One of the most fascinating legends about the origin of Chinese characters revolves around Cāng Jié, the official historian of the Yellow Emperor. The Yellow Emperor wasn’t satisfied with the ancient method of using knots on ropes to record information, so he challenged Cāng Jié to come up with a brand new writing system.
For a while, Cāng Jié was stuck and couldn’t make any progress. But then, he started paying closer attention to the unique characteristics of things in the natural world: animal footprints, leaf shapes, cloud patterns, you name it. Cāng Jié simplified these traits into drawings, giving birth to the earliest Chinese characters.
The traditional classification of Chinese characters is known as the “Six Writings” or “Six Principles” (Liùshū), and it was created during the Han dynasty (202 BC–9 AD, 25–220 AD). According to the Six Writings, every Chinese character falls into one of six categories:
- Pictographs (象形 xiàngxíng): These characters are formal representations of things in the world, like pictorial symbols.
- Ideographs (指事 zhǐshì): These are symbolic signs that indicate meanings, also known as ideograms.
- Compound Ideographs (會意 huìyì): Characters formed by combining two or more semantic components that convey related meanings.
- Phonetic-Semantic Compounds (形声 xíngshēng): Characters that combine both a semantic element and a phonetic component.
- Transfer Characters (轉注 zhuǎnzhù): Characters derived from existing characters with related meanings.
- Loan Characters (假借 jiǎjiè): Characters borrowed to represent words with similar or identical pronunciations.
Understanding how Chinese characters are structured can be really helpful in creating memory tricks or clues that aid in learning new characters faster and retaining the ones already learned. So, next time you encounter a Chinese character, remember it’s not just a random squiggle – it belongs to one of these six fascinating categories!