Types of Characters


There are six types of characters in terms of how they came about. The first were simply pictures of object seen in every day life. Known as pictographs, they were simply drawings of the object. Note we say "were" because over 3,000 years they have changed considerably, and may no longer look like the object they were originally modeled on.
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Drawings of objects only gets you so far, however, and soon the Chinese had to be able to represent concepts. One way to do that was with characters known as ideographs. These are relatively straightforward representation of concepts that are not objects. The character for 'above' was originally just a dot above a line.
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The third type are more complex ideas, created by combining two characters to make a third. For example, the sun and the moon are the brightest objects known to man, so the character for 'bright' is the sun and the moon combined into one character. For a further look at characters like this, see here.
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The fourth type is, in terms of numbers of characters - 85% of those in common use today - the largest. These are known as sound and meaning, or shape and sound, or semantic-phonetic, and are a combination of a phonetic element - the sound - and a radical - the meaning. In each case, the spoken word already existed, so they borrowed a word that was pronounced the same, and added a radical to lend it meaning. This is why there are many cases where several characters have the same sound element and different radicals.
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The last two types are not very common. One is called 'false borrowing,' when a character with the same sound was simply taken to represent an additional meaning. The other is known as 'extended meaning' or 'mutual interpretation.' Here, one character is altered to create a new one with a different pronunciation but a similar meaning.

The following explanation comes from an unknown source. It is used in several websites, none of which actually wrote it. My apologies to the original author for not being able to give credit. It may have come from http://www.chinaknowledge.de, an excellent source of information.

The Six Types of Characters
The Han time scholar Xu Shen 許慎(d. 147 AD) who wrote the great dictionary Shuowen jiezi說文解字"Explaining Simple and Analyzing Compound Characters", divided the Chinese characters into six different types (liushu六書):
Most of these characters have lost their original sense. Many grammatical particles without particular meaning are of this type, making it necessary to create a new character for the original meaning:
This kind of character shows that Chinese characters could also be used only with their sound, thus creating a kind of syllable script. The Japanese Hiragana and Katakana alphabets follow the same pattern.
Some of the phonetic parts are also used with their true meaning:
Other characters use the phonetical part as a philosophical interpretation:






Bullet Point Summary
There are six types of characters, in terms of how they came about:
*Pictographs: pictures of objects;
*Ideographs: chaarcters that describe a concept;
*Compound Pictographs/Compound Ideographs: combinations of characters that describe another concept;
*Semantic-phonetic: a combination of a radical (meaning element) and a phonetic (sound element); these make up 85% of characters in common use today;
*False borrowing: not very common, when a character with the same sound as another word was used for its meaning as well;
*Extended meaning: not very common, this is where a character is altered slightly to become the character for a word with a different sound but similar meaning.

Recommended Reading
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Chinese_character_classification
http://www.chinaknowledge.de/Literature/Script/script.html
http://myweb.uiowa.edu/jiliao/menu.html
http://www.internationalscientific.org


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