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Like other writing systems, the system for Chinese evolved originally from the
pictorial representation of concrete objects, so it seems logical to start here with 1)
pictographs. With this category, a written representation of a horse, say, was used
to represent the early Chinese word for ‘horse’, and this same principle was utilized
to represent numerous other words such as ‘sun’, ‘tree’, ‘bird’, mountain’, and so on.
There was, though, a limit to the usefulness of this principle. It was fine for writing
simple, concrete words, but how to write more abstract words such as those
for ‘above’ or ‘basis’, for example? In the oracle bone script, ‘above’ was represented
by one short stroke above a longer one, while for ‘basis’ or ‘root’ a short horizontal
stroke was added low down on the vertical stroke of ‘tree, wood’ to give . In
English, graphs of this category— type 2)—are generally referred to as ‘indicative
symbols’ (or similar).
In some other cases, a word was conveyed by combining several pictographs
into one graph, and so in English these may be termed 3) ‘semantic compounds’.
Examples of this category include (two trees) for ‘forest’, or ‘sun’ and ‘moon’
combined together as to represent the word for ‘bright’.
A further means employed to represent various words or morphemes was 4) the
loan-graph principle, whereby a character was ‘borrowed’ for its sound value to
represent in writing another word of the same (or similar) pronunciation. Thus, in
oracle bone texts we find, for instance, the pictograph for ‘winnowing basket’ (written
in its stylized modern form) borrowed to represent another word of the same
pronunciation meaning ‘probably’ or ‘will’. Once this happened, the reader in ancient
times had to decide whether in a particular context was to be taken as ‘winnowing
basket’ or ‘probably/will’. In the same way, a character originally meaning
‘sunset’ () was borrowed to write a similar-sounding grammatical function-word
meaning ‘there is none, not any’. This sort of arrangement seems to have worked
adequately at first, helped no doubt by the fact that OBI and also the very early
bronze texts tended to be quite formulaic and repetitive in nature. However, as the
number of such borrowings increased and also texts became more diverse in terms
of content, help was needed to avoid the danger of texts degenerating into hopelessly
complex puzzles. To combat this, gradually semantic markers (traditionally called
‘radicals’, but better is ‘determinatives’) were often added. Thus, because ended
up being used more to indicate probability or futurity than in the sense ‘winnowing
basket’, ‘bamboo’ was added at the top to create for the latter (i.e., original)
sense, a graph which could readily be understood to mean just ‘winnowing basket’,
leaving to stand for probability/futurity. The same process took place with : to
overcome the ambiguity of this graph when it had come to mean either ‘sunset’ or
‘there is none’, a second ‘sun’ was added to create a new graph for ‘sunset’, leaving
to be used for ‘there is none’. Graphs of the type and are referred to as
Introduction 13