The secret behind how Chinese characters work - Gina Marie Elia

According to legend, in the 27th century BCE, the Yellow Emperor of China charged his historian, Cangjie, to develop a system of writing. Sitting alongside a riverbank, Cangjie noticed the imagery that surrounded him. From this, he created the first Chinese characters. And that night, the sky rained millet while ghosts cried, fearing their actions may now be condemned by the written word.

We can’t say for sure whether the story is true. But the earliest artifacts containing Chinese characters date to the Shang Dynasty, around 1250 to 1050 BCE, still making it one of the earliest forms of written language. Characters etched on ox bones and turtle shells show Shang kings’ writings to their ancestors, discussing everything from agriculture to the origins of a toothache.

And as the legend suggests, these ancient characters were mainly pictograms, or symbols that resemble what they’re meant to represent. Even today, some of the most foundational Chinese characters remain pictographic, like rén (人), which means person, and mù (木), which means wood or tree. Some characters are ideograms, or symbols that represent abstract concepts, like the numbers yī (一), èr (二), and sān (三). Others are compound ideograms, which combine two or more pictograms or ideograms. For example, xiū (休) places the character for person next to the character for tree and means to rest.

However, most modern-day characters are known as logograms, and are constructed of two components: a radical component, which gestures at the meaning of the character, and a sound component, which hints at its pronunciation. And all characters are built from a variety of strokes, which are often simplified to eight basic types. There are 214 radicals, each with its own definition. Some can stand alone, while others cannot.

For instance, the radical rì (日), written on its own means sun. It’s also used in characters with sun-related definitions, such as xiǎo (晓) meaning dawn. The radical cǎo (艹), on the other hand, never stands alone, but can be found within characters related to grass and plants, like huā (花) meaning flower. And the radical shuǐ (水), meaning water, always stands alone, but has a variant (氵) that is used when it’s part of more complex characters like hé (河), meaning river.

Radicals can appear in different positions: to the left, to the right, above, below, or even surrounding the rest of the character. There are many more sound components than radicals, with estimates ranging in the thousands. Similar sounding words often share the same sound component, and their radicals help shed light on their meanings.

Take fēng (峰) and fēng (蜂). The radical shān (山) means mountain, which hints at the first character’s definition: summit. The radical in the second character, chóng (虫), means insect, and together with the sound component means bee. While many words in Chinese sound similar, just like in other languages, context or tonality helps clarify their meaning.

Yet how each character is pronounced depends on dialect, which varies across the country. So conversations in Chengdu may sound vastly different than in Nanjing, but in both places, the written language is the same. And unlike the romance languages, Chinese has no gendered nouns or verb conjugations. So the character chī (吃), meaning to eat, remains unchanged whether the subject is yourself, a coworker, or a lesion of fearful ghosts.

To indicate the past, a marker like le (了) can be added. So “I eat bread” becomes “I ate bread.” Over the years, the Chinese writing system has undergone many changes. As characters went from being etched in bone, to cast in bronze, to brushed on paper, their script has evolved along the way.

In the 1950s and 60s, the Chinese Communist Party introduced new simplified versions of the traditional characters, which are now standard in China, though traditional characters remain in use in Hong Kong and Taiwan. And while the Chinese character system may seem unique, its development greatly influenced the spoken languages and writing systems of its neighbors.

For example, around 60% of Japanese dictionary entries are kanji—characters that originated in Chinese or were created from its elements. With a 3,000 year history, Chinese characters have and will continue to leave their mark.