Chinese Character Classification
All Chinese characters are logograms, but there are several derivative types. These include a handful which derive from pictograms (象形 pinyin: xiàngxíng) and a number which are ideographic (指事 zhǐshì) in origin, but the vast majority originated as phono-semantic compounds (形聲 xíngshēng). In older literature, Chinese characters in general may be referred to as ideograms, due to the misconception that characters represented ideas directly, whereas in fact they do so only through association with the spoken word. This article therefore covers the origin of these logographic characters, not their current function in the Chinese writing system.
Read more about Chinese Character Classification: Traditional Classification, Modern Classifications
Famous quotes containing the words chinese and/or character:
“We can see nothing whatever of the soul unless it is visible in the expression of the countenance; one might call the faces at a large assembly of people a history of the human soul written in a kind of Chinese ideograms.”
—G.C. (Georg Christoph)
“When I think of some of the Persians, the Hindus, the Arabs I knew, when I think of the character they revealed, their grace, their tenderness, their intelligence, their holiness, I spit on the white conquerors of the world, the degenerate British, the pigheaded Germans, the smug self-satisfied French.”
—Henry Miller (1891–1980)