There are several kinds of Chinese characters, including a handful of pictograms (象形; xiàngxíng) and a number of indicatives (指事; zhǐshì), but the vast majority are phono-semantic compounds (形聲; xíngshēng). Although Chinese characters are often called ideograms, only a handful fit this category in any sense, and sinologists and linguists discourage referring to Chinese characters as ideograms, as this term has led to a misconception that characters represent ideas directly, whereas in fact they do so only through association with the spoken word.

The different classes of Chinese characters

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Traditional Chinese lexicography divided characters into six categories (六書 liùshū), which are described below. This classification system is often attributed to Xǔ Shěn's second century dictionary, the Shuōwén jiězì, but in fact its roots are earlier; the first mention is in the Rites of Zhōu (周禮 Zhōulǐ) of the late Zhōu dynasty, and the types listed in the Hànshū of the 1st century CE as well as by Zhèng Zhòng in a 1st century CE Zhōulǐ commentary (周禮鄭注 Zhōulǐ Zhèng Zhù), although the details vary slightly. The traditional classification is still taught but is no longer the focus of modern lexicographic practice. Some categories are not clearly defined, nor are they mutually exclusive: the first four refer to structural composition, while the last two refer to usage. For this reason, some modern scholars view them as "six principles of character formation" rather than six types of characters, the word liùshū (六書) might therefore be translated as the "Six-Principles Theory of Character Formation".

The earliest significant, extant corpus of Chinese characters is found on turtle shells and the bones of livestock, chiefly the scapula of oxen, for use in pyromancy, a form of divination. These ancient characters are called oracle bones (甲骨文 jiǎgǔwén, literally shell bone writing). Roughly a quarter of these characters are pictograms - stylised drawings of the things they refer to - while the rest are either phono-semantic or compound indicative structures. Despite millenia of drastic changes in shape, usage and meaning, a few of these characters remain recognizable to the modern reader of Chinese.

At present, more than 90% of all Chinese characters are phono-semantic compounds, constructed out of elements intended both to hint at meaning and pronunciation. However, as both the meanings and pronunciations of particular characters have changed over time, these components have often ceased to be good guides either to meaning or to pronunciation. The failure to recognize the historical and etymological role of these components often leads to misclassification and folk etymology. A study of the earliest sources (the oracle bones and Zhōu dynasty bronze script) is often necessary for an understanding of the true composition and etymology of any particular character. Reconstructing Old Chinese phonetics from the clues present in characters and other sources is a part of diachronic linguistics with a long tradition in China. In Chinese, it is called yīnyùnxué (音韻學).

Pictograms (象形)

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pinyin: xiàng xíng, lit. form imitation.

Roughly 600 Chinese characters are pictograms - characters which are stylised drawings of the things they represent. These are generally among the oldest characters in Chinese. A few, indicated below with their earliest forms, date back to the 14th to 11th centuries BCE and are found on the oracle bones, generally ox scapulae and turtle plastrons used in pyromancy.

Many of these pictograms became progressively more stylized as they evolved through the Zhou dynasty and lost their pictographic flavor, especially during the transition from the Seal Script of the Eastern Zhou to Qin dynasty period to clerical script and then regular script. The table below summarises the evolution of a few Chinese pictograms. Where no simplified form is provided, it is identical to the traditional character.

N.B.:

• 女 nǚ is a stylised drawing of a woman kneeing in profile. In the oracle bone, bronze and seal scripts, the torso vertically bisects the crossed arms; in the clerical and standard scripts, the graph is rotated 90 degrees counterclockwise so that the hands, not the feet, are pointed downward.
• 水 shuǐ, "water" represents the lines of a flowing river.

--85.108.169.232 11:25, 6 July 2006 (UTC)

Simple indicatives (指事)

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pinyin: zhǐ shì, lit. indication.

