Chinese character classification

Roughly 600 Chinese characters are pictograms (象形; xiàng xíng; 'form imitation') – 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 flavour, 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.

Oracle bone script	Seal script	Clerical script	Semi-cursive script	Cursive script	Regular script (traditional)	Regular script (simplified)	Pinyin	Meaning
							rì	Sun
							yuè	Moon
							shān	Mountain
							shuǐ	Water
							yǔ	Rain
							mù	Wood
							hé	Rice Plant
							rén	Person
							nǚ	Woman
							mǔ	Mother
							mù	Eye
							niú	Cow
							yáng	Goat
							mǎ	Horse
							niǎo	Bird
							guī	Tortoise
							lóng	Chinese Dragon
							fèng	Chinese Phoenix

Ideograms (指事; zhǐ shì; 'indication') 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 (木; mù) with the base indicated by an extra stroke.
• 末; mò; 'apex' - the reverse of 本; běn, a tree with the top highlighted by an extra stroke.

Compound ideographs (會意; huì yì; 'joined meaning'), also called associative compounds or logical aggregates, are compounds of two or more pictographic or ideographic characters to suggest the meaning of the word to be represented. In the postface to the Shuowen Jiezi, Xu Shen gave two examples:[3]

• 武; 'military', formed from 戈; 'dagger-axe' and 止; 'foot'
• 信; 'truthful', formed from 人; 'person' (later reduced to 亻) and 言; 'speech'

Other characters commonly explained as compound ideographs include:

• 林; lín; 'forest', 'grove', composed of two trees[4]
• 森; sēn; 'full of trees', composed of three trees[5]
• 休; xiū; 'shade', 'rest', depicting a man by a tree[6]
• 采; cǎi; 'harvest', depicting a hand on a bush (later written 採)[7]
• 看; kàn; 'read or watch', depicting a hand above an eye[8]
• 莫; mù; 'sunset', depicting the sun disappearing into the grass, originally written as 茻; 'thick grass' enclosing 日 (later written 暮)[9]

Many characters formerly classed as compound ideographs are now believed to have been mistakenly identified. For example, Xu Shen's example 信, representing the word xìn < *snjins "truthful", is now usually considered a phono-semantic compound, with 人; rén < *njin as phonetic and 言; 'speech' as signific.[2][10] In many cases, reduction of a character has obscured its original phono-semantic nature. For example, the character 明; 'bright' is often presented as a compound of 日; 'sun' and 月; 'moon'. However this form is probably a simplification of an attested alternative form 朙, which can be viewed as a phono-semantic compound.[11]

Peter Boodberg and William Boltz have argued that no ancient characters were compound ideographs. Boltz accounts for the remaining cases by suggesting that some characters could represent multiple unrelated words with different pronunciations, as in Sumerian cuneiform and Egyptian hieroglyphs, and the compound characters are actually phono-semantic compounds based on an alternative reading that has since been lost. For example, the character 安; ān < *ʔan "peace" is often cited as a compound of 宀; 'roof' and 女; 'woman'. Boltz speculates that the character 女 could represent both the word nǚ < *nrjaʔ "woman" and the word ān < *ʔan "settled", and that the roof signific was later added to disambiguate the latter usage. In support of this second reading, he points to other characters with the same 女 component that had similar Old Chinese pronunciations: 妟; yàn < *‍ʔrans "tranquil", 奻; nuán < *‍nruan "to quarrel" and 姦; jiān < *kran "licentious".[12] Other scholars reject these arguments for alternative readings and consider other explanations of the data more likely, for example viewing 妟 as a reduced form of 晏, which can be analysed as a phono-semantic compound with 安 as phonetic. They consider the characters 奻 and 姦 to be implausible phonetic compounds, both because the proposed phonetic and semantic elements are identical and because the widely differing initial consonants *ʔ- and *n- would not normally be accepted in a phonetic compound.[13] Notably, Christopher Button has shown how more sophisticated palaeographical and phonological analyses can account for Boodberg's and Boltz's proposed examples without relying on polyphony.[14]

While compound ideographs are a limited source of Chinese characters, they form many of the kokuji created in Japan to represent native words. Examples include:

• 働 hatara(ku) "to work", formed from 人 person and 動 move
• 峠 tōge "mountain pass", formed from 山 mountain, 上 up and 下 down

As Japanese creations, such characters had no Chinese or Sino-Japanese readings, but a few have been assigned invented Sino-Japanese readings. For example, the common character 働 has been given the reading dō (taken from 動), and even been borrowed into written Chinese in the 20th century with the reading dòng.[15]

