Written Chinese, better known as "Chinese characters" in the West, is a combination of pictograms, ideograms and phonograms. Of systems of written communication in use today, it is the only one that has vestiges of pictographic writing. Europeans sometimes call Chinese writing hieroglyphs. The characters are called han tzu in Chinese, kanji in Japanese and hanja in Korean, all meaning "Han characters" (漢字). The characters are used exclusively in Chinese writing and in combination with the kana syllabaries in Japan and with the hangul alphabet in Korea.
Written Chinese is rarely used as an international language of diplomacy, trade or academe and therefore is not familiar to most Westerners. Even so, the number of those using the Chinese characters in daily life is far greater than the number writing any other language. Because of the global distribution of the Chinese people, the Han characters are also the most widely disseminated. Chinese-language newspapers are found in all countries of East Asia, and also in Cuba and Mauritius. The United States has both Chinese and Japanese-language newspapers. In 1966, those who use the Han characters in daily life (not including some 18 million overseas Chinese) were 773 million Chinese, 98.8 million Japanese and 41 million Koreans-nearly a quarter of the world's population of 3,356 million.
The Chinese characters constitute the oldest written language still in use. At one time the characters were contemporaneous with such now archaic written languages as Sumerian, Hittite, Akkadian, Elamite, Egyptian and Cretan. These "dead languages" now are known only to scholars. The Chinese characters have changed over the centuries. Yet many of the pictographs and ideographs inscribed on bamboo and wooden strips thousands of years ago are still meaningful to Chinese, Japanese and Korean primary school pupils of today.
Without the Chinese characters, it would be impossible to trace the origin and development of East Asia's cultural heritage. This was the written language that conveyed the Confucian doctrine of filial piety, the Buddhist concept of Zen, the calculations of the Chinese lunar calendar and the prescriptions of herb medicine to Korea, Japan and Annam. Written Chinese was the source of the Japanese kana syllabaries and the now extinct Annamese chu-nom characters, and provided the basis for invention of the Korean hangul alphabet. Despite the subsequent development of these derivative writing systems, many books written in Korea, Japan and Annam as late as this century often were wholly in Chinese.
In Japan and Korea today, most nouns - especially the names of persons, organizations and localities - are still written in Chinese. When peoples of China, Japan and Korea get together and lack a common language, they can readily communicate in the Han characters. Since its export more than a millennium ago, written Chinese has been the international written language of East Asia, serving a purpose not unlike that of Latin in the scholarship and communication of Western Europe during Medieval times and into the Renaissance. Some Western Sinologists suggest that if the Chinese had developed a phonetic system of writing, "East Asia would certainly not have been so distinct a unit in world civilization".
The Chinese system of writing is based primarily on pictographs. The appeal is more to the eye than to the ear and aesthetic value exceeds that of phonetic scripts. Five calligraphic styles have been invented since the characters entered recorded history more than four millennia ago. Differences among the styles are far greater than those among the various typefaces of Western alphabets. A Japanese hierologist says that in the art of lettering, Chinese is the only written language that can be compared to the beauty of the Egyptian hieroglyph. Until the early years of this century, the Han characters were usually written in Indian ink with brushes. For reasons of convenience and speed, every day writing tools of today are pencil and fountain or ballpoint pen. The brush now is used chiefly for the writing and signing of formal documents, titles of publications, epigrams, signboards and for calligraphy as an art. Calligraphy continues to be one of the great Chinese arts. Men of letters, scholars and ranking government officials spend a lifetime of effort in mastering calligraphic technique. A book in Chinese sells better if its title is brush-written by a distinguished calligrapher or prominent person.
In China and Korea, names are written in the Han characters. With few exceptions, a person has a two-character given names preceded by a single character family name. In Japan, most persons have two- character given names preceded by two-character family names. Occasionally the given names of women are written in kana or a combination of kana and kanji. Since the Meiji era (1868-1912), the name of each emperor's chronological period has been taken from a passage in the classical works of China.
Closely connected with names is the use of seals (chops) instead of signatures. In Chinese, Japanese and Korean legal procedure, a seal bearing the name of a person is regarded as more important than his signature. A legal document, especially a deed or negotiable instrument, is valid if it bears the required authentic seal and need not have a signature. A document with an authentic signature but lacking a seal may be invalid. Seals are engraved in the calligraphic style preferred by the owner on square, rectangular, oval or round blocks of wood, buffalo horn, ivory, metal, crystal or plastic. The ink is usually red.
