Chinese character classification Totally Explained

Everything about Chinese Character Classification totally explained

There are several kinds of Chinese characters, including a handful of pictograms (象形 pinyin: xiàngxíng) and a number of indicatives (指事 zhǐshì), but the vast majority are phono-semantic compounds (形聲 xíngshēng). Although Chinese characters are often called ideograms, only a handful fit this category in any sense, and sinologists and linguists discourage referring to Chinese characters as ideograms, as this term has led to a misconception that characters represent ideas directly, whereas in fact they do so only through association with the spoken word (Hansen 1993).

Traditional classification

Traditional Chinese lexicography divided characters into six categories (六書 liùshū lit. "Six Writings"), which are described below. This classification system is often attributed to Xu Shen's second century dictionary Shuowen Jiezi, but this classification can be dated earlier. The first mention is in the work Zhou Li of the late Zhou dynasty, and the types listed in the Hanshu of the 1st-century AD as well as by Zheng Zhong (鄭眾), quoted by Zheng Xuan (鄭玄) in his 1st-century AD commentary of Zhou Li, although the details vary. The traditional classification is still taught but is no longer the focus of modern lexicographic practice. Some categories are not clearly defined, nor are they mutually exclusive: the first four refer to structural composition, while the last two refer to usage. For this reason, some modern scholars view them as six principles of character formation rather than six types of characters, the term liushu might therefore be translated as the "Six-Principles Theory of Character Formation".
The earliest significant, extant corpus of Chinese characters is found on turtle shells and the bones of livestock, chiefly the scapula of oxen, for use in pyromancy, a form of divination. These ancient characters are called oracle bone script. Roughly a quarter of these characters are pictograms while the rest are either phono-semantic or compound indicative structures. Despite millennia of drastic changes in shape, usage and meaning, a few of these characters remain recognizable to the modern reader of Chinese.
At present, more than 90% of all Chinese characters are phono-semantic compounds, constructed out of elements intended both to hint at meaning and pronunciation. However, as both the meanings and pronunciations of particular characters have changed over time, these components have often ceased to be good guides either to meaning or to pronunciation. The failure to recognize the historical and etymological role of these components often leads to misclassification and folk etymology. A study of the earliest sources (the oracle bones script and the Zhou-dynasty bronze script) is often necessary for an understanding of the true composition and etymology of any particular character. Reconstructing Middle and Old Chinese phonology from the clues present in characters and other sources is a part of diachronic linguistics with a long tradition in China. In Chinese, it's called Yinyunxue (音韻學 lit. "Studies of sounds and rimes").

Pictograms (象形)

pinyin: xiàng xíng, lit. form imitation.
Roughly 600 Chinese characters are pictograms - characters which are stylised drawings of the things they represent. These are generally among the oldest characters in Chinese. A few, indicated below with their earliest forms, date back to the 14th to 11th centuries BCE and are found on the oracle bones.
Many of these pictograms became progressively more stylized as they evolved through the Zhou dynasty and lost their pictographic flavor, especially during the transition from the Seal Script of the Eastern Zhou to Qin dynasty period to clerical script and then regular script. The table below summarises the evolution of a few Chinese pictograms. Where no simplified form is provided, it's identical to the traditional character.

Oracle Bone Script	Seal Script	Clerical Script	Semi-Cursive Script	Cursive Script	Regular Script (Traditional)	Regular Script (Simplified)	Pinyin	Meaning
						—		Sun
						—		Moon
						—		Mountain
						—		Water
						—		Rain
						—		Wood
						—		Rice Plant
						—		Man
						—		Woman
						—		Mother
						—		Eye
						—		Cow
						—		Goat
								Horse
								Bird
								Tortoise
								Chinese Dragon
								Chinese Phoenix

N.B.:

女 nǚ is a stylised drawing of a woman kneeling in profile. In the oracle bone, bronze and seal scripts, the torso vertically bisects the crossed arms; in the clerical and standard scripts, the graph is rotated 90 degrees counterclockwise so that the hands, not the feet, are pointed downward.
水 shuǐ, "water" represents the lines of a flowing river.

Simple indicatives (指事)

pinyin: zhǐ shì, lit. indication.
Indicatives (sometimes called "ideograms") are intended to express an abstract idea by means some non-arbitrary sign or by modifying an existing pictogram. This most often means pictograms with added dots or lines to indicate what part or action is intended. In the examples below, abstract notions like numbers are represented by a matching number of strokes and the parts of trees are represented by marking them on a pictogram of a tree.

Character	一	二	三	上	下	本	末
Pinyin	yī	èr	sān	shàng	xià	běn	mò
Gloss	one	two	three	up	below	root	apex

N.B.:

本 běn, "root" - a tree (木 mù) with the base indicated by an extra stroke.

末 mò, "apex" - the reverse of 本 (běn), a tree with the top highlighted by an extra stroke. Note that the words "ideogram" and "ideograph" are objectionable to many scholars because they've historically been associated with the broadly rejected notion that Chinese characters somehow represent ideas directly without any link to spoken language.

