So, you know how Chinese is just picture writing? Errrt! There’s more to this story.
Like all of the world’s earliest writing systems, Chinese characters start out as symbols
that stand for words. A rice paddy. A person. A tree. These are logographs, and they let
you depict specific language pieces - to write what you mean. But instead of requiring different
characters for every word, the handy rebus principle lets you write other things that
sound like the logograph - to write what you say.
Sure, you could use the rebus “sounds like” principle to write any sound in your language.
But please consider this symbol and answer the question that follows. Does it mean ‘son’,
‘soon’, ’sun’ or ‘sown’? Oh my, did rebus writing get you into a bit of trouble
here?
When we see this character, we could read it as a plain old logograph, according to
its meaning, or any of these rebus ways, following its pronunciation. Which one should you choose?
Think a bit outside of the jade box here, and take the lead of this Han scribe. His
solution is elegant: don’t choose one. Use both systems together!
What’s that behind is back? Is that a… oh, yeah! “Major Moments in the History
of Writing”! So, here’s the logograph for “horse”.
But it also sounds the same as the word for “ant”, so the rebus principle lets us
write them both with the same glyph. Confusing? Not if you add the logograph for “insect”
next to the sound-alike character! This says it’s pronounced like “horse”, which
it is, but that its meaning has something to do with “insect”. You don’t read
the extra character - it’s a meaning hint, determining how to read the sound character,
so it’s called a determinative.
One more Mandarin example. This logograph means “moon”, which happens to be pronounced
“yuè”. Using rebus writing, “yuè” also means “amputate your feet”. Incidentally,
the word “key” is pronounced the same way. Same problem. But nothing a couple determinatives
can’t fix! Add the determinative for “metal” to this character. Add “knife” to that
one. And let’s leave the moon be, because that’s already what it means.
Here again, the “sounds like” reading of a character gives you its phonetic component.
This extra logograph clues you into its meaning - its semantic component. Together, they form
a unit - a whole character with a clear meaning and a clear pronunciation. Determinatives
are very common in Chinese characters, natively called Han characters. In fact, since they
hint at the character’s root meaning - its radix - Han determinatives get called radicals.
Bring back the character “sun”. It can be pronounced many ways, true. But add a determinative,
a silent helper character, and you can quickly narrow down its meaning. These extra determinatives
avoid ambiguous readings. Which one is the “sun” in the sky? Which is a father’s
“son”? Which one means “soon”? Too easy.
There’s something else to learn from this quiet scribe. He’s using radicals to clean
up some ambiguity, but even he knows that context matters. He won’t spell everything
out for you every time. Sometimes this character means “for”, as in “this is for you”,
other times it’s the verb “supply”. He’s balancing this tension in the history
of writing between what’s easy on the reader, who needs more information to interpret the
words, versus what’s easy on the writer, who typically knows what he means when he’s
writing it. Plus, hand cramps.
The choice of leaving in or leaving out helpful information isn’t simply about clarity and
laziness. It’s aesthetic. Throughout the history of Chinese calligraphy, from oracle
bones to the rough cursive script, stylistic choices are made, not just semantic and phonetic
choices. Seeing through the calligrapher’s eyes, you can find in the history of writing
not only a vision of what words and sounds look like, but where words and sounds go and
where they stop.
When it comes to aesthetic choices and Han characters, none is more fundamental than
the decision to arrange character components in blocks. Bonus note: this is definitely
not the only time in history that writing gets organized in blocks.
So this radical sits on top of this phonetic component in a block, making up one whole
character - the character for “flower”. The ideograph man plus tree, a man leaning
against a tree, has two components sitting side by side in a block, and they’re the
character for “rest”. And here’s one tree in its own block, two trees meaning “woods”
and three trees for “forest”.
Aesthetics aside, what would happen if we took this “sounds like“ principle a step
further and make writing about the sounds? Isn’t that a better solution to our “soon”,
“son”, “sown”, “sun” problem, and one that doesn’t make us memorize
tons of characters?