Other characters commonly explained as compound ideographs include:
The table below summarises the evolution of a few Chinese pictographic characters. These pictograms became progressively more stylized and lost their pictographic flavour, especially as they made the transition from the oracle bone script to the Seal Script of the Eastern Zhou, but also to a lesser extent in the transition to the clerical script of the Han Dynasty.
A few, indicated below with their earliest forms, date back to oracle bones from the twelfth century BCE. These are generally among the oldest characters. Roughly 600 Chinese characters are pictograms ( 象形 xiàng xíng 'form imitation') – stylised drawings of the objects they represent. In Chinese, it is called Yinyunxue ( 音韻學 'Studies of sounds and rimes'). Reconstructing Middle and Old Chinese phonology from the clues present in characters is part of Chinese historical linguistics. 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. The failure to recognize the historical and etymological role of these components often leads to misclassification and false etymology. However, as both the meanings and pronunciations of the characters have changed over time, these components are no longer reliable guides to either meaning or pronunciation. Despite millennia of change in shape, usage and meaning, a few of these characters remain recognizable to the modern reader of Chinese.Īt present, more than 90% of Chinese characters are phono-semantic compounds, constructed out of elements intended to provide clues to both the meaning and the pronunciation. Roughly a quarter of these characters are pictograms while the rest are either phono-semantic compounds or compound ideograms. These ancient characters are called oracle bone script. 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. For this reason, some modern scholars view them as six principles of character formation rather than six types of characters.
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. The traditional classification is still taught but is no longer the focus of modern lexicographic practice. Xu Shen illustrated each of Liu's six types with a pair of characters in the postface to the Shuowen Jiezi.
Slightly different lists of six types are given in the Book of Han of the first century CE, and by Zheng Zhong quoted by Zheng Xuan in his first-century commentary on the Rites of Zhou. 23 CE) edited the Rites, he glossed the term with a list of six types without examples. The phrase first appeared in the Rites of Zhou, though it may not have originally referred to methods of creating characters. This classification is known from Xu Shen's second century dictionary Shuowen Jiezi, but did not originate there. Traditional Chinese lexicography divided characters into six categories ( 六書 liùshū 'Six Writings').
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