Another characteristic of the Chinese characters is that they can translate or transliterate almost any foreign word or term. For example, the English word "airplane" becomes 飛機 (fei, fly + chi, machine). "television" 電視 (tien, electricity + shih, vision) and "astronaut": 太空人 (t'ai-k'ung, grand sky = space + jen, man). The transliteration of foreign sounds is unique because, in addition to the phonetic transcription, each Chinese character has a suggestive meaning. The Chinese version of "Coca Cola" is 可口可樂 (k'o-k'ou k'o-lo, may it be palatable to your mouth and may it please you) and that of "DDT" 滴滴敵 (ti-ti ti, drop drop enemy = each drop kills the enemy). The transliteration of personal names into Chinese characters is more meaningful than that into the Japanese kana or the Korean hangul. For instance, the English name "Eisenhower" becomes 艾森豪 (Ai Sen-hao) - Sen - hao of the Ai family. Some terms are rendered into Chinese in a combination of transliteration and translation. For example, the English term "mini skirt' is translated into 迷你裙 (mi-ni chun) -charm you skirt.
To meet their own needs, the Japanese have coined characters and variants and developed new usages, most of them unknown to the Chinese. For example, (hatake) is a combination of 火 (fire) and 田 (field), meaning a "dry field" reclaimed after burning up the rubbish. (choose) is a variant for 擇. 八折 is the Japanese translation of "octavo" in the printing industry. These two characters also are used in China but with the entirely different meaning of "20 per cent discount". The term 教書 is "presidential message" in Japanese and Korean. But in Chinese it is "teaching". These phenomena are similar to the so-called "faux amis" of French and English - French on for the English somebody, parent for relative and pour for for.
There is no unanimously accepted theory about the origin of the Chinese characters. Legends ascribing the invention of the written language to Ts'ang Chieh, a historiographer of Huang Ti, the Yellow Emperor (c. 2697-2597 B.C.), were widely accepted until late in the 19th century. Ts'ang Chieh's pictographs were supposed to have originated in the pa kua, or eight trigrams. Each trigram is a combination of three complete or broken lines and stands for an important element of the universe.
In legend, the trigrams are traced to Fu Hsi, first of the five mythological rulers of China (2852-2737 B.C.), who based them on the hexagons of tortoise shells.
The riddle of pictograph origin was partially solved in 1899 A.D. when the chia-ku wen, known as "oracle bone inscriptions" in the West, were discovered in Anyang county of Honan province. A scholar named Wang I-jung obtained a dosage of "dragon bones" from a Peking herb dispensary to treat malaria. The bones were incised with strange characters. Wang examined the writing with a friend, Liu O, and concluded that the characters were older than the chin wen, or "metal inscriptions", and the oldest form of Chinese writing then known. The chin wen also were called chung-ting wen, literally "bell-cauldron inscription", because they were engraved on bronze wares of the Chou dynasty (1122-256 B.C.). Investigation ascertained that the "dragon bones" were a mixture of tortoise shells and bovine scapulae excavated in the vicinity of An-yang, the capital of the Yin dynasty for 273 years beginning in 1387 B.C. The animal bones were used in divination by the people of Yin. They were thinned, polished and held over a fire until they developed cracks. Priests interpreted the cracks and made predictions that were recorded on the bones in characters. Hence the name "oracle bone inscriptions". The Chinese term chia-ku was taken from the last of the terms:kuei chia, tortoise shells, and niu chia-ku, bovine scapulae.
When Wang I-jung died in 1900, his collection was taken over by Liu O. After some additions, Liu published T'ieh-yun Tsang Kuei, or Tieh-yun's Collection of Tortoises, in 1903. T'ieh-yun was Liu's scholarly name. A paleographer of Hongkong says that from 1899 to 1952, the number of oracle bones excavated totaled 161,989 pieces. But in his Chia-ku Hsueh Wu-shih Nien (Fifty Years of Oracle Bone Paleography) published in 1955, the late Prof. Tung Tso-pin, one of the leading scholars of oracle bone paleography, estimated the number of pieces excavated could not have exceeded 100,000. Judging from the fact that the number of single inscriptions totaled some 3,000 (of which about 500 had been unanimously recognized) and that their morphology was stylized and more sophisticated than a purely pictographic system of writing, it is probable that more primitive forms of writing existed in China long before Yin times. It is ironic that these animal bones, once used by the Yin priests to predict the future, should be studied by modern paleographers and archaeologists in a scientific unveiling of the past.
