote a hundred years ago. The book is interesting in that it reflects the accepted wisdom of Chinese scholars of the nineteenth century on the subject, and in this sense it resembles James Legge's translations of the Chinese classics - they're considered almost unreadable nowadays (as is Wieger) but Legge had the benefit of real mandarins of the old regime to consult with. Fr. Wieger's book is a reflection of the sholarship that put together the Kang Xi dictionary, which despite its drawbacks in retrospect was a monumental work in its time.

If you're looking for a dictionary don't waste your time with Wieger - in this respect he was inaccurate even when he was new, and it's doubtful that preparing a dictionary was his major concern anyway. If you're looking for a history of Chinese writing, you should look elsewhere for accuracy, but Wieger's comments are worth a read as well, for no other reason than that he goes into so much detail over every character, and provides us with the received wisdom on the derivation of so many of them.

Which is his major virtue; the level of detail he was willing to go to in the book is stultifying. The book's other virtue is the sheer fact of its existence, which is one more tribute to the Jesuit fascination with China over four centuries.

Rating:
Summary: Outdated, but useful
Review: If you're looking for a book giving the latest information on the history and development of Chinese characters, this is NOT the book you want to use.

Having said that, this book can still be very useful to you in learning Chinese characters. The vast majority of Chinese characters are NOT the charming "sun plus moon equals bright" type of pictographs. They are a two-part composite, with one character (the radical) carrying the general semantic meaning of the compound, and the other character giving an indication of the sound of the compound. (for an excellent discussion of this, see John DeFrancis' The Chinese Language - Fact and Fantasy.) What Wieger presents is a scheme of 858 phonetic series, and by learning the sound(s) associated with these series you get, in essence, multiple characters for the price of one.

So forget about his outdated etymologies, and use his information only when it's vivid and makes the character easy to remember. Otherwise, make up your own mnemonics. But the sound-carrying parts of characters - his "phonetic series" - repeat themselves over and over again in different compound characters. And being familiar with the more prolific phonetic series will make the memorization of new characters much easier.

Rating:
Summary: For Reference & Pleasure
Review: If you've heard of the excellent Zhongwen.com website, note that you can look up a word there and often find the corresponding Wieger lesson number in THIS book. Very helpful.
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I bought this book in '96 and am still enjoying it. While I agree with many other reviewers who say this book is not for beginners, I was shocked to see reviews posted here that call it grossly out of date, or even useless.

If you have some experience with Chinese characters and would like to delve into their origins, Wieger's book provides hundreds of brief etymologies. Are they correct and accurate? Ahem, no comment. I'm not a linguist. But they have definitely helped me to remember characters' meanings when I see them later in a newspaper or a letter.

Nitty gritty:
+ You can find ancient forms next to the modern (merely 2000 years old?) forms here. Very interesting, and I have yet to find these forms on the Internet. Also, you may see more than one variation of a character.
+ The etymologies: Translated from French, which was translated from - i think - German, they have an archaic flavor. You might like that, and you might hate it. Still, the etyms are what this book is all about.
Printing: bad, but the paper hasn't yellowed, even in my humid climate.
Indexes --How do you FIND these tasty etymologies?:
- Radicals
- Phonetics (alphabetized) - the old k'ai, hsien & chou, not kai, xian and zhou.
- the 224 'Primitives'

Series: Aside from the indexes (indices) mentioned above, there are also "phonetic series", lists of words that have not the radical in common but instead...that other part. The phonetic clue. Not all the words in each series sound exactly alike. For example, you'll find ch'ing4, sheng1 and hsin1 together in one group. But, they all share the same phonetic clue, and are thus placed in the same lesson as well. Bottom line - if you fail to find a word, but then turn to a word that merely _reminds_ you of the former, and there's a good chance of finding the word you're actually looking for.

Final word on the etymologies: If you're a linguist, there must be better sources out there (and you probably have them). The angry reviewer from Wulai wants to see this book out of print, but until she posts the title of an alternative source, these snippets are USEFUL, at least in helping one memorize characters. They make this book one of my favorite sources of pleasure reading. How many language books can _You_ still call pleasure reading after 5 years?