Meaning Trees and Original Meanings

A meaning tree maps a character’s senses from the one meaning the written shape was invented to picture. Later senses either spun from that root by metaphor or metonymy, or were grafted on because the words sounded alike. The tree stores the root and the keepers a reader could not regenerate; every other gloss stays off the card.

Two roads and a fallback

The original meaning is the only sense the form actually depicts. Explaining why a character looks the way it does always routes through that sense, even when the everyday reading has drifted. 木 was drawn as a tree. The everyday reading “wood” is a later spin from that picture, and it is the one people reach for first. Until the root is restored, the everyday sense and the strokes sit next to each other with no reason to.

Derivation is the first road. A new sense spins from an older one the way English “hit the bottle” uses the container for the drinking. 漢 started as a river, which is why 氵 sits on the left. People living beside that river took its name; the dynasty that rose from the region took the name next; the ethnic group that dynasty named; then an adult male of that group. The modern sense “Han / Chinese” is reachable only through that chain. The water component pays off at the first step and nowhere later.

Sound loan is the second road. A form is borrowed to write an unrelated word that sounded alike. 我 drew a saw-toothed pole weapon. The loan evicted the weapon sense. The form still pictures the weapon; the modern word does not.

Evicted senses often get successor characters. 其 lost its winnowing-basket sense and 箕 added ⺮ to keep it. 必 lost “dagger-axe handle” and 柲 added 木. That successor pattern is the same rebus machinery Sound Components owns; here it is only the eviction made visible. Semantic parts that extend the same roots into later hosts live on Meaning Components.

Two roads plus one fallback is the whole typology. When the invented sense cannot be pinned, the earliest attested usage takes the root slot. 恢 is already “vast” in Warring States texts. Nothing in that sense talks to 忄, and 灰 is the phonetic. The fallback is rare. There is no fourth road.

How a tree is written, and what stays off the card

A meaning tree records the genealogy. The root is tagged original even when it is obsolete. A loan sense is circled — 〇. A break marked before the mind starts mending it is easier to store than a break the mind keeps trying to fix. Derivations are graded by depth: first-stage, second, third, with indentation matching the stage. The arrows encode which sense could have spawned which. Only the root is verified history. Tracing the true historical chain would multiply the work several-fold and change nothing that belongs on a card. A logical tree is not a philological tree.

Two readings, two trees.

長 cháng:

• old person → long in time ⇒ long in space
• later: good at / strong point

長 zhǎng:

• grow old → grow, develop ⇒ increase
• plus: leader

One tree per role. 臣 in a text is a ruler’s subject; as a component it is the eye of someone bowing. 又 as a word is “again”; inside 取 it is a hand. Construction is analyzed with component meanings; words are read with character meanings. Three Attributes of a Character is the meaning leg these trees organize. Surface vs Deep Structure is the parse they anchor to — character role and component role stay apart.

The prune is the action. A sense derivable from a more basic one is not stored: if B is guessable from A and C, B is skipped; if B and C both follow from A, A is stored alone. On 長 zhǎng the keeper is “to grow.” Context then rebuilds “grow old,” “develop,” “increase,” even “leader.” Rare senses wait. Loading the whole gloss list up front is how many of them are forgotten before they are ever used.

What the tree is for

The tree does three jobs. It ties today’s ordinary sense back to the strokes. It shows how the other senses grew, or failed to. It cuts the store down to what cannot be rebuilt.

Those jobs become a motion in three steps. First, ask whether the form and the ordinary modern sense still talk to each other — a 〇 answers no. Second, choose which senses to keep. Third, wire the keepers together. The savings compound across thousands of characters.

The work refused is full historical chains. That is the price, paid once per character, against the cost of storing a flat list. Rules of Effective Memorization is the general form — understanding, association, load-minimization — and this prune is one instance.

Four false bridges

Inventing a link to a loan is the first. 造 has no path from “create” to 辶; the component served original “to arrive” (ancient cào). “Create” is circled. “Manufacture” is derived from it.

Modern-sense etymology is the second. Hunting “Chinese” in the strokes of 漢 is folk etymology. The river reading already made 氵 obvious.

Role confusion is the third. Carrying a character meaning into construction — 臣 as “official” inside a host, 又 as “again” inside 取 — forces contorted stories.

Lookalike traps are the fourth. 必 shares no history with 心. The 旦-shaped element in 是 is unrelated to 旦. Both are Empty Components — residue, not meaning.

What this is not

Basic modern meaning is the sense a native gives with no context. A good dictionary’s first gloss is the practical proxy when no native is standing at a whiteboard.

Almost no character is a pile of equal glosses. That is a qualitative claim about how senses grow, not a measured share of an unnamed dictionary.

This is not a 訓詁 seminar. A tree that invents links is folk etymology with extra steps. A tree that stores every gloss has not pruned. The method does nothing for a reader who will not look up an original sense. The price is a root-finding pass, paid once per character. If the tree keeps growing to match a dictionary entry, the prune failed. After the pass, the stored set is the root plus the non-obvious keepers, and a circled loan no longer asks to be repaired.

Memory Handling is the general prune-by-inference move. This page is the character-sized version.

The same root is now the thing that stays on the card. Context regenerates the obvious extensions. Loans stay circled. The form still pictures only that oldest sense; the store is small enough to use.

Links into the knowledge base

• How Chinese Characters Work — the hub: how the cluster is ordered, and where trees sit after the component pages.
• Three Attributes of a Character — the meaning leg these trees organize.
• Meaning Components — semantic parts that extend the same roots into hosts.
• Sound Components — rebus machinery behind sound-loans and successor characters.
• Surface vs Deep Structure — character-versus-component roles; the parse these trees anchor to.
• Rules of Effective Memorization — understanding, association, load-minimization — the general rules the prune instantiates.
• Memory Handling — inference-over-storage as a general move; this page is the character-sized version.
• Empty Components — the lookalike half of 必 and 是.

Open Questions

How does a pruned sense re-enter once it starts appearing in real text?

A dictionary’s first gloss stands in for the whiteboard test. How far that proxy drifts from the sense a native would give with no context is still open.

Sources

Qiu Xigui, Chinese Writing, trans. Gilbert L. Mattos and Jerry Norman (Berkeley: Society for the Study of Early China, 2000). The public 本義 / 引申 / 假借 distinction this page restates as original meaning, derivation, and sound loan.

Standard 訓詁 handbooks on 本義 as the sense a graph was invented to write, 引申 as metaphor and metonymy from that root, and 假借 as attachment by sound alone.

The 漢 river-name chain and the 我 weapon-to-pronoun loan are the ordinary textbook accounts of those two characters; they are not house etymologies.