Chinese Characters are cool - pictographs

Some Chinese characters make perfect sense, some make no sense to me whatsoever. Lets look at a couple that are so clear you want to go up to them and hug then until they're just a pile of black sticks in your arms.

A lot of people think all Chinese characters are pictographic, ie little meaningful drawings. A lot of people are stupid too. Most Chinese characters you could place along a continuum of idographic to pictographic. Maybe it would look like this:


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ideographic pictographic

I would put our character chuan 串 way up the right end of that scale. Cos 串 looks like something strung together and that's just what it means. Whereas something like Cuo4 错 which means "mistake" doesn't look like much of anything. Cuo4 is made up of two parts radicals if you will, an ideographic component and a phonetic, so I think I'll put that one on the left of that continuum there.

There's obviously not going to be a way to draw a picture everything in the universe right? So Chinese makes it all up by using a combination of pictographic, ideographic bits and phonetic bits. Bits of pictures, bits of meaning and bits of sound = Chinese!

Don't get me wrong, I'm a huge fan of the pictographic. Some of my best friends are pictographic. I think they have a role to play in society.
Check these guys out!

马 = horse (ok so this one is a bit of a stretch at first)

大 = big (imagine this is a guy standing with his arms out saying "It was this BIG!"

鸟 = bird (umm, this kinda looks like the horse character, but this is meant to be a bird)

鸭 = duck (Duck has the bird radical and another phonetic bit on the left)

鸡 = chicken (Chicken also has the birdy radical but with a different phonetic bit for pronunciation)

山 = mountain (kinda looks like a mountain don't it?

岛 = island (This is the birdy radical sitting on a submerged mountain......that is: an ISLAND!

So there we have some Chinese character pictographs. For the love of God, don't go thinking that's the be all and end all of Chinese characters. Jeez.

Should I write something about Chinese character tattoos at some point? Maybe, just maybe, I will.