Read the side if any

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For background on this topic, please refer to Chinese character classification.

"Read the side if any" (Chinese: 有邊讀邊 pinyin: yǒu biān dú biān) is an (often false) method people used to read a Chinese character, when they do not know its exact pronunciation. A longer version is "read the side if any; read the middle part if there is no side" (有邊讀邊，沒邊讀中間). As an analogue to folk etymology, this linguistic phenomenon may be termed "folk reading". As folk etymology sometimes changes the spelling of a word, some of these "folk readings" have become acceptable over time (i.e. listed in dictionaries as alternative pronuncations).

Most Chinese characters consist of two parts, one of which is the semantic part (often the radical), i.e. what this character has to do with (e.g. the part 貝 (shell) indicates that a character concerns commerce, as people used shell as currency in ancient times); another of which is the phonetic part, which shows how the character is or was pronounced.

The phonetic part represented the exact or almost-exact pronunciation of the character when the character was first created; and characters sharing the same phonetic part had the same reading. Linguists rely heavily on this fact to reconstruct the sound of ancient Chinese. However, over time, the reading of a character may be no longer the one indicated by the phonetic part due to sound change.

By applying the "folk reading", one would take the pronunciation of the phonetic element of a character, if any, as the present and exact pronunciation of the character. For example, reading 詣 (Mandarin Pinyin: yì) as zhǐ because its "side" 旨 is pronounced as such, or reading 篷 (péng) as if it were its "midde part" 逢 (féng).

The "folk reading" can be useful. For example, the "rule" helps distinguish the l- and n- syllables in Standard Cantonese. An increasing prevalence of reading n- as l-, such as 農 (nung) as 龍 (lung), is found in Cantonese-speaking communities, which is termed "incorrect" by some. By this "folk reading", Cantonese speakers are able to make out the "proper" pronunciation: e.g. since 農 has an n- syllable, words like 膿, 濃, and 儂 should own the same syllables, as all of them possess the same "side" 農. Similarly, 籠 and 聾 should start with an l- syllable as they have the common "side" 龍. A few exceptions, though, should be noticed, e.g. 良 (l-) vs 娘 (n-).