Lesson 4 Ideographic and Self-explanatory Characters
I. The Ideographic Characters
An ideographic character is created by combining two or more existing characters into a new character in an intuitive way, and thereby reflects the way of thinking of the ancient Chinese people. For example, 女(female) and子(child) come together to make the character好(good) – the implication may be that a woman who could give birth to a child was considered a good woman; two 火(fire) stacked together become 炎(heat) – that’s not hard to understand.
II. The Self-explanatory Characters
The self-explanatory characters also represent an interesting way to make hanzi. A self-explanatory character is created by adding symbols like a dot or a line to an existing pictographic character. In this way, the abstract meaning is rendered easily understandable. The following are some examples of the self-explanatory characters in both the seal script and the simplified hanzi. The ancient seal script shows the original way of character formation more clearly than the modern simplified hanzi.
刀knife刃blade—A dot is added to the left of 刀to indicate the idea of blade.
木tree本basis,foundation—A short line is added to the lower part of 木to indicate the idea of “root” or “base”.
末tip,end—A long line is added to the upper part of 木to indicate the idea of “end” or “tip”.
女woman母mother—Two dots are added to 女as her breast to indicate the idea of “mother”.
