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Chinese
Writing Characteristics
Chinese
Writing is understood by more people in the world than any
other languages and its earliest written records date back over 4000
years. .
Over the years, Chinese were evolved and
developed in the following different ways:
Pictographs
The original written format were found on the
markings scratched onto tortoise shells and animal bones, the so-called "oracle bones". These ancient writings were pictures or Pictographs.
Many people tend to think that Chinese characters are all pictographs.
Actually, pictographic characters are only one kind of Chinese
character, there are only about 600 pictograph characters.
Pictographic Chinese characters are pictures of concrete objects, they
are the basic units for forming other Chinese characters.
These are a few examples showing the
pictographic characters:
 - 山 Mountain ;  - 羊 sheep ;  月 moon
Ideographs
As time went on and people needed to express more complex ideas or
concepts, pictographs were extended or combined to form ideographs.
Ideographs are graphical representations of abstract ideas.
For example:
Phonetic-Semantic
Compounds
Over 90% of current Chinese
characters are semantic-phonetic compounds.
There
are many objects, abstract and ideas that are difficult to express
through Pictographs or Ideographs.
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 each of them by way of pictography or
ideography. But this is easily achieved in phonetic-semantic compounds
by adding different phonetics to the radical 鸟,
e.g. 鸽 ( pigeon ), 鹊 ( crane ), 鸡 ( chicken ) or 鹅 ( goose ).
A phonetic compound consists of a semantic
radical and a phonetic radical, the semantic radical indicates its
semantic field and the phonetic radical its pronunciation.
The meaning component of the semantic-phonetic
compound Chinese character is also called the 'radical'. For example, ' 足 '
is a popular
Chinese radical that means 'foot'. The meanings of those characters
that contain this radical are related to 'foot' in a certain way.
The phonetic component indicates at least part of
the sound. Characters that contain the same phonetic component tend to
have similar sounds.
For example, for the character ' 跳' (
jump ), the right part ' 兆' indicates the sound. They share the same
vowel.
Phonetic Loans
The phonetic loan is another way of using
existing characters.
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.
For example, the character自in the Oracle-Bone
Inscriptions was originally 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.
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