The following are examples of how the Chinese characters are believed to have evolved from pictogram through oracle bone inscriptions, metal inscriptions, seal script and so to the writing of today:
It may be noted that not all the characters for animals represent the natural posture of walking or swimming. All the animals' mouths are turned upward. This may be the result of the writing of ordinary texts vertically on bamboo or wooden strips in ancient times. To form the characters for such horizontally shaped animals as the dog, tortoise and fish, it was easier to write longititudinally on the vertical strips. The text was read from top to bottom and the lines from right to left, possibly because the strips were bound with thread on the right.
As the written language became an increasingly popular tool of communication, scholars and officials of the Chou dynasty developed the so-called liu shu, a sixfold classification of characters, in an attempt to trace the principles on which the written language was based. In 100 A.D. during the Han dynasty, this was modified by Hsu Sheng (30-124) in his 15-volume paleographical work Shuo-wen Chieh-tzu, or the "Explanation of Writing and Analysis of Words". Hsu Sheng's liu shu consists of these six principles: hsiang hsing, pictographic characters; chih shih, simple ideographic characters; hui i, compound ideographic characters; hsing sheng, phonetic compounds; chia chieh, borrowed characters; and chuan chu, literally meaning "turn to explain" and which may be translated as "mutual lexigraphy". In a practical sense, only the first four principles are connected with the formation of the written language. The remaining two are mainly concerned with usage. The Shuo-wen Chieh-tzu listed 9,353 characters under 540 radical entries. Of this number, 364 were pictographic, 125 simple ideographic, 1,167 compound ideographic: and 7,697 phonetic compounds.
Pictographic characters may be classified into the following six categories:
a. Elements of the universe - sun, moon, rain, cloud, mountain, river, water, etc.
b. Architectural structures - door, well, city wall, palace, pavilion, etc.
c. Human body - man, corpse, mouth, tooth, eye, ear, hand, foot, woman, mother, child, etc.
d. Tools and utensils - cart, vessel, arrow, knife, cauldron, etc.
e. Vegetables - grass, tree, rice, mulberry, etc.
f. Animals - cattle, goat, dog, pig, horse, elephant, deer, tiger, bird, tortoise, fish, etc.
The simple ideographic characters are symbolic representations of such abstract concepts as position, motion and relationship. For example, a dot above a horizontal line ___ originally meant "above" or "up". It is now written 上. In like manner, the sun just above the horizon ( ) is "dawn". A dot below the horizon is ( ) "below" or "down". "Tree" is written 木. When the lower part has a short horizontal line like 本, the character means "root", "base" or "foundation". The numerals "1" and "2" are simply written 一 and 二. Commenting on the use of a dot above a horizontal line to indicate the idea of "above", a Japanese hierologist says that the Chinese were more advanced in abstract thinking than the Egyptians, who employed the picture of a human head to represent the same idea.
The compound ideographic characters are composite symbols representing a more abstract concept. For example, if "sun" and "moon"· shone together, everything should be bright and clear. Hence the character 明 means "bright", "clear", "understand" and "intelligent". As a radical, "sun" is basic to some 150 characters and "moon" to about 20.
Of more than 40,000 Chinese characters, about 1 per cent has 口 (mouth) as the radical. The combination of "mouth" and ,鳥 (bird) - 嗚 - is the "singing of a bird" or "bird song". When the same radical is connected with 犬 (dog) 吠, the meaning is "bark". When a man opens his mouth at somebody's door (門) - 問 -it means he "asks" for something.
The radical 木 (tree) is found in 300 characters. When the radical is doubled - 林 - the meaning is "grove". If tripled - 森 - the result is a "forest". Not all radicals can be doubled or tripled. Here are examples of those that can:
Stone rubbing of oracle bone inscriptions
毛 (hair) - (down of birds)
車 (cart) - (rumbling of carts)
The character 女 (woman) supplies the radical for some 200 combinations and is probably the most versatile sign in the Chinese thesaurus. Most characters related to femininity have this radical. In addition, it provides the basis for characters describing both good and evil. Elder sister (姉) is woman (女) + market (市), because a market is a place where people come one after another. Hence a woman who has a number of followers is an "elder sister".
