Radical misconceptions: On the background and consequences of European ideas about bushou 部首

The idea that the part of a Chinese compound character commonly called bushou 部首 in Chinese and translated by ‘radical’ in English (or cognate expressions in other European languages) contains the semantic root of that character or the lexi­cal root it represents has a long European prehistory, which reaches back to the first accounts of the Chinese writ­ing system in missionary sources of the 17th cen­tury. In my talk I will trace the early history of both the Chinese and the European terms (as well as some com­peting designations). It will be shown that the term ‘radi­cal’ arose out of a peculiar constellation of a community of scholarly mission­aries working in East and South­east Asia as well as South-America under various presuppositions of ‘alterity’. Arguably, it inhibited the recognition of bushou  as se­mantic determinatives or classifiers for a long time – despite the emergence of the lat­ter concept in the same intellectual environment. 
Building upon the discussion of a few selected ex­amples, I will show how this per­ception led to some seemingly ineradicable miscon­ceptions about the role of seman­tic and phonological elements in compound characters, as well as the na­ture of word-families and etymologies built upon them, which are still noticeable today in various domains of sinology and even Chinese linguistics.

More Info: Presentation at ECLL Chinese Linguistics Day

Event Date: Apr 7, 2017

Organization: UZH