Jiajie (假借; jiǎjiè; 'borrowing', 'making use of', 'literally "false borrowing"') are characters that are "borrowed" to write another morpheme which is pronounced the same or nearly the same. For example, the character 來 was originally a pictogram of a wheat plant and meant *m-rˁək "wheat". As this was pronounced similar to the Old Chinese word *mə.rˁək "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 麥 was devised for "wheat". (The modern pronunciations are lái and mài.) When a character is used as a rebus this way, it is called a 假借字; jiǎjièzì; chia³-chie(h)⁴-tzu⁴; 'loaned and borrowed character', translatable as "phonetic loan character" or "rebus" character. (An example using symbols familiar to English-speakers would be if a beekeeper wrote "This year we bottled £124 weight of honey".)

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 (determinative). For instance, 又 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 右, which adds the "mouth radical" 口 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 (通假; tōngjiǎ; 'interchangeable borrowing') 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 東; 'a bag tied at both ends'[16] for dōng "east", and tongjia being an interchangeable character used for an existing homophonous character, such as using 蚤; zǎo; 'flea' for 早; zǎo; 'early'. (But the character 東 for "east" has also been explained as a drawing of the sun rising behind a distant tree.)

According to Bernhard Karlgren, "One of the most dangerous stumbling-blocks in the interpretation of pre-Han texts is the frequent occurrence of [jiajie], loan characters."[17]

• 形声; 形聲; xíng shēng; 'form and sound' or 谐声; 諧聲; xié shēng; 'sound agreement'

These form over 90% of Chinese characters. They were created by combining two components:

• a phonetic component on the rebus principle, that is, a character with approximately the correct pronunciation.
• a semantic component, also called a determinative, one of a limited number of characters which supplied an element of meaning. In most cases this is also the radical under which a character is listed in a dictionary.

As in ancient Egyptian writing, such compounds eliminated the ambiguity caused by phonetic loans (above).

This process can be repeated, with a phono-semantic compound character itself being used as a phonetic in a further compound, which can result in quite complex characters, such as 劇 (豦 = 虍 + 豕, 劇 = 刂 + 豦).

Often, the semantic component is on the left, but there are many possible combinations, see Shape and position of radicals.

As an example, a verb meaning "to wash oneself" is pronounced mù. This 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. Contemporary foreign pronunciations of characters are also used to reconstruct historical Chinese pronunciation, chiefly that of Middle Chinese.

When people try to read an unfamiliar compound character, they will typically assume that it is constructed on phonosemantic principles and follow the rule of thumb to "if there is a side, read the side" (有邊讀邊/有边读边, yǒu biān dú biān) and take one component to be a phonetic, which often results in errors. Since the sound changes that had taken place over the two to three thousand years since the Old Chinese period have been extensive, in some instances, the phonosemantic natures of some compound characters have been obliterated, with the phonetic component providing no useful phonetic information at all in the modern language. For instance, 逾 (yú, /y³⁵/, 'exceed'), 輸/输 (shū, /ʂu⁵⁵/, 'lose; donate'), 偷 (tōu, /tʰoʊ̯⁵⁵/, 'steal; get by') share the phonetic 俞 (yú, /y³⁵/, 'a surname; agree') but their pronunciations bear no resemblance to each other in Standard Mandarin or in any modern dialect. In Old Chinese, the phonetic has the reconstructed[18] pronunciation *lo, while the phonosemantic compounds listed above have been reconstructed as *lo, *l̥o, and *l̥ˤo, respectively. Nonetheless, all characters containing 俞 are pronounced in Standard Mandarin as various tonal variants of yu, shu, tou, and the closely related you and zhu.

Since the phonetic elements of many characters no longer accurately represent their pronunciations, when the People's Republic of China simplified characters, they often substituted a phonetic that was not only simpler to write, but more accurate for a modern reading in Mandarin as well. This has sometimes resulted in forms which are less phonetic than the original ones in varieties of Chinese other than Mandarin. (Note for the example that many determinatives were simplified as well, usually by standardizing cursive forms.)

The derivative cognate (轉注/转注; zhuǎn zhù; 'reciprocal meaning') is the smallest category and also the least understood.[19] In the postface to the Shuowen Jiezi, Xu Shen gave as an example the characters 考 kǎo "to verify" and 老 lǎo "old", which had similar Old Chinese pronunciations (*khuʔ and *C-ruʔ respectively[20]) and may have had the same etymological root, meaning "elderly person", but became lexicalized into two separate words. The term does not appear in the body of the dictionary, and may have been included in the postface out of deference to Liu Xin.[21] It is often omitted from modern systems.