Younger sister (妹) is woman + immature (未) .
Marry (嫁) is woman + house (家). Housewife (婦) is woman + broom (帚).
Widow (孀), is woman + frost (霜).
Surname (姓) is woman + birth (生).
Good (好 ) is woman + child (子)·
Wicked (奸) is woman + offend (干).
Jealous (妒) is woman + door (戶). A woman peeping at the door is presumably "jealous".
Fascinating (媚) is woman + eyebrow (眉).
The character for male (男) is a combination of field (田) and strength (力). If a woman comes between two men (嬲) -, she is "dallying with" them.
Clippings from Chinese (left), Japanese (center) and Korean (right) newspapers
The phonetic compounds are characters in which the most important radical represents a sound. In most cases, the sound is determined by the right-hand component of each character. For example, both 睛 and 清 are pronounced ch'ing in Chinese, sei in Japanese and chong in Korean for the right-hand radical (青) (blue). But their meanings are different:
晴 sun + blue = (weather is) fine
清 water+ blue = (water is) clear
The first part of the character distinguishes one from the other. The following character bearing the radical (青) are pronounced the same but the meanings are indicated by the other radicals.
Ch'ing in Chinese: 凊 (cool), 情 (affection), 請 (request), 鯖 (mackerel), 蜻(dragon-fly).
Sei in Japanese: 請 (request), 蜻 (dragon-fly), 倩 (pretty),菁 (flowers of the leek),靖 (pacify), 精 (essence).
Chong in Korean: 情 (affection), 請 (request), 精 (essence).
About four-fifths of Chinese characters are formed on this principle.
In olden times, the number of Chinese characters was limited. To make up for inconvenience caused by the lack of vocabulary, some characters were borrowed to represent different meanings. Take the character 來 (come) as an example. It was developed through the following process and originally meant "wheat". As there was no character for "come", an idea which had frequent expression in daily life, 來 was borrowed to denote the notion of moving from one place to the other because the people of ancient China believed that a cereal not indigenous to the Middle Kingdom had "come" from a faraway land. Later a new but similar character 麥 was substituted for “wheat”.
Another example is the formation of new vocabulary by borrowing homonyms or characters of related meanings. For instance 鳥 (crow) also has been called a "filial bird" because a young crow disgorges food to feed its parents. In ancient China when a person lost his parents, the most common expression to show grief was 鳥呼, literally "the crow cries out" - Alas! Later the radical 口 (mouth) was prefixed to me crow - 嗚 - to form an onomatopoeia of that bird. In modern eulogy, 嗚呼 expresses mourning for the deceased of any relationship.
As an administrative unit, 縣 (county) was used for the first time during the Han dynasty. To form a new term for the chief administrator of a county-magistrate-, two characters of related meanings were borrowed. One was 令 (order), the other長 (elder). Each of them was suffixed to 縣 (county). Thus 縣令 was the magistrate who governed 10,000 households or more and one whose jurisdiction was fewer than 10,000 households. In modern usage, magistrates are uniquely called hsien chang (縣長).
The interpretation of chuan chu is a matter of controversy. Paleographers with different views are divided into 18 schools. According to tung Tso-pin, "mutual lexigraphy" of synonyms, such as 問 (ask) for 訊 (inquire), and vice versa, seems to offer the best interpretation.
Hsu Sheng's Shuo-wen Chieh-tzu was regarded as the definitive paleographical work of the written Chinese language for nearly two millennia. Since the discovery of oracle bones in 1899, however, an increasing number of paleographers and archaeologists have become interested in tracing origin of the characters. According to a Chinese scholar in Hongkong, the number of those engaged in the study of oracle bone inscriptions totaled 289 from 1899 to 1952. This figure included 230 Chinese, 40 Japanese, 6 Britons, 5 Americans, 4 Germans, 2 Frenchmen, 1 Canadian and 1 Russian. Works published totaled 776. From research on oracle bone inscriptions, says a paleographer, "we have come to know that at least 20 to 30 per cent of what the Shuo-wen Chieh tzu describes should be amended, because that book is full of religious superstitions and philosophically subjective opinions".
(This is part 1 in a series of articles on the Chinese characters. The theme for the second article will be the development of the characters.)