Chinese character classification

All Chinese characters are logograms, but there are several derivative types. These include a handful which are '' in origin, and a number which are '' in origin, but the vast majority originated as - compounds .'' In older literature, Chinese characters in general may be referred to as ideograms, due to the misconception that characters represent ideas directly, whereas in fact they do so only through association with the spoken word .

Traditional classification

Traditional Chinese lexicography divided characters into six categories , which are described below. This classification is often attributed to Xu Shen's dictionary ''Shuowen Jiezi,'' but it has been dated earlier. The first mention is in the work ''Zhou Li'' of the late Zhou dynasty, and the six types are listed in the ''Hanshu'' of the first century CE, and in Zheng Zhong quoted by Zheng Xuan in his first-century commentary of ''Zhou Li,'' although the details vary. 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 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 bone script. Roughly a quarter of these characters are pictograms while the rest are either phono-semantic compounds or compound ideograms. Despite millennia of change in shape, usage and meaning, a few of these characters remain recognizable to the modern reader of Chinese.

At present, more than 90% of Chinese characters are phono-semantic compounds, constructed out of elements intended provide clues to both the meaning and the pronunciation. However, as both the meanings and pronunciations of the characters have changed over time, these components are no longer reliable guides to either meaning or 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 is often necessary for an understanding of the true composition and etymology of any particular character. Reconstructing and Old Chinese phonology from the clues present in characters is part of Chinese historical linguistics. In Chinese, it is called '''' .

Pictograms

*象形 ''xiàng xíng'' "form imitation"

Roughly 600 Chinese characters are pictograms—stylised drawings of the objects they represent. These are generally among the oldest characters. A few, indicated below with their earliest forms, date back to oracle bones from the twelfth century BCE.

These pictograms became progressively more stylized and lost their pictographic flavor, especially as they made the transition from the oracle bone script to the Seal Script of the Eastern Zhou, but also to a lesser extent in the transition to the clerical script of the Han Dynasty. The table below summarises the evolution of a few Chinese pictographic characters. Where no modern simplified form is provided, it is identical to the traditional character.





N.B.:
* 女 ''nǚ'' is a stylised drawing of a woman kneeling 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.

Simple ideograms

*指事 ''zhǐ shì'' "indication"

Ideograms express an abstract idea through an iconic form, including iconic modification of pictographic characters. In the examples below, low numerals are represented by the appropriate number of strokes, directions by an iconic indication above and below a line, and the parts of a tree by marking the appropriate part of a pictogram of a tree.





N.B.:
* 本 ''běn'', "root" - a tree with the base indicated by an extra stroke.
* 末 ''mò'', "apex" - the reverse of 本 , a tree with the top highlighted by an extra stroke.

Ideogrammic compounds

*會意 ''huì yì'' "joined meaning"

In ideogrammic compounds, also called ''associative compounds'' or ''logical aggregates,'' two or more pictographic or ideographic characters are combined to suggest a third meaning. For example, the character 各 ''gè'' originally meant "to arrive". The oracle-bone form of this compound, very similar to the modern glyph, shows 夂 a ''foot'' at a 凵 or 口 walled object, perhaps a dwelling. The meaning of "arrive" is thus suggested jointly, as a footstep at the door. As another example, the character 明, composed of the characters for the sun and the moon, means "bright".

As these characters became more stylized over time, one or more of the components was often compressed or abbreviated. For example, the character 人 "human" was reduced to 亻, 水 "water" to 氵, and 艸 "grass" to 艹.

A few further examples:












::*Early forms of the character 集 show three birds on a tree.

Phono-semantic compound characters

*形聲 ''xíng shēng'' "form and sound"

These are often called radical-phonetic characters. They form the majority of Chinese characters by far—over 90%, and were created by combining a rebus with a determinative—that is, a character with approximately the correct pronunciation with one of a limited number of determinative characters which supplied an element of meaning . Such compounds remedied the difficulty of using iconic forms to represent physically similar objects , actions, and abstract notions, without creating undue homophony as simple rebuses would. Phono-semantic compounds appeared prior to the first attested Chinese writing on Shang Dynasty oracle bones.

As an example, a verb meaning "to wash one's hair" is pronounced ''mù.'' Although difficult to draw, it happens to sound the same as the word ''mù'' "tree", which was written with the simple pictograph 木. The verb ''mù'' could simply have been written 木, like "tree", but to disambiguate, it was combined with the character for "water", giving some idea of the meaning. The resulting character eventually came to be written 沐 ''mù'' "to wash one's hair". Similarly, the water determinative was combined with 林 ''lín'' "woods" to produce the water-related homophone 淋 ''lín'' "to pour".