Compound indicatives (會意)

pinyin: huì yì, lit. joined meaning.
   Also variously termed associative compounds, logical aggregates, or composed ideograms (see above for objections to the word "ideogram"). In compound indicative graphs, two or more graphic elements are juxtaposed to indicate a new meaning. (Note that in modern characters, one or more of the graphic elements may be compressed or abbreviated: 人 "human" → 亻, 水 "water" → 氵, and 艸 "grass" → 艹.)
   An example of the two components interacting to give meaning is 各 gè, originally meaning 'to arrive' but long borrowed for 'each'. The oracle bone of this compound, very similar to the modern graph, shows 夂, a foot (inverted form of 止 zhǐ, originally a foot) arriving at or entering a U- or 口-shaped object, representing perhaps a dwelling or a walled city. Neither of the components is the radical or semantic root of the entire graph in the manner of European languages. Rather, the meaning is expressed jointly through their interaction. In another example, the character 明 - composed of the characters for the sun and the moon - means "bright".
   A few further examples:

木×2 = 林 lín	木×3 = 森 sēn	人+木 = 休 xiū
two trees → grove	three trees → forest	a man leaning against a tree → rest

隹+木 = 集 jí	隹×2 +又= 雙 shuāng	女+子 = 好 hǎo	手+木 = 采 (採) cǎi
a bird on a tree* → gather together	two birds in the right hand → pair	a girl with a boy → good	a hand on a bush → harvest

日+月 = 明 míng	木×2+火 = 焚 fén	禾+火 = 秋 qiū
sun and moon → bright	fire under woods → burn	grain and fire → Autumn

Note: Earlier forms of the character 集 ("gather together") show three birds (隹) on a tree.

Phono-semantic compound characters (形聲)

pinyin: xíng shēng, lit. form and sound.
   By far the bulk of Chinese characters - over 90% - were created by linking together a character with a related meaning (the "semantic" element) and another character (the "phonetic" element) to indicate its pronunciation. These constructs came into being because of the difficulty of using pictorial forms to represent physically similar objects (for example, dogs versus wolves), actions and abstract notions. This practice appeared very early in the development of Chinese writing; already in the Shang dynasty oracle bone script.
   For example, a verb meaning "to wash one's hair" is pronounced mù, which sounds the same as the character for "tree". So, the character used to indicate washing one's hair is composed of the character for "tree", because it sounds the same, and the character for "water" (水, shuǐ), because "water" is semantically related to "washing".
   A common error is to assume that in a phono-semantic compound, each component plays one and only one role. It is often the case that one of the two was the original graph and the other was added later as a form of semantic or phonetic disambiguator. That is, the original graph or "etymon" might therefore have both roles as well. Take 菜 cài ("vegetable") as a case in point. The pictogram for 艹 cǎo "grass" (an abbreviation of 草 cǎo "grass") is used as a semantic component, in conjunction with 采 cǎi ("harvest") as the graph's pronunciation. But 采 cǎi ("harvest") was also used in classical texts to mean "vegetable". In other words, the graph 采 underwent semantic extension, to also mean "vegetable"; the addition of the 艹 is in fact redundant. Thus, although the graph 菜 is usually understood in folk etymology (as it was by Xu Shen in Shuowen Jiezi) as 艹 (semantic) plus 采 (phonetic), it can also be analyzed as 采 (semantically extended to "vegetable") which is etymonic, playing both semantic and phonetic roles, plus 艹 as a redundant semantic indicator.
   The phonetic element of a semantic-phonetic character represented the exact or almost-exact pronunciation of the character when the character was first created; and characters sharing the same phonetic part had the same reading. Linguists rely heavily on this fact to reconstruct the sound of Old Chinese. However, over time, the reading of a character may be no longer the one indicated by the phonetic part due to sound change and other reasons. When people try to read a two-part character of which they're ignorant, they may take one of the parts as the phonetic indicator, following the folk wisdom of you bian du bian (有邊讀邊). That often results in mistakes.

Meaning	Pronunciation	Character
氵 water	木 mù	沐 mù = "to wash one's hair"
氵 water	林 lín	淋 lín = "to pour"
艹 grass	采 cǎi	菜 cài = "vegetable"

Borrowed characters (假借)

pinyin: jiǎ jiè, lit. borrowing. Refers to the case where a character is borrowed to write another word due to a fortuitous homophony between the words. For example, the character 來 lái depicts the wheat plant and meant "wheat" in ancient times -- it was a pictogram. Because "wheat" and "to come" were pronounced the same, the character 來 was then borrowed to write the verb "to come". The pronunciation of the original word meaning "wheat" has changed in modern times to mài(now written 麥), and the original homophony between the two words has disappeared.

Derived characters (轉注)

pinyin: zhuǎn zhù, lit. reciprocal meaning.
This classification is of purely historical value, and is the least understood of the liushu principles of character formation. It may refer to characters which have similar meanings and often the same etymological root, but which are pronounced differently and usually have somewhat different meanings. The English words chance and cadence, for example, have the same Latin root word: cadentia, cadentiam, meaning "fall". If English were written the way Chinese is, these two words would likely have similar characters.
The characters 老 lǎo ("old") and 考 kǎo ("a test") are the most commonly cited examples of derived characters, which come from a common etymological root but differ in that one part is changed to indicate a different pronunciation and meaning.

Modern classification

The liushu had been the standard classification scheme for Chinese characters since Xu Shen's time. Generations of scholars tried to modify the scheme, but none challenged it. Tang Lan (唐蘭) (1902-1979) was the first person to dismiss liushu, offering his own sanshu (三書 "Three Principles of Character Formation"), namely xiangxing (象形 "form-representing"), xiangyi (象意 "meaning-representing") and xingsheng (形聲 "meaning-sound"). This classification was later criticised by Chen Mengjia (陳夢家) (1911-1966) and Qiu Xigui. Both Chen and Qiu offered their own sanshu. (Qiu 2000:chp. 6.3)

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