Indicatives (sometimes called "ideograms") are intended to express a relatively abstract idea by means some non-arbitrary sign or by modifying an existing pictogram. This most often means pictograms with added dots or lines to indicate what part or action is intended. In the examples below, abstract notions like numbers are represented by a matching number of strokes and the parts of trees are represented by marking them on a pictogram of a tree.

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Character

一

二

三

上

下

本

末

-

Pinyin

yī

èr

sān

shàng

xià

běn

mò

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Gloss

one

two

three

up

below

root

apex

N.B.:

• 本 běn, "root" - a tree (木 mù) with the base indicated by an extra stroke.
• 末 mò, "apex" - the reverse of 本 (běn), a tree with the top highlighted by an extra stroke.

Note that the words "ideogram" and "ideograph" are objectionable to many scholars because they have historically been associated with the broadly rejected notion that Chinese characters somehow represent ideas directly without any link to spoken language.

Compound indicatives (會意)

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pinyin: huì yì, lit. joined meaning.

Also variously termed associative compounds, logical aggregates, or composed ideograms (see above for objections to the word ideogram). In compound indicative graphs, two or more graphic elements are juxtaposed to indicate a new meaning. (Note that in modern characters, one or more of the graphic elements may be compressed or abbreviated: 人 "human" → 亻, 水 "water" → 氵, and 艸 "grass" → 艹.)

An example of the two components interacting to give meaning is 各 gè, originally meaning 'to arrive' but long borrowed for 'each'. The oracle bone of this compound, very similar to the modern graph, shows 夂, a foot (inverted form of 止 zhǐ, originally a foot) arriving at or entering a U- or 口-shaped object, representing perhaps a dwelling or a walled city. Neither of the components is the radical or semantic root of the entire graph in the manner of European languages. Rather, the meaning is expressed jointly through their interaction. In another example, the character 明 - composed of the characters for the sun and the moon - means "bright".

A few further examples:

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木×2 = 林 lín

木×3 = 森 sēn

人+木 = 休 xiū

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two trees → grove

three trees → forest

a man leaning against a tree → rest

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隹+木 = 集 jí

隹×2 +又= 雙 shuāng

女+子 = 好 hǎo

手+木 = 采 cǎi

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a bird on a tree → gather together

two birds in the right hand → pair

a woman with a child → good

a hand on a bush → harvest

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日+木 = 東 dōng

日+月 = 明 míng

木×2+火 = 焚 fén

禾+火 = 秋 qiū

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the sun behind a tree → east

sun and moon → bright

fire under woods → burn

grain and fire → Autumn

Phono-semantic compound characters (形聲)

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pinyin: xíng shēng, lit. form and sound.

By far the bulk of Chinese characters - over 90% - were created by linking together a character with a related meaning (the "semantic" element) and another character (the "phonetic" element) to indicate its pronunciation. These constructs came into being in part because of the sharp reduction in the number of distinct syllables in Mandarin Chinese compared to earlier forms of Chinese and in part due to the difficulty of using pictorial forms to represent physically similar objects (e.g., dogs versus wolves), actions and abstract notions. In general, Chinese characters have single syllable pronunciations, but the standard form of Mandarin Chinese allows only roughly 2000 distinct syllables, and even many of those distinctions are eliminated in context. This means that a great many characters have homophones or near homophones.

For example, a verb meaning "to wash one's hair" is pronounced mù, which sounds the same as the character for "tree". So, the character used to indicate washing one's hair is composed of the character for "tree", because it sounds the same, and the character for "water" (水, shuǐ), because "water" is semantically related to "washing".

This practice appeared very early in the development of Chinese writing; already in the Shang dynasty oracle bone script, over one third of all graphs fell in this group.