However, the phonetic component is not always as meaningless as this example would suggest. Rebuses were sometimes chosen that were compatible semantically as well as phonetically. It was also often the case that the determinative merely constrained the meaning of a word which already had several. 菜 ''cài'' "vegetable" is a case in point. The determinative 艹 for plants was combined with 采 ''cǎi'' "harvest". However, 采 ''cǎi'' does not merely provide the pronunciation. In classical texts it was also used to mean "vegetable". That is, 采 underwent semantic extension from "harvest" to "vegetable", and the addition of 艹 merely specified that the latter meaning was to be understood.



Some additional examples:


Originally characters sharing the same phonetic had similar readings, though they have now diverged substantially. Linguists rely heavily on this fact to reconstruct the sounds of Old Chinese. When people try to read a two-part character of which they are ignorant, they will typically follow the folk wisdom of ''you bian du bian'' "read the side" and take one component to be a phonetic, which often results in errors.

Since the phonetic elements of many characters no longer accurately represent their pronunciations, when the People's Republic of China , they often substituted a phonetic that was not only simpler to write, but more accurate for a modern reading as well.

{|
| 

| 

|}

Phonetic loan characters

*假借 ''jiǎjiè'' "borrowing; making use of"

''Jiajie'' are characters that are "borrowed" to write another homophonous or near-homophonous morpheme, comparable with using "4" as a rebus for English "for". For example, the character was originally a pictogram of a wheat plant and meant ''*ml?k'' "wheat". As this was pronounced similarly to the Old Chinese word ''*ml?k'' "to come", 來 was also used to write this verb. Eventually the more common usage, the verb "to come", became established as the default reading of the character 來, and a new character was devised for "wheat". When a character is used as a rebus this way, it is called a ''jiajiezi'' 假借字 , translatable as "phonetic loan character" or "rebus character".

As in Egyptian hieroglyphs and Sumerian cuneiform, early Chinese characters were used as rebuses to express abstract meanings that were not easily depicted. Thus many characters stood for more than one word. In some cases the extended use would take over completely, and a new character would be created for the original meaning, usually by modifying the original character with a radical . For instance, ''yòu'' originally meant "right hand; right" but was borrowed to write the abstract word ''yòu'' "again; moreover". In modern usage, the character 又 exclusively represents ''yòu'' "again" while , which adds the "mouth radical" to 又, represents ''yòu'' "right". This process of graphic disambiguation is a common source of phono-semantic compound characters.



While this word ''jiajie'' dates from the Han Dynasty, the related term ''tongjia'' is first attested from the Ming Dynasty. The two terms are commonly used as synonyms, but there is a linguistic distinction between ''jiajiezi'' being a phonetic loan character for a word that did not originally have a character, such as using "a bag tied at both ends" for ''dōng'' "east", and ''tongjia'' being an interchangeable character used for an existing homophonous character, such as using ''zǎo'' "flea" for ''zǎo'' "early".

According to Bernhard Karlgren , "One of the most dangerous stumbling-blocks in the interpretation of pre-Han texts is the frequent occurrence of , loan characters."

Derivative cognates

*轉注 ''zhuǎn zhù'' "reciprocal meaning"

This classification is of purely historical value, and is the least understood of the ''liushu'' principles of character formation. It may refer to characters which have similar meanings and often the same etymological root, but which have diverged in pronunciation and meaning. The English words ''chance'' and ''cadence'' would fit this pattern, as they share a common Latin root, ''cadentia'' "to fall". If English were written the way Chinese is, these two words might have similar characters.

The characters 老 ''lǎo'' "old" and 考 ''kǎo'' "a test" are the most commonly cited example. The words derive from a common etymological root ,'' and the character differ only in the modification of one part.

Modern classifications

The ''liushu'' had been the standard classification scheme for Chinese characters since Xu Shen's time. Generations of scholars modified it without challenging the basic concepts. Tang Lan was the first to dismiss ''liushu,'' offering his own ''sanshu'' , namely ''xiangxing'' , ''xiangyi'' and ''xingsheng'' . This classification was later criticised by Chen Mengjia and Qiu Xigui. Both Chen and Qiu offered their own ''sanshu''.