Yǒu biān dú biān (), or dú bàn biān (), is a rule of thumb people use to pronounce a Chinese character when they do not know its exact pronunciation. A longer version is '，' (yǒu biān dú biān, méi biān dú zhōngjiān; lit. "[if] there is a side, read the side; [if] there is no side, read the middle part").

Around 90% of Chinese characters are phono-semantic compounds that consist of two parts: a semantic part (often the radical) that suggests a general meaning (e.g. the part [shell] usually indicates that a character concerns commerce, as people used shells as currency in ancient times), and a phonetic part which shows how the character is or was pronounced (e.g. the part (pinyin: huáng) usually indicates that a character is pronounced huáng in Mandarin Chinese).

The phonetic part represents the exact or almost-exact pronunciation of the character when the character was first created; characters sharing the same phonetic part had identical or similar readings. Linguists rely heavily on this fact to reconstruct the sounds of ancient Chinese. However, over time, the reading of a character may be no longer the one indicated by the phonetic part due to sound change and general vagueness.Cf. Qiu Xigui, Chinese Writing, trans. Gilbert L. Mattos and Jerry Norman, Early China Special Monograph Series No. 4, Berkeley: The Society for the Study of Early China and the Institute of East Asian Studies, University of California, Berkeley, 2000, §8.6.

When one encounters such a two-part character and does not know its exact pronunciation, one may take one of the parts as the phonetic indicator. For example, reading (pinyin: yì) as zhǐ because its "side" is pronounced as such. Some of these readings have become acceptable over time; they have been listed in dictionaries as alternative pronunciations, or simply become the common reading. For example, the character ting in (Ximending) is read as if it were ding. It has been called a "phenomenon of analogy", and is observed in as early as the Song dynasty.Zhu Jianing 竺家寧, "Songdai yuyin de leihua xianxiang" 宋代語音的類化現象, in Jindai yin lunji 近代音論集, Taipei: Taiwan xuesheng shuju, 1994, pp. 159–172.

See also

Spelling pronunciation The Chinese Language: Fact and Fantasy

Notes

External links Feng, Shouzhong (S: 冯寿忠, T: 馮壽忠, P: Féng Shòuzhōng), 《与读半边有关的常用字》 (), 语言文字网 Yǔyán Wénzì Wǎng。