At this stage of your study, it is important only to remember that 中 means center or middle. Whatever symbolic connection you make between 中 and center that helps you to remember the connection between them is the mnemonic that you should use.
I have given my interpretation, based on a composite of opinions among Chinese, Japanese and Western scholars, of the meanings of the pictures in each kanji. The purpose is to help you remember the 400+ kanji in this book. If you find an interpretation of the pictures which better helps you to remember the kanji, then that is the interpretation you should use.
There came a time when the early nations of the Western world decided to give up pictographic writing for something simpler. They began to use a phonetic system in which a specific picture stood for a certain sound instead of standing for a certain meaning. Their scholars arbitrarily selected some pictures to stand for the sounds they used in their language and abandoned all the other pictures. One of the phonetic systems thus developed was, of course, the forefather of the English alphabet.
The pictograph the Egyptians selected for the sound of A was cow
The Egyptian pictograph for eye
The simple Chinese pictographs can be grouped into a few major categories. Most pictographs were drawn from objects the Chinese saw around them. Many were drawings of human beings in different shapes and postures, and of parts of the human body. Natural objects such as trees, plants, rocks, the sun, birds, and other animals were another major source. Weapons, which in that era meant only hand-held weapons like bows and arrows, knives, axes, spears, and lances, also were a source. Other important categories were houses and buildings, kitchen utensils, and clothing.
After the Chinese had invented all the characters they needed at the time, their next step was to standardize the kanji into a form easy to read and write. Over a period of about 2,000 years, they did this by simplifying and re-proportioning the pictures so they would all be about the same size, fit into the same-sized square, and be uniformly written throughout the country.
This was done by squaring circles, straightening some lines and eliminating others, and abbreviating or eliminating the more complicated portions of the picture. The shapes of some were changed slightly to make them more aesthetic or to make them easier and quicker to write. In fact, when the characters first took on their modern form they were called “clerical script” and were the form followed by the government bureaucrats in their record-keeping.
Some of the changes differed according to where in the square the element would be put. For example, the pictograph fire
When the kanji for person 人 is added at the left of a composite kanji, it is generally written 亻, as in 休, a person next to a tree, meaning to rest. When a person is added at the top of a composite kanji, it is generally written 亠, as in the character 亡, meaning die. (The picture
The process of combining pictographs into new kanji, then stylizing and simplifying them, made the final characters a little more abstract and less pictorially representative than the original pictures, of course, but the form of the original picture is still clearly visible and with just a little imagination on your part the pictures and scenes depicted in the kanji will come alive.
How Japan Borrowed Characters From China
Until the third century A.D., scholars say, the Japanese had no written language at all. How their society, already well-developed by that time, was able to get along without a script is very difficult to imagine. I suspect that somewhere along the line an archeologist will discover evidence of native writing or a form of borrowed script that existed in Japan before it borrowed characters from China. But until that time, what the scholars say must be accepted.
In any case, the Japanese had a spoken language, and when they saw that their neighbor, China, had both a spoken and a well-developed written language, they decided to borrow the Chinese writing system. The Japanese took the written Chinese characters and attached them to the Japanese spoken words of corresponding meaning. Where the Japanese had no equivalent word, they borrowed the Chinese meaning and pronunciation as well as the written character. They called these characters kanji, a compound word composed from two separate kanji, kan 漢, meaning China, and ji 字, meaning letter.
While the Japanese could use these imported Chinese characters to write the basic roots of Japanese words, they could not use the characters to write grammatical word endings because Japanese grammar and morphology were so different from Chinese. In Chinese, there were no grammatical endings to show what part of speech a word is (corresponding in English to endings such as –tion, –ish, –ed, –ful, and to such auxiliary words as had been, will be, could, and would), whereas in Japanese there were.
At first, the Japanese tried to use the Chinese characters to write both the word root and the grammatical ending. But after a few hundred years they concluded that this did not work too well, so they decided to abbreviate some of the Chinese characters into a phonetic system, similar to what some early Western cultures had done to form an alphabet from their pictographs.
The Japanese then used Chinese characters to write the roots of the words and wrote the grammatical endings, where grammar was needed, in the phonetic system they had just developed. They called the phonetic letters kana.
The Japanese actually have two separate sets of kana, one called katakana and one called hiragana. The pronunciation of each set is identical to the other. The function of each set is also identical to the other, although each set of kana is used in different situations.
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