The secret behind how Chinese characters work - Gina Marie Elia
According to legend,
in the 27th century BCE,
the Yellow Emperor of China charged
his historian, Cangjie,
to develop a system of writing.
Sitting alongside a riverbank, Cangjie
noticed the imagery that surrounded him.
From this, he created
the first Chinese characters.
And that night, the sky rained millet
while ghosts cried,
fearing their actions may now be
condemned by the written word.
We can’t say for sure whether
the story is true.
But the earliest artifacts containing
Chinese characters
date to the Shang Dynasty,
around 1250 to 1050 BCE,
still making it one of the earliest
forms of written language.
Characters etched on ox bones
and turtle shells
show Shang kings’ writings
to their ancestors,
discussing everything from agriculture
to the origins of a toothache.
And as the legend suggests,
these ancient characters
were mainly pictograms,
or symbols that resemble
what they’re meant to represent.
Even today, some of the most foundational
Chinese characters remain pictographic,
like rén (人), which means person,
and mù (木), which means wood or tree.
Some characters are ideograms, or
symbols that represent abstract concepts,
like the numbers yī (一),
èr (二), and sān (三).
Others are compound ideograms,
which combine two or more
pictograms or ideograms.
For example, xiū (休) places
the character for person
next to the character for tree
and means to rest.
However, most modern-day characters
are known as logograms,
and are constructed of two components:
a radical component,
which gestures at the meaning
of the character,
and a sound component,
which hints at its pronunciation.
And all characters are built
from a variety of strokes,
which are often simplified
to eight basic types.
There are 214 radicals,
each with its own definition.
Some can stand alone, while others cannot.
For instance, the radical rì (日),
written on its own means sun.
It’s also used in characters
with sun-related definitions,
such as xiǎo (晓) meaning dawn.
The radical cǎo (艹), on the other hand,
never stands alone,
but can be found within characters related
to grass and plants,
like huā (花) meaning flower.
And the radical shuǐ (水), meaning water,
always stands alone,
but has a variant (氵) that is used when
it’s part of more complex characters
like hé (河), meaning river.
Radicals can appear
in different positions:
to the left, to the right, above, below,
or even surrounding the rest
of the character.
There are many more sound components
than radicals,
with estimates ranging in the thousands.
Similar sounding words often share
the same sound component,
and their radicals help shed light
on their meanings.
Take fēng (峰) and fēng (蜂).
The radical shān (山) means mountain,
which hints at the first
character’s definition: summit.
The radical in the second character,
chóng (虫), means insect,
and together with the sound component
means bee.
While many words in Chinese sound similar,
just like in other languages,
context or tonality helps
clarify their meaning.
Yet how each character is pronounced
depends on dialect,
which varies across the country.
So conversations in Chengdu may sound
vastly different than in Nanjing,
but in both places,
the written language is the same.
And unlike the romance languages,
Chinese has no gendered nouns
or verb conjugations.
So the character chī (吃), meaning to eat,
remains unchanged
whether the subject is yourself,
a coworker, or a lesion of fearful ghosts.
To indicate the past, a marker
like le (了) can be added.
So “I eat bread” becomes “I ate bread.”
Over the years, the Chinese writing
system has undergone many changes.
As characters went from being
etched in bone, to cast in bronze,
to brushed on paper,
their script has evolved along the way.
In the 1950s and 60s,
the Chinese Communist Party introduced
new simplified versions
of the traditional characters,
which are now standard in China,
though traditional characters remain
in use in Hong Kong and Taiwan.
And while the Chinese character
system may seem unique,
its development greatly influenced
the spoken languages
and writing systems of its neighbors.
For example, around 60% of Japanese
dictionary entries are kanji—
characters that originated in Chinese
or were created from its elements.
With a 3,000 year history,
Chinese characters have and will
continue to leave their mark.
