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Where does all the weird Chinese component terminology come from?
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pdenisowski:

--- Quote from: amyk on December 28, 2022, 02:15:00 am ---It seems it was intended to be the simplified character for blue, but later reassigned to orchid, yet people just started using it anyway. Google Translate says "blue" too.

--- End quote ---

Well, it is easier to write :)   [5 strokes versus 13 strokes]

According to Wiktionary (not exactly a primary source, but still ...)

"This misspelling appears to be found almost exclusively in Simplified Chinese texts, i.e. 蓝色 is being misspelled as 兰色."

https://en.wiktionary.org/wiki/%E8%98%AD%E8%89%B2#Chinese


--- Quote from: amyk on December 28, 2022, 02:15:00 am ---Google Translate says "blue" too.

--- End quote ---

Yes, but it gives the correct hanzi (蓝) when you reverse the direction  :)
coppice:

--- Quote from: pdenisowski on December 26, 2022, 11:27:07 am ---I recently was testing a transformer and the two sides were labeled "红色" (hóng sè - red) and "兰色"  I'm pretty sure they meant "蓝色" (blue) and not "兰色", both of which would be read "lán sè."  "兰" means "orchid" so "兰色" would probably mean "orchid colored" (if it were a real/common word)
--- End quote ---
So orange can't be a colour because its actually a fruit? Orchid colour is obviously meaningless, as orchids come in numerous colours. 兰 is not ambiguous, as nobody would read it as blue on its own, only when combined with 色 (colour). There are huge areas of overlap in Simplified Chinese. Even in Traditional Chinese the same character can have several meanings. Simplified reduced the character set so much the overlaps are much greater. There are plenty of words in any language which have numerous meanings.
gamalot:
This use of "兰色" is a very common mistake in China, especially among less educated people, and is somewhat similar to "I don't have no money" in English. 
pdenisowski:

--- Quote from: coppice on January 02, 2023, 02:26:10 pm --- Simplified reduced the character set so much the overlaps are much greater.

--- End quote ---

My understanding is that most of those cases involved merging of two characters where one of the two merged characters stayed the same, e.g. 雲 and 云 both becoming 云.  Situations where two different characters were merged into a single, different character (like 發 and 髮 both becoming 发) are significantly less common.

蓝 and 兰 do share a radical in traditional characters (艹 in both 藍 and 蘭) but I get the feeling (not being a Chinese native speaker :)) that 兰 is being used simply because it's a lot easier to write and has the same reading.
coppice:

--- Quote from: pdenisowski on January 02, 2023, 04:43:40 pm ---
--- Quote from: coppice on January 02, 2023, 02:26:10 pm --- Simplified reduced the character set so much the overlaps are much greater.

--- End quote ---

My understanding is that most of those cases involved merging of two characters where one of the two merged characters stayed the same, e.g. 雲 and 云 both becoming 云.  Situations where two different characters were merged into a single, different character (like 發 and 髮 both becoming 发) are significantly less common.

蓝 and 兰 do share a radical in traditional characters (艹 in both 藍 and 蘭) but I get the feeling (not being a Chinese native speaker :)) that 兰 is being used simply because it's a lot easier to write and has the same reading.

--- End quote ---
If you look at the pre-Unicode character sets, the most popular were Big5 for traditional Chinese, and the CNS standard for simplified Chinese. Depending on the variant, Big 5 is about 13000 to 14000 characters. CNS is about 6000 characters, They cover similar needs. That's how much the character set shrunk. Traditionally 云 was just shorthand for 雲, both meaning the same thing - a cloud. Many of the simplifications in simpliifed Chinese were just codifying the simplified way people were already writing those characters in informal writing.
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