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Meaning

Pronunciation

Character

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氵 water

木 mù

沐 mù = "to wash one's hair"

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氵 water

林 lín

淋 lín = "to pour"

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艹 grass

采 cǎi

菜 cài = "vegetable"

A common error is to assume that in a phono-semantic compound, each component plays one and only one role. It is often the case that one of the two was the original graph and the other was added later as a form of semantic or phonetic disambiguator. That is, the original graph or "etymon" might therefore have both roles as well. Take 菜 cài ("vegetable") as a case in point. The pictogram for 艹 cǎo "grass" (an abbreviation of 草 cǎo "grass") is used as a semantic component, in conjunction with 采 cǎi ("harvest") as the graph's pronunciation. But 采 cǎi ("harvest") was also used in classical texts to write "vegetable". In other words, the graph 采 underwent semantic extension, to also mean or represent "vegetable"; the addition of the 艹 cǎo "grass" is in fact redundant. Thus, although the graph 菜 is usually understood in folk etymology (as it was by Xu Shen in Shuowen Jiezi) as 艹 cǎo "grass" semantic plus 采 cǎi ("harvest") phonetic, it can also be analyzed as 采 cǎi ("harvest", semantically extended to "vegetable") which is etymonic, playing both semantic and phonetic roles, plus 艹 cǎo "grass" as a redundant semantic.

Borrowed characters (假借)

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pinyin: jiǎ jiè, lit. borrowing.

Refers to the case where a character is borrowed to write another word due to a fortuitous homophony between the words. For example, the character 來 lái depicts the wheat plant and meant "wheat" in ancient times -- it was a pictogram. Because "wheat" and "to come" were pronounced the same, the character 來 was then borrowed to write the verb "to come". The pronunciation of the original word meaning "wheat" has changed in modern times to mài(now written 麥), and the original homophony between the two words has disappeared. See phonetic loan characters.

Derived characters (轉注)

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pinyin: zhuǎn zhù, lit. reciprocal meaning.

This classification is of purely historical value, and is the least understood of the six 六書 liushu principles of character formation. It may refer to characters which have similar meanings and often the same etymological root, but which are pronounced differently and usually have somewhat different meanings. The English words chance and cadence, for example, have the same Latin root word: cadentia, cadentiam, meaning "fall". If English was written the way Chinese is, these two words would likely have similar characters.

The characters 老 lǎo ("old") and 考 kǎo ("a test") are the most commonly cited examples of derived characters, which come from a common etymological root but differ in that one part is changed to indicate a different pronunciation and meaning.

References

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Boltz, William G. (1994). The Origin and Early Development of the Chinese Writing System. American Oriental Series, vol. 78. American Oriental Society, New Haven, Connecticut, USA. ISBN 0-940490-78-1.

DeFrancis, John (1984). The Chinese Language: Fact and Fantasy, University of Hawaii Press, Honolulu. ISBN 0-8248-1068-6.

DeFrancis, John (1989). Visible Speech: The Diverse Oneness of Writing Systems. University of Hawaii Press, Honolulu. ISBN 0-8248-1207-7.

Qiú Xīguī (裘錫圭, 2000). Chinese Writing. Translation of his 文字學概論 (1988 PRC edition is in simplified Chinese; 1993 Taiwan edition is in traditional Chinese) by the late Gilbert L. Mattos (Chairman, Dept. of Asian Studies, Seton Hall University) and Jerry Norman (Professor Emeritus, Asian Languages & Literature Dept., Univ. of Washington). Early China Special Monograph Series No. 4. Berkeley: The Society for the Study of Early China and the Institute of East Asian Studies, University of California, Berkeley. ISBN 1-55729-071-7.

Woon, Wee Lee (雲惟利, 1987). Chinese Writing: Its Origin and Evolution (漢字的原始和演變) Originally published by the University of East Asia, Macau (no ISBN); reprint by Joint Publishing, jpchk@jointpublishing.com.

See also

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• Radical
• Chinese writing
• Chinese character
• Chinese calligraphy
• Japanese writing
• Seal script
• Stroke order

External links

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• This page draws heavily on the French Wikipedia page Classification des sinogrammes, downloaded 12 April 2005.

Kanji | Chinese language

Classification des sinogrammes | 六書 | 六書