Missing Characters

We, Chinese, have over 60 thousand characters. A dictionary, 漢語大字典 from Taiwan, which has listed all [perhaps most] of our characters and this process has taken many decades and over 400 people helped to compile the dictionary, which comes in eight volumes.  However, only very few of these characters are in the unicode list. 

The last time when such great work was done, was during the period of the Great Emperor Kangxi, during the Qing dynasty.

The Japanese based their characters on this dictionary, which was compiled during the period of this Great Emperor and the Japanese therefore calls Chinese characters "Kanji" to name them after Emperor Kangxi.

So how do Teochew dictionaries come up with missing unicode characters? 

Let us take just one character "diang" and discuss one way in which this problem is solved.

We say di2diang5 for whom or who [誰 in Chinese] and u6diang5si5 for sometimes [有時候 in Chinese].

So what character can we use for diang?

We know dzi7diang2 字典 for character dictionary.  So one of the writers of one my dictionaries use 唺 to represent this diang5 sound. We know that this diang character is only used for its sound because it has 口 as its radical. 

So now we can write u6diang5si5 as 有唺時 and di2diang5 as 哋唺.

Then you can say to me - Well, we can say u6diang5si5 as u6si5 有時 and we say di2diang7 as di2nang7 哋人. Of course you can and then the problem of not having a character for diang5 will disappear. Then how about di2 哋? Well, the problem with di2 is solved in the same way as diang5, described above. 

Alternatively, you could say to me, but the diang in both words have different tones. Yes, the diang in u'diang'si changes from tone 5 to tone 7 because the character is in the middle of the word and we say it as u3diang7si5. 

For this reason, many ghua'di'nang 外地人 finds learning Teochew very difficult in China.

I hope you have found this post interesting and it has helped you to understand some aspect of the uniqueness and beauty of our Teochew ue. 

Thank you for reading this post. God bless!