>another example is your typhoon, which doesn't mean big wind. the "tai" is the same tai as in sen"dai" and "tai"wan<

William, you're right and I'm wrong - teach me to post without checking my facts!

I just looked up typhoon in my English-Chinese dictionary and interestingly enough it shows the character as in 'tai'-wan, BUT with the addition of a wind radical. So the one in day-to-day use is just a simplification.

Neither of my Chinese-English dictionaries shows this character, but my Japanese one (Nelson's) does. Curiouser and curiouser.

..I used to have a marvellous thing called just 'Karlgren', which showed the derivation (including three to six stages of character development over the years) and classical Chinese pronunciations of characters, along with all their ancient meanings. It was just a heap of photocopies - not sure if the original was ever published - I'll try to dig through my chests and see if it has stuck with me through my travels.

(BTW yes, I knew 'if if' was a joke.)