The Pictographic/Ideographic Myth

One of the more enduring myths about Chinese characters is that they are pictures depicting real world objects and events or graphs that directly represent ideas. Exotic and romantic this picture may be, it is a very inaccurate characterization of the Chinese writing system.

Of course, Pictographs (象形xiangxing ‘resemble-shape’) do indeed exist. A few examples are given below:

日	Ri4	‘sun’
月	Yue4	‘moon’
人	Ren2	‘people’
水	Shui3	‘water’
火	Huo3	‘fire’
木	Mu4	‘tree’

To be sure, these characters could be more picture-like, the sun being round instead of rectangular and so on. They actually were at the beginning, before they evolved into the present uniform square shape. For some good pictures of the original characters, please see: http://fog.ccsf.cc.ca.us/~jliou/ch_written_system/written.htm.

You may have noticed that all the six characters above represent nouns referring to concrete objects. This is by no means an accident. Pictographs are good at representing words for concrete objects but poor at representing anything else. How do you represent abstract concepts with pictures? By necessity, Chinese writing has to go beyond pictures. At present, pictographs only constitute a tiny fraction (4%) of the total number of characters

How about the notion that Chinese characters represent ideas directly, i.e., they are ideographs? Again, such characters do exist.

Indicative characters (指事zhishi ‘indicating things’) are simple ideographs, which convey their meanings somewhat like icons do. While not pictorial, the characters’ shape still relates to their meanings in a iconic fashion. Some examples are given below:

上		Shang4		‘up’
下		Xia4		‘down’
中		Zhong1		‘middle’
本	Ben3		‘root, origin’
末	Mo4		‘end’
凶	Xiong1		‘danger’

Even though the characters上 ‘up’ and下 ‘down’ are by no means pictures of the abstract meanings of up and down, they nonetheless indicate the two directions in a rather direct way, somewhat like the up and down icons. Just as transparently, the character中‘middle’ is formed with a line running through the dead center of a rectangular shape. Simple indicative characters can also be augmentation of existing pictographs. The characters本 ‘root’ and 末 ‘end’ are based on the pictograph木 ‘tree’ with additional strokes serving as indicators: marking the bottom of the tree to indicate root and the top of the tree to indicate the other end of the tree. Similarly, the character for danger凶is constructed by adding a cross to the picture of a booby trap.

If pictographs are few, simple indicative characters are even fewer in number (only 1%). There is a serious limit to what you can express with these simple ideographs. So the problem of impoverished characters is not significantly alleviated. Attempts were then made to combine existing characters to create more characters and to express more (and more abstract) ideas.

Compound indicative characters (会意huiyi ‘understand meaning’) represent the first attempt to combine characters. A few examples are given below:

仁	Ren2	人+二	person + two	‘benevolence’
信	Xin4	人+言	person + word	‘trust’
明	Ming2	日+月	Sun + Moon	‘bright’
休	Xiu1	人+木	Person + tree	‘rest’
看	Kan3	手+目	Hand + eye	‘look’
男	Nan2	田+力	Field + force	‘male person’

As can be seen, these characters all have two components, the combinations conveying what simple pictographs and ideographs cannot do. These characters can also be very interesting from a cultural standpoint, in that they may reveal cultural beliefs and social conditions of the people who first created these characters. Take仁 ‘benevolence’ for example. The combination of the characters for person and two suggest that benevolence begins with the relationship between two people. The combination of person and word in信’trust’ suggests that when you trust someone, you trust what they say. The combination of field and force in男‘male person’ tells us what the division of labor was like in the early societies. These characters therefore provide a window to an ancient civilization. They can be even more revealing than archeological finds in that their reference is not limited to material culture but includes social organization and cultural values as well. Some of these characters even contain philosophical statements. This indeed is astounding. Do you know of any writing system that does this?

Versatile and interesting as it is, even the strategy of combining existing pictographs and ideographs cannot solve the problem of the shortage of characters in a fundamental way. Although the number of compound indicative characters is greater than either the pictographs or simple ideographs, they still only constitute 13% of the total number of characters. The percentage of pictographs, simple and compound indicative characters added together only accounts for 18% (4+1+13) of the total number of characters in Chinese.

The reason for the inadequacy of the three types of characters thus far examined is simple: they are all based on the representation of meaning directly. Although direct meaning representation is natural and found in almost all early writing systems such as Sumerian (http://www.upenn.edu/museum/Games/cuneiform.html), Egyptian (http://www.civilization.ca/civil/egypt/egcw01e.html) and Chinese, its inadequacy was soon felt by all of these writing systems and a radical departure from the ‘direct-representation-of-meaning’ strategy was eventually necessary.