Let’s say a Chinese person was dictating something to another Chinese person over the phone and a word came up that was spelled with a character the guy taking dictation had never come across before.
In English, for example, this is impossible assuming both people are literate: We have 26 letters and everyone knows all of them. The Chinese writing system has hundreds of thousands of characters, and given that a large number are obsolete and only used by scholars there’s no reason to assume everyone knows more than a fraction of them. (Don’t derail this with a discussion of precisely how large that fraction is. This problem would come up if even a single character was not common knowledge.)
So, would the person dictating start listing radicals? Would he have to go stroke-by-stroke? Do most Chinese people know a romanization system or some other way to write purely phonetically?
Generally they would say the word, and then say the equivalent of “As in ______”, using a common compound word. For example, if you wanted to say “vision” you might say “Vision, as in television”.
The compounds they use to identify individual characters are fairly standard, and I think they are drilled into people in childhood when they are learning the characters. So it’s kind of a bigger version of our “A as in Apple” system.
If the word really is just completely unknown to the writer, they’d probably use an electronic aid of some sort. But really if you were working on something with such specialized vocabulary that the other person might not know the words, chances are you probably wouldn’t do it over the phone. When is the last time you had to spell an unfamiliar word (other than a name) over the phone? It’s not as common a problem as you’d think it’d be.
If it’s a specialized word they could just use tell the person the pinyin. That won’t necessarily map to a single character (there can be multiple words with the same pronunciation and tonality) but it will allow the person to look it up pretty quickly.
I don’t think it’s all that common a situation, but they’d most likely just describe the unknown character in relation to other characters that the other person would certainly know.
So in the unlikely situation of someone not knowing the character 詩, they’d say “the right side is 寺 and the left 言” or “like 特 but with the 言 radical.”
I think that cckerberos can probably expand some more - but although there is a huge number of words, isn’t there a fixed or limited number of radicles? Something like 30 - 50, each of which has a name?
The first example is most common. eg, “port” as in “airport” and not the vile stuff English people drink.
cckerberos “radical” way is one you also come across but less common than above.
You can use pinyin but that doesn’t narrow the field too much.
I’ve never heard anyone using stroke order.
Scratching my head and I suppose if you really were anal about it one could use the chinese commercial code number for the character. I don’t know anyone that actually would know that though outside of the telegraph operators. I’m also thinking that while I sent Chinese telegraphs back in the 1980’s it’s a dead industry these days. Here’s a link.
There is also the 4 corner method. But I don’t know anyone that’s ever used this. This should be better than just the strokes but again it’s probably like trying to find someone that knows how to use a slide rule.
It depends on what you mean by “know” (and I should make clear that I primarily have experience with native Japanese, although I don’t think that it would be much different for Chinese.) They’ll have been taught the radicals when learning characters at school and be familiar with them because they’re still the main indexing method for character dictionaries. But I wouldn’t necessarily expect them to know uncommon radicals by name or be able to correctly identify the radical of a character.
In Taiwan, I’m pretty sure anyone who’s gotten past middle school would have been taught all of the radicals, and retain the ability to identify most of them by name.
Here’s a page of radicals on my favorite online dictionary. There’s probably a lot more than 214, though, as this page gives both the simplified and traditional variants of each radical.
Also remember that many if not most radicals also constitute characters in and of themselves.
And here’s an example of how a specific radical is incorporated into different characters. The radical 門 is also the word for “door”, so most of those characters are all door-related.
Actually, I don’t think it is that uncommon. I’ve heard my mom use that method numerous times. Although, the first method she would use is the one that even sven and China guy described. I remember that some teachers in Chinese school would describe the radicals, too.
I can’t quite wrap my head around what you mean by this. Does this mean Pinyin is ambiguous? That is, more ambiguous than the utterance it has been used to transcribe, like any other defective orthography* would be.
*(I don’t know what the correct term here would be. ‘Defective’, in this context, is usually used to describe orthographies like Hebrew without vowel marks, where multiple words are all written the same way. I know Pinyin transcribes both vowels and tone.)
Not to nitpick too much, but the method even sven described isn’t actually applicable to the question, since the OP is asking about describing characters that someone has “never come across before”. So specifying “the port in airport” wouldn’t actually be of help since the person doesn’t know what that is.
That’s what I’m describing as an uncommon situation. IME most of the time people are describing characters to one another it’s not because the character is unknown but rather because they’ve temporarily forgotten how to write it. I think it’s actually pretty rare for someone to come across a character that’s completely new to them.
The method may not be applicable, but I was just mentioning that it is very commonly used in real life conversations when the listener inquires about a certain character. The person dictating would usually first use it in a phrase and then go on to describe the character if it was clear that listener still didn’t know it, couldn’t remember it, or whatever.
I read your post wrong. I was saying it’s not uncommon to describe a character that way, by breaking it down and describing each part.
for example, there are around 80 different characters for the pinyin of ‘li’. There are about 23 of ‘li’ in the second tone. So, saying it is the ‘li’ character spelled L I is not helpful.
‘li’ is avery common sound but you should be able to get my drift