Lesson 3 Are All Hanzi Pictographs?
The answer to the title question is “not really” if we are talking about present-day hanzi, whether the simplified or the traditional scripts which we’ll introduce later in this lesson. However, the answer may be “almost yes” if we are talking about hanzi in their early days, when a limited supply of hanzi represented things like food (animals and plants), clothes, hose, nature, augury, war, and of course humanity itself.
Now let’s first take a look at the history of hanzi before dealing with the question of pictographs.
I. A Brief History of Hanzi
The history of hanzi began in the Shang Dynasty (1600BC-1100BC) at the latest. People engraved rudimentary characters onto flat tortoise shells to carry out auguries, record important events or express their feelings, and these earliest characters are called the oracle bone script. Later, the Chinese characters appeared as the inscriptions on bronze vessels in the Zhou Dynaty (1100-256BC). In the Qin Dynasty (221-206BC), hanzi became unified into a simpler form called the seal script, which then developed into the clerical script. It was not until the Han Dynasty (206BC—AD220) that hanzi finally developed into the regular script, which was more or less like what we are using today. When the Chinese writing tool changed from knife and tortoise shell to brush and paper, the strokes of hanzi became smooth and dynamic, no longer as stiff and bony as those on the oracle bones.
We may say that hanzi have evolved out of pictographs but have gradually parted with their ancient pictographic forms. Actually each character of hanzi is like a piece of “fossil” that embodies all the efforts the Han people have made in simplifying their writing system. Without the simplification, it would take us a lifetime the learn hanzi. The ancient pictographs help us trace the interesting origins of hanzi and look into their interesting stories with a wealth of cultural information. These stories give us a glimpse into the way the Han people lived and viewed the world in ancient times.
It has taken more than 3000 years for hanzi to become what they are today, yet you are here be bear witness to the entire history of the Chinese writing system without having to be an immortal!
II. Pictographic Characters and the “Six Categories of Hanzi”
A pictographic character is a sketchy depiction of the outline or important features of an object in simple lines. However, a pictographic character is not a picture – you must remember this when learning to write hanzi. A picture can be interpreted in different ways, but each pictographic character in hanzi is associated with a definite meaning and a pinyin.
Pictographic characters are based on the external looks of common objects, but a lot more concepts in human life are too complicated or abstract to be rendered in pictographic forms. Therefore, there are only a limited number of pictographic characters in hanzi. Fortunately, the Chinese are an ingenious people and have developed other ways of creating characters. Today all the Chinese characters are formed in six different ways, called the Six Categories of Hanzi. This theory was first proposed by Xu Shen (58—147) in the Eastern Han Dynasty.
1. 象形Pictographic: The character is a pictographic depiction of an object or the important features thereof, as we have already discussed above.
2. 指事Self-explanatory: The character is created by adding symbols like a dot or a line to an existing pictographic character to indicate an abstract meaning in a self-explanatory way, such as 刃, the blade of a knife, and the numbers like 一，二，三.
3. 会意Ideographic: The character is composed of two ( or more ) existing characters, whose meanings interact to form a new meaning. For example, 休(rest) consists of 人(human) and 木(tree), meaning that a person is taking a rest by leaning against a tree.
4. 形声Semantic-phonetic: A semantic-phonetic character consists of a semantic radical, indicating its general meaning, and a phonetic radical, indicating its pronunciation. For example, 抬(lift) consists of a semantic radical扌(hand) and a phonetic radical台(tái); with this information, you can easily understand that抬probably has something to do with an action involving hands and sounds like tái.
5. 转注Mutually-explanatory: A group of characters share the same (or similar) meaning and are mutually explanatory, like 老(old) and 考(test; originally meaning “father”).
6. 假借Phonetic loan: In the absence of a character for an object, an existing character with a similar pronunciation is borrowed for the task. For example, 来originally meant a kind of wheat but was later borrowed to be used as a verb for “come”.
Mutually-explanatory characters and phonetic loan characters are, strictly speaking, “borrowed” instead of “created”. Hanzi in those two categories are scarce today and too complex for beginners, so we’ll skip them.
There are many objects and abstract ideas which are difficult to express through pictographic or ideographic characters. For example, 鸟is the general term for birds, but there are thousands of types of birds in the world, and it is impossible to differentiate them with pictographic or ideographic characters. However, there is a simple solution with the semantic-phonetic characters: by adding different phonetic radical to the semantic radical 鸟, we have new characters in the bird family, e.g. 鸽(pigeon), 鹤(crane), 鸡(chicken) and鹅(goose). Since they can be easily created, the semantic-phonetic characters have been increasing in number, especially in modern times. Today they account for over 90% of hanzi! So, a large bulk of the ensuing contents of this book will be dedicated to the study of the semantic-phonetic characters.
