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The Chinese script is one of the oldest and most widely used writing systems in the world. It has a history of five or six thousand years, and is used by about one fourth of the total population on the earth. The creation and evolution of Chinese characters is closely interwoven with the development of Chinese culture. Chinese characters are the basic carriers of the traditional Chinese culture and as an important tool for extending, spreading and exchanging ideas, they have played a tremendous role in the long history of the Chinese nation. One may well argue that without Chinese characters there would be no such splendid Chinese cuIture. In the world today, Chinese characters are not only indispensable to any Chinese user but also have an ever increasing important role to play in worldwide cultural development.
Anyone learning Chinese will have to learn the characters first. How to help learners master the characters efficiently, therefore, is a major task for Chinese language workers.
The Chinese script is an ideographic writing system, in which the form is related to the meaning directly. Hence the first step toward the mastery of Chinese characters is to learn the characteristics and regularity in their composition. It is a rule every student of Chinese characters must follow to base one's judgment of the original meaning of a character on its form, and only when that relation is clear can one go on to discuss its extended and shifted meanings.
In the study of the composition of Chinese characters, there is a traditional theory known as Liu Shu (six writings). That is, there are six types of characters in terms of their composition: pictographs, indicatives, ideographs, phonetic compounds, mutual explanatories and phonetic loans. Strictly speaking only the first four refer to the ways to compose Chinese characters, the last two are concerned with the ways to use them. The traditional view that Liu Shu is a summary of the different ways of composing characters, therefore, is not very accurate. Nevertheless the theory Liu Shu is basically correct in revealing the general pattern in the creation and development of Chinese characters. It may help learners to better understand the composition of Chinese characters and their original meanings, and thence use them more accurately.
1. Pictographs A pictograph is a depiction of a material object. Chinese characters mostly originaled from picture writing. In other words, most Chinese characters were originally pictures of objects. However there is a fundamental difference between pictographs and pictures: the former, usually rough sketches of objects(e. g．日“sun”，月“moon”，山“mountain”，川“river”，人“man”，大“big”)or consisting of a characteristic part only (e. g．牛“ox”，羊“sheep”), are much simpler than the latter. More important is that pictographs are associated with definite meanings and pronunciations, and have become symbolic. And as a result of increasing simplification and abstraction, pictographs of the later ages are quite different from their originals. Compared with those in the Oracle-Bone Inscriptions, pictographs in the Regular Script are no longer picturelike. In a sense they are not really pictographic, but simply symbdic.
Pictographs are based on the external form of material objects, but the abstract concepts in language are formless, which renders it impossible to picture them. This impossibility inevitably hinders the growth of pictographs, and that is why their number is limited. However, pictography remains the most important method of composing Chinese characters. The others are only developments on this basis:indicatives are mostly formed by adding indicating signs to pictographs, ideographs are usually made up of two or more pictographs, and phonetic compounds are also composed of two pictographs(or ideographs or indicatives), except that one of them specifies the meaning while the other represents the pronunciation.
2. Indicatives Indication refers to the way to form abstract characters with indicating signs. There are two subtypes of indicatives: one is composed of a pictograph and an indicating sign, e. g．刃 (knife-edge)，本(root)，末 (treetop); the other is composed purely of abstract signs, e. g．上(on top of)，下(underneath)，一(one)，二(two)and三 (three).
Indicatives account for the smallest percentage of Chinese characters. The reason is that for most characters there are simpler ways of composition: characters referring to material objects may be composed pictographically and those expressing abstract concepts may be composed ideographically or by way of phonetic-compounding.
3. Ideographs Ideographs are compounds, composed of two or more than two existing characters. In terms of structure, an ideograph is the composition of two or more characters side by side or one on top of another. In terms of meaning, an ideograph is also the composition of the meanings of its component characters. For example, a single character木stands for a tree, two trees together (林) refers to a group of trees—forest, and the character made up of three trees (森) means a place full of trees, a thick forest. And the character休consists of人(man) and木(tree), signifying that a man is taking a rest against a tree.
Ideographs are made up of two or more than two pictographs, hence they differ from each other in that the former are complex while the latter simplex. Compared witn pictography and indication, ideography is more adaptable. Characters of various kinds may be composed in this way, whether they refer to material objects or express abstract concepts, depict static states or describe dynamic processes. The same pictograph may be used to form different ideographs with different pictographs, or with the same pictograph by appearing in diffent positions. Thus there are more chances of existing pictographs used in the composition of new characters. As a result there are much more ideographs than pictographs or indicatives in Chinese. Ideography was the most important way of composing characters before Phonetic compounds became popular. It was only because phonetic compounds, with a phonetic component, are more convenient to use that the importance of ideographs decreased. Some ideographs were even changed into phonetic compounds, e. g．块(the original complicated from being 塊), and some were replaced by phonetic compounds pronounced the same, e. g．渺．
4. Phonetic compounds A phonetic compound consists of a radical and a Phonetic. The radical indicates its semantic field and the phonetic is pronunciation. For example, phonetic compounds with 木(tree) as the radical like 松(pine)，柏(cypress)，桃(peach)are all names of trees; those with手(hand)as the radical like推(push)，拉(pull)，提 (lift)，按(press) a11 refer to actions performed by the hand. However the radical only shows the general semantic class of the character, not its specific meaning. The specific meanings of the characters sharing the same radical are differentiated by the phonetics they each have. The phonetics in some phonetic compounds may also be semantical, e. g. the phonetic取in娶is also meaningful in the sense of“take”, hence the name ideographic-phonetic compounds. But as far as the majority of phonetic compounds are concerned, the phonetic is only phonetical, not semantical. For example, the phonetics工and可in江and河respectively are only indicative of their pronunciations, and have nothing to do with their meanings.
