Categorizing

At the end of last month, May of 2014, Bratislav, of Croatian descent, had left the Lulu Island neighbourhood, he having bought a new house and abandoning his slender townhouse. One of our last meetings in the neighbourhood was at the Rideau School field. We discussed plenty. Russia and China had been "State Capitalist" regimes and not "Communist" as they claimed to be. There was an alien "spacecraft" hovering invisibly above the grassy field; oh no, it was some kind of "portal"; oh no, it was an "incorporeal being." Many East Asian logograms, or "Sinograms," had a categorizing radical along with a hinting phonetic radical; they were not all pictographic. Daoists, I said, liked to be like a simple driftwood. There were aliens aplenty, Bratislav repeated. That day on the field last month, the thousands of dandelions were abundant with cloudy tufts of their soon-to-fly seeds.

Japanese use a lot of sinograms. Many sinograms have a categorizing radical along with a phonetic hint radical, historically for Chinese. Sometimes, Japanese borrow a sinogram and pronounce it with a Japanese native reading, so the original Chinese historicity becomes semi-irrelevant. In a way, Japanese writing is a real mishmash.

Many people are a little over obsessed with categorizing other people.