Chinese radicals are the semantic components of Chinese characters that generally indicate major concepts and categories. Characters that share the same radical may be semantically linked in various ways to the broad semantic category that the radical represents, and radicals may thus be considered a categorization mechanism to distinguish lexical meanings. Given the fact that FIRE is an independent character that can also be used as a radical in composite characters, the question arises as to what extent the semantic developments of the FIRE character and the FIRE radical are similar, i.e. does the FIRE radical develop independently of the FIRE character? Against the background of this question, this paper studies the diachronic semantic structure of the FIRE character, which will be compared to the FIRE radical in composite characters in follow-up studies. The analysis shows that the overall diachronic development of the FIRE character exhibits prototypical characteristics and a radial network structure.

中文翻译：

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对FIRE字符的历时分析

汉字根部是汉字的语义成分，通常表示主要的概念和类别。可以使用多种方式将共享同一主语的字符与主语所代表的广泛语义类别进行语义链接，因此，主语可以被视为区分词汇含义的分类机制。鉴于FIRE是一个独立字符，也可以在复合字符中用作部首，因此出现了以下问题：FIRE部首和FIRE部首的语义发展在多大程度上相似，即FIRE部首是否独立于火角色？在这个问题的背景下，本文研究了FIRE字符的历时语义结构，在后续研究中将其与FIRE部首的复合特征进行比较。分析表明，FIRE字符的整体历时发展表现出原型特征和放射状网络结构。