Compared with pictography, indication and ideography, phonetic compound is more flexible. There are many objects and abstract ideas which are difficult to express through plctography or ideography. For example，鸟is the general term for birds, but there are tens of thousands types of birds in the world, and it is impossible to differentiate each of them by way of pictography or ideography. In contrast this is easily achieved in phonetic compounding by adding different phonetics to the radical鸟，e. g．鸽(pigeon)，鹤(crane)，鸡(chicken) and 鹄(swan). Thus there is an enormous number of phonetic compounds in Chinese, and this number is growing larger and larger in the modern period. Statistics show that phonetic compounds accounted for 80% of the total characters in the Origin of Chinese Characters (Shuo Wen Jie Zi) of the Han Dynasty, 88% in Aspects of the Six Categories of Chinese Characters (Liu Shu Lüe) of the Song Dynasty, and 90% in Kangxi (K ' ang-Hsi) Dictionary of the Qing Dynasty. In the modern simplified form currently in use, phonetic compounds make up an even larger percent.
5.Mutual explanatories Mutual explanation is a most dubious concept in the theory Of Liu Shu . Numerous definitions have been offered, but none of them is definitive. According to Xu Shen's definition in his Origin of Chinese Characters , mutual explanatories are those which share the same radical, mean the same and are mutually explainable. For example, the characters老and考，both of the age radical (老) and meaning the same, are mutual explanatories. Thus the Origin of Chinese Characters says, “老means考”and“考means老”.
Strictly speaking, mutual explanation is a way to explain the meaning of characters through comparison. There is no new character created in this way. Hence mutual explanation is not a way of composing new characters, but a way of using existing ones.
6. Phonetic loans Phonetic loan is also a way of using existing characters. Xu Shen defined it as a character which is used in a new sense on account of its pronunciation. In other words, it is an internal borrowing on the basis of pronunciation:a character is used in a new meaning which is expressed by a similar sound in the spoken form. In this way an existing character has acquired a new meaning, but no new character is created. Phonetic loan, therefore, is not a way of composing Chinese characters either.
At the early stage, there were quite a few phonetic loans in the writing system. As the number of existing characters at that time was limited, many concepts had to be expressed by phonetic loans. For example, the character自 in the Oracle-Bone Inscriptions was Originlally a pictograph and referred to the nose, but it is now used in the sense of“self”as a result of phonetic loan. The character来in the Oracle-Bone Inscriptions was also a pictograph, referring to the wheat, but is now used in the sense of“come”as a phonetic loan.
This book is entitled the An Illustrated Account of Common Chinese Characters . The characters in the book,651 in total, mostly have a high frequency of use. A few characters, which are not as frequently used, are also included for the purpose of presenting a complete picture of the characters in the same series, e. g. the character镬 in the 鼎 series. In terms of composition type, most of the characters are pictographs, indicatives and ideographs. The few phonetic compounds included are developments of earlier pictographs or ideographs.
The 651 characters are classified on the basis of their meaning into categories of the human body, implements, buildings, animals'plants, nature, etc. , under which there are specific classes, again based on the meaning. The arrangement of characters in this way is intended to help readers better understand the regularity and characteristics of character creation in the early stage, that is, people modeled the characters on all kinds of things, as close as the various parts of the human body and as distant as material objects like implements and buildings. In order to compose characters more rationally, they looked closely upward at the celestial bodies in the sky and downward at the configuration of the earth's surface. They observed the movements of animals and appearances of plants.
The original meaning of a character is determined in accordance with its form in ancient writing systems and its use in classical records. The emphasis is on the revelation of the relation between the original meaning and the shape of the character, the extended and shifted meanings are mentioned in passing. To show the original meaning of the characters more vividly, there is a picture, or rather a cartoon, accompanying the text for each character.
At the beginning of each entry, the character is represented by its simplified form in the Regular Script, after which is its original complicated form in brackets, and the variant, if any, is enclosed in square brackets. The phonetic transcription given shows how the character is pronounced when it is used in its original meaning or common meaning. We also emumerate the representative forms of the character in ancient writing systems, tracing it to its source. The characters甲，金and篆beside the ancient forms are abbreviations of 甲骨文 (the Oracle-Bone Inscriptions)，金文(the Bronze Inscriptions)and小篆(the Later Seal Character). In addition，石is short for石鼓文(the Stone-Drum Inscriptions)and玺is short for古玺(ancient seals).
To facilitate readers'use of the book, there are two indexes in it, one is in an alphabetical order of the characters in Pinyin and the other is in the order of the number of strokes in a character.
Xie Guanghui
Jinan University, Guangzhou