What does "kwukyel" mean in regards to Chinese language characters?

Question

My Pleco always tells me two little hashes on the top of 汉字 such as.

兑

are "kwukyel".

Can anyone point me to a reference that explains this term as it relates to Chinese language?

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ps -- I already know the explanation about older Korean. That is not the question.

I'm asking about why this is in my Chinese language dictionaries (at least two).

[ -- this premise is not quite correct ----
I don't believe these dictionaries are intended to be abstract Hanzi references.]

They are Chinese language dictionaries.

• Is there any good reference that explains the mapping to "kwukyel" for Chinese language is wrong?
• If the term "kwukyel" is not meaningful for Chinese language, what definition should the marks be mapped to?
  • If the answer is "nothing", please provide some evidence/references so I can give credit to your answer. :-)

Answer 1

kwukyel or gugyeol is a Korean system to write Chinese characters phonetically that predates Hangul. As for 丷 itself, to quote from Wiktionary:

This is a kwukyel note. Kwukyel was a system formerly used in Korea whereby correct interpretation of texts written in Classical Chinese was aided by small interspersed notes such as this one. The notes represent Korean morphemes but were only used within Chinese text.

Answer 2

As a learner of Chinese it means nothing to you. But since Chinese characters were and are used to write other languages, diacritics used in 口訣 (kwukyel/gugyeol) belong to the Hanzi (in Unihan just "Han") world. So if Pleco uses the Unihan database as its source, kwukyel signs are bound to appear.

Also, regarding the added question of what to name them in Chinese, the name kwukyel maps to 口訣. Hence calling them just that, [Hánguó] kǒujué, 韓國口訣, could work.

Answer 3

Specifically for the character "兑", the top two strokes are a corrupted form of 八 , which in this case symbolizes air coming out of one's mouth. The character "兑" is an early form of "悅", which means happiness.

Most characters can be classified as Pictographs (象形), Ideograms (指事), Compound-ideograph (會意) or Phono-semantic (形聲). By definition, compound-ideographs are composed by adding two different components to directly infer their meaning. For an example, 林, composed of two 木, which means a forest.

So, attempting to understand Chinese by decomposing them into their respective parts only makes sense for compound-ideograph characters. Unfortunately, compound ideograph characters are only a fraction of the frequent Chinese characters in use. ("兑" is, unfortunately, a pictograph)

Furthermore, many commonly-used Chinese characters take forms and meanings that are many degrees removed from their etymology. Normal people don't learn how to speak and write daily English by learning Latin and Germanic roots, so learning the etymology of Chinese characters would likely be overkill for mastering proficient use of the modern language.

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FYI, simply for the sake of correctness, many online sources claiming to explain Chinese character etymology is unreliable and rooted in folk etymology to propagate certain beliefs or religion, such as confucious beliefs or falun gong. For example, many such websites would explain the character "王" by quoting the Confucious saying "a ruler is the person who can connect the heaven, the people and the ground" (一貫三為王).

However, oracle carvings from ~1500BC indicate that "王" is a pictograph for an axe. Confucious is from ~500BC. Chinese characters are far from as "deep" as some propagandish websites would lead you to believe.

But, most native users wouldn't care about the etymology anyway.

Answer 4

FWIW - when Unihan was first developed and Chinese characters were encoded, it's possible that someone attempted to resolve the components for characters such as "不” and mistakenly tried to decompose 不 into a compound ideograph when perhaps it should have been a single component plus misc strokes.

Perhaps creating a CJK character set itself is rife with built-in inconsistencies.

So, @mikem, you might consider "kwukyel" entries as residual errors that should be corrected in the dictionaries you're using. I believe mdbg has dropped references to kwukyel.

I'm creating my own database of Chinese-only characters and I'm treating kwukyel as simply additonal strokes.

Answer 5

(sorry to toot my own horn, but my prior effort to Edit another answer to give credit didn't work)

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The question makes sense, but is not quite correct.
It says

the dictionary is only contemporary Chinese, not for multiple uses for Hanzi.

But if you're looking at

• Unihan

that very much is an abstract Hanzi reference.

It is not only for contemporary Chinese - not even only for Chinese language.
Here is the Wikipedia on it: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Han_unification

If it is shown inside your electronic Mandarin or Cantonese or other Chinese dictionary, you should expect some confusion.
It's a huge set of characters.
There may be genuine disagreement on a "correct" mapping, as well as mistakes or compromises in your electronic tool.
~
~
For a specific Component or Character mapping you are curious about, maybe that should be a new question.

As for the definition "kwukyel"...
as a learner of Chinese it means nothing to you.
That definition is for an old form of Korean writing - also considered in Unihan. It was a mark just to guide the reader, without a "meaning" of it's own.

As a learner of Chinese, if you see "kwukyel" in Unihan you should think

1. if there is another definition in your tool, from a Chinese-only dictionary, you should use that because it was (hopefully) researched just for Chinese -- ignore the Unihan
2. if there is no other definition, just take it as "no useful meaning"

If you think your electronic dictionary could be improved, you might report to their support.