Sample from Chapter 4. Meaning Representation in
Characters
Characters Tell Stories
English letters, such as a and b, now merely indicate sounds,
and then only inconsistently; but in their earliest forms these two letters
were pictographs, which came to represent the initial sounds of the Semitic
words alef ('ox') and beta ('house'). These two words were
joined to form the word we now know as alphabet.
Compared with the now meaningless and workaday phonetic letters, some
Chinese characters have interesting origins, which can be elaborated into
stories. These stories give us an intriguing glimpse into the way Chinese
people lived and viewed the world in ancient times. They might be learned
when characters are learned; if not, they are readily found in any good
book on Chinese characters (e.g., Li L.-Y. 1992 and Ma 1993). Let us sample
some characters that have interesting stories. The characters are listed
in old pictographs--most in the oracle-bone script--and contemporary standard
script. Some of them are used in simplified shapes in China (for one example,
see the characters for 'child'.)
mu ('tree') shows a trunk and two leafless branches
of a tree. The bottom half of the character may be hanging branches or
the roots of a tree. As shown in Table 3-6, the character doubles to represent
"forest" and triples to represent "dense forest." It
joins with the character for "person" to represent "rest,"
as shown below. 
mo ('last' or 'top') shows a tree in which the
top is marked with a horizontal stroke, while 
ben ('source'
or 'origin') shows a tree in which the root is marked with a horizontal
stroke.
ren ('person') shows a person in a profile, standing
upright with arms hanging down. In another interpretation a person is marching
with two legs. The character, often in a slender form, appears in many
composite characters: with a tree 
xiu ('rest'),
a person resting against a tree; with a mountain
xian
('hermit' or 'immortal'), a person secluded in a mountain; and with
a dog 
fu ('lie prostrate'). 
bei ('north')
shows two persons standing back to back for "the direction toward
which people turn their backs." In China the icy winter winds from
Siberia and the yellow spring sandstorms from the deserts of Mongolia come
from the north. To protect themselves, people turned their backs on them.
The house gate, the emperor's throne, and all important ceremonial sites
face south.
er ('child') consists of a child's head sitting on the
character for "person." The head shows two tufts of hair above
the ears, characteristic of a child's hair style to this day. Alternately,
the top is open, showing an immature skull in which its two halves are
not yet closed. In the simplified form used in China 
the
child's head vanishes!
jing ('a well') represents eight square lots
of fields, divided among eight families, reserving the middle square with
a well in it for public use. In ancient China eight families formed a village
and cultivated a well-field in common for the purpose of taxation. Alternately,
the character is a pictograph of a well with a square opening. Sometimes
a well has a center dot, which may represent a bucket that brings water
up from the well.
men and 
shuan ('door'
and 'bolting') show that the ancient Chinese had folding doors that could
be bolted with a bar. The simplified forms now used in China no longer
depict the door. 
kai ('open') shows the bar on
the door removed with two hands.
bei ('shell','valuable') shows that cowrie shells
were used as currency in antiquity. Their supply did not meet the demand
and so copies of shells were made out of bone. In bone shells, only a few
horizontal strokes were filled across the surface to mimic the mouth wrinkles
of a real shell, as depicted in the pictograph. pin ('poverty')
consists of the valuables in the form of shells (the bottom component),
which is partitioned (the top component). In China the family property
was divided equally among male offspring, and so in a family with many
sons poverty followed the partition of the property.
bu ('divination') is a pictograph of a crack
appearing on an ox bone or turtle shell when heat is applied on its reverse
side. This technique was used in divination in the Yin period (chap. 3).
zhan ('to consult a diviner') has the character
for 'mouth' underneath 'divination'.
bi ('brush', 'pen') began as a pictograph showing
a hand holding a brush vertically. This character existed in the oracle-bone
script, suggesting that some kind of brush was used over 3400 years ago.
During the Zhou dynasty this character was crowned with the radical for
'bamboo'. In the several brushes preserved from the late Zhou dynasty,
the shaft is usually made of bamboo, and the head is made of animal hairs
of various kinds. In the simplified form, the character's "hand"
and "brush" are replaced by the character for "hair."
nü ('woman') shows a woman squatting down
with the arms crossed in front of her body. The"woman" character
appears in many compound characters with favorable meanings, such as 
an ('peace'), which shows a woman under a roof. But some
characters containing the "woman" have such undesirable meanings
as "jealousy," "slave," and "sly."
jia ('house') shows a pig under a roof; in the old days
pigs and dogs lived around and in the house of a peasant. The street-cleaning
and privy-emptying tasks were left to these two animals.
The interpretions of characters are occasionally ambiguous or controversial:
witness the two or more possible interpretations for some characters. About
2000 years ago the lexicographer Xu Shen misinterpreted the pictographic
origins of some characters, especially because he was not aware of the oracle-bone
script. For example, he explained the character for earth 
tu
as two layers of soil through which a plant pushes upwards. The oracle-bone
and bronze character, however, has the form 
, which shows
an altar with a wooden sacred pole on it representing the god. The earth
was a divinity in ancient China, and in front of the pole offerings for
the god of the soil were laid (Karlgren 1923). Yet another interpretation
says that the archaic character simply depicts a mound of earth on the ground.
These stories--whether authentic or fabricated, and realistic or fanciful--make
characters come alive and at the same time serve as excellent mnemonics
for remembering them. A mnemonic is an art or trick used in memorizing a
seemingly meaningless or complex item, or in memorizing a large number of
items. (Example : I memorized the name in English of the fish splake
by asssociating it with "splash in a lake.") The thousands of
Chinese characters do not form a collection of totally arbitrary graphs,
but neither are they systematically related to each other. The use of mnemonics
is bound to help in learning Chinese characters (chap.
9).
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