Pictograms and Chinese characters, Kunming, China (2002)
Among the many exhibits at the Ethnic Village in Kunming, China was a framed page on the evolution of some Chinese pictograms (象形字). It shows how the words sky, sun, moon, cloud, snow, and cow (the top line from left to right) changed from the original pictograms to the present forms.
The majority of the world’s languages have an alphabet system used to write words. A common misconception is that all Chinese characters use logograms/pictograms which consist of “pictures” that represent a word. In reality, the formation of characters is incredibly complex, and pictograms represent just one relatively minor type of character out of a total of six different types, namely pictograms, phono-semantic characters, simple ideograms, compound ideographs, transfer characters, and loan characters.
Roughly 600, or 4%, of Chinese characters are pictograms. These are generally among the oldest characters. A few date back to oracle bones from the 12th century BCE. 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, and the transition to the clerical script of the Han Dynasty.
Pictograms and Chinese characters, Kunming, China (2002)
Among the many exhibits at the Ethnic Village in Kunming, China was a framed page on the evolution of some Chinese pictograms (象形字). It shows how the words sky, sun, moon, cloud, snow, and cow (the top line from left to right) changed from the original pictograms to the present forms.
The majority of the world’s languages have an alphabet system used to write words. A common misconception is that all Chinese characters use logograms/pictograms which consist of “pictures” that represent a word. In reality, the formation of characters is incredibly complex, and pictograms represent just one relatively minor type of character out of a total of six different types, namely pictograms, phono-semantic characters, simple ideograms, compound ideographs, transfer characters, and loan characters.
Roughly 600, or 4%, of Chinese characters are pictograms. These are generally among the oldest characters. A few date back to oracle bones from the 12th century BCE. 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, and the transition to the clerical script of the Han Dynasty.