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I have been studying Chinese linguistics recently, starting with Chinese characters. I read “Six Essays on Chinese Characters” and “Ten Lectures on Chinese Characters and Chinese Culture” written by Wang Ning, and learned from them the methods of analyzing the Chinese character system. With the help of “Shuowen Jiezi” and Ziyuan.com , I analyzed and sorted out the basic components of Chinese characters. I have many thoughts, and I will make a staged summary and sharing here.

Chinese character system

As the symbol system of the Chinese language, Chinese characters have their own internal structure, and their structure is constantly changing over time. Therefore, there are two basic dimensions in the study of the Chinese character system. One is to study the structure of the Chinese character system in a certain period (that is, a certain time section of Chinese characters), and the other is to study the development and changes of the Chinese character system over time.

Discussing the structure of Chinese characters from the perspective of time

Chinese characters come first with text, and text comes from the abstraction of things.

Pictogram

The abstract method of physical objects is called pictography , which depicts and depicts the key features of the physical objects to form symbols that refer to the physical objects, which is very intuitive.
For example, animals:

refer to something

The abstract method of referring to things is called referring to things , which introduces more symbolic and complex logical relationships. For example:

Understanding and phonogram

Wen is the source of Chinese characters, and characters are derived from wen, mainly in two ways: meaning and pictophonetic.
Huiyi is an ingenious way of making words. Multiple texts are put together to form one word, and the meaning of the word can be understood from the multiple texts that make up the word. For example, Jie: Knife, Ox, Horn. The structural meaning is to use a knife to separate the horn from the cow to express the meaning of “Jie”.

PS: “Ci” refers to the words used for speaking. Language comes before words. There are words used for speaking first, and then there are words created based on the words. The structural meaning (constructive meaning) of a word is not equal to the meaning of the word, but it can be determined by Construct the meaning and understand the meaning of the word. Words were originally monosyllabic words, corresponding to the characters one by one. Therefore, more and more ancient Chinese characters were created with the emergence of new words, until polysyllabic words appeared. New words were combined with existing words to express new things, one sound for one character. Correspondence with Chinese characters. Later, the number of newly coined Chinese characters gradually decreased, and uncommon characters that were not commonly used were replaced by polysyllabic words and gradually abandoned. For example, “cow” replaced “female”, “bull” replaced “male”, and “white cow” replaced “㹊” “. The Chinese character system has therefore been greatly simplified. Although the largest number of Chinese characters included in “Chinese Character Ocean” is 85,568, the 3,500 commonly used Chinese characters are enough to cover 99.5% of modern corpus.

Phonophone is a Chinese character made up of meaning parts and voice parts. It is a batch method of character creation. Therefore, most of the modern Chinese characters are pictophonetic characters. The meaning part is the current radical, and the voice part is the phonetic part. Due to the long-term evolution of pronunciation, only 39% of them can effectively represent the pronunciation. Although phonetic phonemes are mainly used to express sounds, the selection of phonetic phonetic words is also very particular. The appearance and pronunciation of new words also have their own internal logic and are intrinsically related to old words. Therefore, many phonetic phonetic words also have the function of assisting in expressing meaning, and are even used. Misunderstood as both pictographic and phonetic characters. But understanding and form are two different construction methods, and there is only one construction method for a word.

Pictograms, meanings, meanings, and pictograms are the four ways to construct Chinese characters.

Borrowing and transferring

Borrowing and annotation, which are often listed together as the “Six Books”, are two phenomena in the evolution of Chinese characters.

Qieqiu refers to the characters that are commonly used when learning ancient Chinese. After a new word appears and there is no corresponding word, a homophone word is written instead, and the word becomes a polyphonic word. When ambiguities and confusions arise when they are used too much, a new word is created to share the burden. The new word may mean a new meaning or the original meaning. For example, the original meaning of “ran” is to burn. Later, the new meaning of “ran” was more commonly used, so “ran” was added to “ran” by fire, and “burn” was created. This process is called transfer. Therefore, borrowing and transliteration are two textual phenomena that cause and effect each other.

Understand the Chinese character system from basic components

This part of the work is intended to analyze the basic components of Chinese characters and understand their connotations. In this way, when facing a Chinese character, analyze its structure and dismantle it into its basic components, you will roughly know where the character came from. On this basis, you can form a systematic understanding of Chinese characters.

There are many basic components, which I roughly divided into five categories: nature, human body, humanities, artifacts, and shape relationships, with original glyphs and explanations attached. I will introduce them one after another in subsequent articles, so stay tuned.

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