In 221 BCE, Qin Shi Huang, the First Emperor, unified the country and made mandatory throughout all of China the use of the Qin script. This script, known as 小篆 Xiăozhuàn or Small Seal Script, is ancestral to all later forms of Chinese writing and is still sometimes used today for ornamental purposes and in the making of seals. At about the same time as the official Xiăozhuàn script, there developed among the common people a much simplified form of Xiăozhuàn called 隶书 (隸書) Lìshū or Clerical Script, which was characterized by a straightening out of round strokes and a generally much less pictographic appearance. By the latter part of the Han Dynasty (ca. 200 CE), Lìshū had been further simplified into 楷书 (楷書) Kăishū or Standard Script, which has served ever since as the standard for both printed and carefully handwritten characters.
The table below summarizes the development of two characters from their Jiăgŭwén to their Kăishū forms (but keep in mind that it is of necessity somewhat simplified, and in actual practice there was not a neat and easily dissected progression—two or more types of characters typically coexisted in different locales for decades or even centuries):
STRUCTURE OF THE CHARACTERS
Every Chinese character is made up of from one to twenty or more separate strokes. The basic strokes are eight in number: diăn (丶), héng (一), shù (丨), piĕ (丿), nà (), tí (), gōu (亅), and zhé (). Some of the basic strokes have several variants, and there are also compound strokes consisting of combinations of the basic strokes. Don’t worry, you’ll learn all these strokes as you learn Chinese characters made up of them. In case you’re curious, the characters with the fewest strokes in the language are 一 yī “one” and 乙 yĭ “second of the ten Celestial Stems,” each of which is composed of only one stroke; while the most complex commonly written character is 鬱 yù “melancholy,” which consists of 29 strokes (in the simplified character system it has been simplified to 郁). Less common, fortunately for us, is 齉 nàng, an onomatopoeic word meaning “nasal twang” that has all of 36 strokes, whether in the traditional or the simplified character system!
According to Chinese tradition, the characters are divided based upon their structure into six types called 六书 (六書) Liùshū “Six Categories of Writing.” This system of categorization was first employed in a well-known Chinese etymological dictionary known as the 说文解字 (說文解字) Shuōwén Jiĕzì that was completed by a man named Xu Shen in 121 CE. The different categories of characters are as follows:
1. 象形字 Xiàngxíngzì “Pictographs.” These are more or less stylized drawings of objects in the real world such as elements of the universe, topographical features, flora, fauna, parts of the human body, tools, and architectural structures. Although in the development of the Chinese script, pictographs were the earliest type of character, they now make up only a small fraction of characters. Thus, it’s incorrect to consider modern Chinese writing as being primarily pictographic, or to refer to all characters as “pictographs.” Some examples of pictographs still in common use today are:
2. 指事字 Zhĭshìzì “Simple Ideographs.” Rather than being pictures of objects, like the pictographs, these are symbolic representations of abstract concepts such as number and position. The proportion of simple ideographs in written Chinese is even smaller than that of pictographs. Examples:
3. 会意字 (會意字) Huìyìzì “Compound Ideographs.” While simple ideographs are composed of a unified whole and are complete in themselves, compound ideographs rely for their meaning on the combination or interaction of the meanings of two or more separate parts, each of which can occur as an independent character. This category of characters, while more important than the simple ideographs, also accounts for only a small fraction of characters. Examples:
4. 假借字 Jiăjièzì “Borrowed Characters.” Although pictographs and ideographs could be devised for some words in the language, there were many other words which did not readily lend themselves to either of these two means of written representation. Frequently, when the Chinese ancients wanted to write something for which they knew no character, they would borrow another character which had the same or a similar sound. For example, in ancient China there were two different words both pronounced somewhat like English “lug”: one was the name for growing grain, which was written with the pictograph 來, and the other was the verb “to come,” which as yet had no character. Someone came up with the then novel idea of writing “to come” with the borrowed character 來 “grain.” Though the original meaning “grain” and the borrowed meaning “to come” coexisted for a period of time, eventually, in this particular case, “to come” won out, with the result that in modern Chinese that is the only possible meaning of the character. After phonetic-semantic compounds (see below), the borrowed characters constitute the second-largest category of characters. They also played an important role in the simplification of characters in the 1950s and 1960s. In fact, along with the phonetic-semantic compounds, they help make the case that even in ancient times, Chinese characters were largely phonetic in nature. But though the context would often clarify the meaning of borrowed characters, sometimes there were ambiguities. The problem of avoiding ambiguities when borrowing characters for their sound gave rise to the next category of characters, which today accounts for the great majority of characters in the language.
5. 形声字 (形聲字) Xíngshēngzì “Phonetic-Semantic Compounds.” In trying to solve the problem of avoiding ambiguities, the ancient Chinese hit upon the idea of combining the sound-borrowing principle of the Jiăjièzì with the semantic principle of the first three categories of characters to create compound characters, one part of which— called the phonetic, often on the right side of a character—would indicate the sound; and the other part of which— called the semantic, often on the left side of a character—would indicate the meaning.
Take the common Chinese noun pronounced mā, meaning “mom” or “mother.” At some point in the past when this word did not yet have a character associated with it, some Chinese writer who wanted to write this word borrowed the character 馬 mă “horse” to represent the sound of mā (the two words are pronounced identically except for tone) but made a crucially important addition: he or she added to the left of 馬 the character 女 nǚ “woman” to indicate to the reader, first, that a word different from 馬 was meant; and, second, that the word had something to do with “woman.” And so was created the character 媽 mā “mom, mother.” Similarly, consider 螞 mă “ant,” which is made up of the same phonetic element plus the semantic element 虫 chóng “insect”; or the question particle 嗎 ma, composed of the same phonetic plus the semantic 口 kŏu “mouth,” which indicates that this is a word often used in speech.
Here are examples of several groups of phonetic-semantic compounds:
In the above examples, which were carefully chosen to illustrate the principle of Xíngshēngzì, there are fairly close correlations between the sound of the phonetic and the sound of the compound. Unfortunately, due to sound change and interdialectal borrowing over the course of many centuries, plus the fact that the “fit” for some phonetics was never exact to begin with but only approximate, many of the correlations have become obscured, so that the phonetic information contained in phonetic-semantic compounds today is often inexact.
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