China Popular Itineraries |
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The Qrigin of Chinese Characters |
Chinese characters are ideograms that were created independently and were based on pictographic symbols. Then it became a complete character sys-tem after a long period of development. There are many legends about the birth of characters, mainly including theories of engraving, the Eight Dia-grams, and Cang Jie's making characters. Since Mr. Tang Lan put forward the idea in his Introduction to the Ancient Writing that characters originated from pictures, the belief that characters originated from pictures has become long established in academic circles.
It is quite reasonable to say that characters originated from pictures. Pre-historical painting had already existed in the Paleolithic Age, or even earlier. During the long period of the evolution of paintings into characters, totemism performed a great function. Totemism was rather popular in the primitive so-ciety. Some clans designated or adopted the names of certain wild beasts as the names for their clans. They drew pictures of these animals and called them by names between familiar people. Gradually the pictures became connected with certain objects via being clan names. Forms, pronunciations and meanings be-ing confirmed, they became established as Chinese characters. Since numerous clans existed in the primitive society, numerous totemism symbols changed in-to Chinese characters. Thus the development from pictures which transferred information to the birth of Chinese characters, from picture characters and totemism symbols to set symbols, constituted the whole process of the origin of Chinese characters. When individual characters were accumulated suffi-ciently and then deliberately regulated, a coherent system of characters was established.
Anything that can be expressed by pictographic means must be something concrete and having a certain form. Therefore they are easy to write and re-member. Nevertheless, this kind of pictograph is rather limited. First of all, there are many things with a similar appearance. It is very difficult to distin-guish among them by use of simple lines; moreover, society develops con-stantly and so do the minds and ideas of the people. This requires that lan-guage and characters should be enriched and perfected accordingly. In a word, making characters by pictographic means is far from meeting the needs of communication. Thus people thought out new methods, that is, "the Six Cat-egories of Chinese Characters."
As regular patterns for Chinese characters' structure, the Six Categories of Chinese Characters marked the maturation of Chinese characters. It is the systematic theory of writing summed up by Xu Shen of the Han Dynasty on the basis of his predecessors' achievements. The content is as follows:
The first is Pictographic Characters, which describe objects by the form. Take the word for example. The people drew a vague outline into a half moon, since most of the time the moon is not seen in its full phase. Picto-graphic Characters are the most primitive and basic word-formation method.
The second is Self-Explanatory Characters, which use symbols to refer to abstract concepts on the pictographic basis. Take the word for example. The ancient people wrote it as meaning something above the ground.
The third is the Associative Compounds, which combine two or more words together to show a new meaning. Take the word for example. With the upper part as a hand and the lower half as a fruit tree the whole word indicates picking fruits with hands.
The fourth is the Pictophonetic Characters, words with one element indi-cating meaning and the other sound. For example, there is an instrument called Yu, made of bamboo. It is written as, the upper part indicating the bamboo and the lower the sound of the word. Pictophonetic characters ac-count for a large part of Chinese characters, precisely, over 80 percent.
The fifth is the Phonetic Loan Characters, which borrow the words of similar sounds to show new concepts. Therefore there appeared the complicat-ed phenomenon of homograph, that is, words with identical forms but differ-ent meanings. Take the word for example. In ancient Chinese, it was like a person sitting under roof or an umbrella and giving orders. It was a character of Associative Compounds. Later it was extended to include the meaning of county magistrate.
The sixth is the Mutually Explanatory Characters, that is, words with same radicals, same sounds, same or similar meanings which can explain one another.
To sum up, the theory of the Six Categories of Chinese Characters, in fact, is the six fundamental rules over structure and usage of the Chinese char-acters, and is also the major principles. On the basis of pictograph, Chinese characters developed from "making" (Pictographic Characters and Self-Ex-planatory Characters) through "structure" (Associative Compounds) to "bor-rowing" (Phonetic Loan Characters) and again to "explaining" (Mutually Ex-planatory Characters). The whole process not only met the needs of people to express themselves and communicate with one another, but made Chinese characters into a perfect combination of form, sound and meaning, and into words with unique characteristics.
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