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The six categories of chinese characters



Chinese characters can be classified into the following six categories:



Pictograms

A pictogram or picture is a stylised drawing of the thing it refers to. Only 600 Chinese characters out of 50 000, are pictograms. They are generally the oldest characters, since a lot of them have been discovered engraved on turtle shells (1500-1100 before christ).


Examples of pictograms
Character 人 木 日 月 口
Meaning Man tree sun moon mouth
Pinyin rén mù rì yuè kǒu


Symbols

Symbols, also known as indicatives express an abstract idea by means of an arbitrary sign or by modifying an existing pictogram. Very often, dots or lines are added to a pictogram to indicate what part or action is intended. For instance, to represent the idea of "root", a horizontal line is added at the bottom of a tree to suggest the idea of roots.


Examples of symbols
Character 上 下 中 一 二 三 本
Meaning above under middle One Two Three root
Pinyin shàng xià zhōng yī èr sān ben



Phono-semantic

Phono-semantic characters, also known as sound-meaning, or picto-phonograms are characters composed of two components:

More than 90 % of Chinese characters are Phono-semantic characters. These characters appeared very early in the development of Chinese writing, because of the difficulty of using pictorial forms to represent abstract notions and similar objects (for examples donkey versus horse).


Examples of Phono-semantic characters
Character phonetic component semantic component
媽 (mother, mā) 馬 (mǎ) 女 (Woman)
菜 (vegetable, cài) 采 (cǎi) 艹 (grass)
沐 (to bath, mù) 木 (mù) 氵 (water)



Ideogram

An ideogram , also called associative compounds or meaning-meaning comes from the combination of two or more meaningful components to create a new character with a new meaning.


Examples of ideograms
Character semantic component 1 semantic component 2 semantic component 3
明 (bright) 日 (sun) 月 (moon)
男 (male) 田 (field) 力 (strength)
林 (grove) 木 (tree) 木 (tree)
森 (forest) 木 (tree) 木 (tree) 木 (tree)



phonetic-loans

phonetic-loans, also called Borrowed characters or sound-loans refer to characters representing at the same time, two homonyms (words that pronounces the same but with different meaning, like too and two). It has been borrowed to represent the second homonym, the context making the meaning clear. For instance, the words "scorpion" and "10 000" were once , homonyms. Since "scorpion" was represented by 萬, this character was borrowed to designate "10 000". Today, "10 000" is represented by the character 萬.

Another example is the character 來 (lái) which meant "wheat" in ancient times. Because "wheat" and "to arrive" were homonym, the character 來 was then borrowed to write the verb "to arrive". Since the pronunciation of the original word meaning "wheat" has changed, the original homophony between the two words has disappeared.



Reclarified

Reclarified characters are characters whose meaning has been precised by the addition of a new component. It generally happened because the intial character were standing for different words. For instance, the character 萬, which initially meant "scorpion" but also "10 000", was reclarified by the addition of the radical 虫 (bug). Today, the character meaning "scorpion" is 蝎