picture of two boats joined together). But among the other nine
was fang, meaning “street” or “locality,” in such common use
that it became necessary to have some means of writing it.
Instead of inventing an altogether new character, as they might
have done, the Chinese took 方 “square” and used it also in
the sense of “locality.” This was a simple expedient, no doubt,
but one that, applied on a large scale, could not but lead to
confusion. The corresponding difficulty which presented itself
in speech was overcome, as we saw, by many devices, one of
which consisted in prefixing to the word in question another
which served to determine its special meaning. A native does
not say fang simply when he wishes to speak of a place, but
li-fang “earth-place.” Exactly the same device was now
adopted in writing the character. To fang “square” was added
another part meaning “earth,” in order to show that the fang
in question had to do with location on the earth’s surface. The
whole character thus appeared as 坊. Once this phonetic principle
had been introduced, all was smooth sailing, and writing
progressed by leaps and bounds. Nothing was easier now
than to provide signs for the other words pronounced fang.
“A room” was 房 door-fang; “to spin” was 紡 silk-fang;
“fragrant” was 芳 herbs-fang; “to inquire” was
訪 words-fang; “an embankment,” and hence “to guard against,” was
防 mound-fang; “to hinder” was 妨 woman-fang. This last
example may seem a little strange until we remember that man
must have played the principal part in the development of
writing, and that from the masculine point of view there is
something essentially obstructive and unmanageable in woman’s
nature. It may be remarked, by the way, that the element
“woman” is often the determinative in characters that stand
for unamiable qualities, e.g. 妒 “jealous,” 奸 “treacherous,”
妄 “false” and 妖 “uncanny.” This class of characters, which
constitutes at least nine-tenths of the language, has received the
convenient name of phonograms. It must be added that the
formation of the phonogram or phonetic compound did not
always proceed along such simple lines as in the examples given
above, where both parts are pictorial characters, one the
“phonetic,” representing the sound, and the other, commonly
known as the “radical,” giving a clue to the sense. In the first
place, most of the phonetics now existing are not simple pictograms,
but themselves more or less complex characters made up
in a variety of ways. On analysing, for instance, the word 遜
hsün, “to withdraw,” we find it is composed of the phonetic
孫 combined with the radical 辶, an abbreviated form of 辵 “to
walk.” But 孫 sun means “grandson,” and is itself a suggestive
compound made up of the two characters 子 “a son” and 系
“connect.” The former character is a simple pictogram, but
the latter is again resolvable into the two elements 丿 “a down
stroke to the left” and 糸 “a strand of silk,” which is here
understood to be the radical and appears in its ancient form as
, a picture of cocoons spun by the silkworm. Again, the
sound is in most cases given by no means exactly by the so-called
phonetic, a fact chiefly due to the pronunciation having undergone
changes which the written character was incapable of recording.
Thus, we have just seen that the phonetic of 遜 is not hsün
but sun. There are extreme cases in which a phonetic provides
hardly any clue at all as to the sound of its derivatives. The
character 欠, for example, which by itself is pronounced ch‘ien,
appears in combination as the modern phonetic of 坎 k‘an, 軟
juan, 飮 yin and 吹 ch‘ui; though in the last
instance it was not originally the phonetic but the radical of a character
which was analysed as 欠 ch‘ien, “to emit breath” from 口 “the
mouth,” the whole character being a suggestive compound
rather than an illustration of radical and phonetic combined.
In general, however, it may be said that the “final” or rhyme
is pretty accurately indicated, while in not a few cases the phonetic
does give the exact sound for all its derivatives. Thus, the
characters in which the element 僉 enters are pronounced chien, ch‘ien,
hsien and lien; but 意 and its derivatives are all i. A
considerable number of phonetics are nearly or entirely obsolete
as separate characters, although their family of derivatives may
be a very large one. 臤, for instance, is never seen by itself, yet
堅, 緊, and 賢 are among the most important characters in the
language. Objections have been raised in some quarters to
this account of the phonetic development of Chinese. It is
argued that the primitives and sub-primitives, whereby is meant
any character which is capable of entering into combination
with another, have really had some influence on the meaning,
and do not merely possess a phonetic value. But insufficient
evidence has hitherto been advanced in support of this view.
The whole body of Chinese characters, then, may conveniently be divided up, for philological purposes, into pictograms, ideograms and phonograms. The first are pictures of objects, the second are composite symbols standing for abstract ideas, the third are compound characters of which the more important element simply represents a spoken sound. Of course, in a strict sense, even the first two classes do not directly represent either objects or ideas, but rather stand for sounds by which these objects and ideas have previously been expressed. It may, in fact, be said that Chinese characters are “nothing but a number of more or less ingenious devices for suggesting spoken words to a reader.” This definition exposes the inaccuracy of the popular notion that Chinese is a language of ideographs, a mistake which even the compilers of the Oxford English Dictionary have not avoided. Considering that all the earliest characters are pictorial, and that the vast majority of the remainder are constructed on phonetic principles, it is absurd to speak of Chinese characters as “symbolizing the idea of a thing, without expressing the name of it.”
The Chinese themselves have always been diligent students of their written language, and at a very early date (probably many centuries B.C.) evolved a sixfold classification of characters, The “Six Scripts.” the so-called 六 書 liu shu, very inaccurately translated by the Six Scripts, which may be briefly noticed:—
1. 指 事 chih shih, indicative or self-explanatory characters. This is a very small class, including only the simplest numerals and a few others such as 上 “above” and 下 “below.”
2. 象 形 hsiang hsing, pictographic characters.
3. 形 聲 hsing shêng or 諧 聲 hsieh shêng, phonetic compounds.
4. 會 意 hui i, suggestive compounds based on a natural association of ideas. To this class alone can the term “ideographs” be properly applied.
5. 轉 注 chuan chu. The meaning of the name has been much
disputed, some saying that it means “turned round”; e.g.
mu “eye” is now written 目. Others understand it as comprising
a few groups of characters nearly related in sense, each
character consisting of an element common to the group, together
with a specific and detachable part; e.g. 老, 考, and 耉, all of
which have the meaning “old.” This class may be ignored
altogether, seeing that it is concerned not with the origin of
characters but only with peculiarities in their use.
6. 假 借 chia chieh, borrowed characters, as explained above, that is, characters adopted for different words simply because of the identity of sound.
The order of this native classification is not to be taken as in any sense chronological. Roughly, it may be said that the development of writing followed the course previously traced—that is, beginning with indicative signs, and going on with pictograms and ideograms, until finally the discovery of the phonetic principle did away with all necessity for other devices in enlarging the written language. But we have no direct evidence that this was so. There can be little doubt that phonetic compounds made their appearance at a very early date, probably prior to the invention of a large number of suggestive compounds, and perhaps even before the whole existing stock of pictograms had been fashioned. It is significant that numerous words of daily occurrence, which must have had a place in the earliest
