AUTHOR | HISTORIAN | ARTIST

tiantianxuexi:

As you have hopefully noticed, hanzi don’t all seem to work the same way, and during the Han Dynasty six categories were designated for describing the “logic” of a character. It’s not something that comes up a whole lot, but it’s interesting and handy for explaining to folks that it’s not all “lil pictures” ఠ ͟ಠ 

象形 xiàngxíng: pictograms, one’s like 火 or 馬. These arose from people using drawings to help remember oral stories, and then those drawings turning into more simplified and consistent symbols. 

指事 zhǐ shì: ideograms, things that “demonstrate” a concept. so like 上 and 下

形声 xíngshēng: an ideogram + a phonetic component. so you may not have encountered 氿 before, but hm it’s got water (三点水) and 九—it’s pronounced jiǔ & means “bubble up” as in spring water

会意 huìyì: joint ideogram, so two “meaningful” components that help make a new meaning. A 人 man with a 戈 spear, 伐 attack! (tho more literary now)

related thought: this is also the pattern of development for hieroglyphics and Sumerian writing, though as these got used for other languages eg Akkadian things would get used for their semantic meaning and get new phonetic readings that could then be remixed again, or used purely phonetically, resulting in a mixed system kind of like Japanese but if the kana looked more like kanji. (if yr into it I cannot recommend this book enough) So also no, emoji are not like hieroglyphics. 

转注 zhuǎnzhù: transfer characters, these are weird and I don’t totally get them. it seems to be characters that sound different but contain a similar part and mean the same thing, so 爸 and 父. The classical ones given are 考 老 but?? sorry maybe you need to be deeper in the philology ¯_(ツ)_/¯   

假借 jiǎjiè: loan characters. This includes old stuff like 来 which meant wheat but was pronounced lái anyway, and now if you want to talk about wheat you have to add the grass radical 莱, heh. This is also how names and foreign things are transliterated

So that’s how hanzi work! I think in ways there are overlap but these are the technical distinctions. For example “beer” used to be transliterated as 皮酒, aka skin alcohol and that’s gross, so it was changed it to 啤酒, with the “pi” that’s also in 埤 and 脾 but the 口 mouth radical since it’s phonetic, like 啊, 哎, and 哦.  Otherwise new characters are exceedingly rare and mostly only for elements, like oxygen is 氧, and has the 气 radical like other gases but the 羊 for pronunciation. I feel like you could also make a contemporary pseudocategory for internet punning or something, like 囧 being used as a face and all the censorship work-arounds. 

There’s soOoO much to talk about always but you can google around, here’s a Baidu article that has the old school classification poem, here’s an english rundown with more examples and a powerpoint. (o˘◡˘o) 谢谢你们来我的TED talk