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compound characters, in the form ), or as elements in compound characters such
as 73 ‘tree’ in 536 ‘pine tree’. The term ‘radical’ has traditionally been used in
the past for ‘determinative’, but is less preferable because the meaning ‘root’ inherent
in the etymology of the word ‘radical’ suggests that an element so labelled has
been a feature of a compound graph from the outset, whereas in almost all cases the
determinative/radical was added later, as explained in Section 2 above (‘Formational
Principles of the Chinese Script’).
Element and graph element are used without significant difference of meaning.
Either term may refer either to a constituent part of a particular graph which can
occur only as a dependent element, e.g. ‘water’ as part of a more complex graph
such as 94 ‘sea’, or to a constituent element in a compound graph which can occur
independently, e.g. 31 ‘ear’ in 219 ‘hear’.
Homomorphic means ‘having the same shape’. Used in those cases (relatively rare)
where two graphs with different meanings coincide in shape.
Morpheme is a minimal grammatical unit (sometimes referred to as a minimal unit
of meaning) which forms the building block of words. To give an example from English,
‘book’ is one morpheme and also one word, but ‘books’ is one word but two
morphemes, since it can be broken down into two functional units (morphemes),
viz. ‘book’ and ‘-s’ (noun plural marker). A particular morpheme is not always pronounced
the same: in the word ‘eggs’, for instance, the noun plural marker is pronounced
as if it were written ‘z’.
NJK, meaning non-Jōyō kanji, is used in this book to refer to characters which are
not included in the expanded Jōyō kanji list of 2010 (2,136 characters) but are included
in Nelson’s Japanese-English Character Dictionary (ca. 5,400 characters). The
purpose of this is to recognize that there are many characters outside the Jōyō kanji
list which can sometimes be encountered in modern Japanese texts. This is admittedly
only a ‘rough and ready’ arrangement, for two reasons. Firstly, the Nelson dictionary
includes various characters which the reader is very unlikely to encounter
in modern Japanese texts, e.g. ‘flute’, which is included necessarily because it
is one of the 214 determinatives (or ‘radicals’, as Nelson calls them, following the
older terminology). Secondly, ‘NJK’ is a term used in this book to contrast with ‘CO’,
meaning ‘Chinese only’ (either modern or pre-modern texts). What this means is
only that CO characters are not listed in the Nelson dictionary; this by itself is no
guarantee that CO characters will never appear in a modern Japanese text. Despite
24 Introduction