There are three ways to make Chinese characters, and what are the ways to make Chinese characters?

There are four types of Chinese characters, which are pictograms, huiyi, signifiers, and shapes. As for the transfer and pretense, it is necessary to distinguish between the use of words rather than the creation of words.

Pictograms: Belong to the "monolithic lettering method". Use the lines or strokes of the text to concretely outline the shape and characteristics of the object to be expressed.

For example, the word "moon" is like the shape of a bright moon, the word "turtle" is like the side shape of a turtle, the word "horse" is a horse with a horse mane and four legs, the word "fish" is a swimming fish with a fish head, a fish body and a fish tail, "艹" (the original character of grass) is two bundles of grass, and the word "door" is the shape of the left and right doors. And the word "day" is like a circle, with a little point in the middle, much like the shape we see when we look directly at the sun.

There are only a few pictographs, and there are only 364 pictographs in "Shuowen Jie Zi". After the Han Dynasty, only a few pictographs such as "umbrella, concave and convex" were made for more than 1,000 years, and now they are no longer used in this way. A considerable part of the later ligatures were constructed with pictographs.

For example, "people" is the word-building component of the words "enterprise, war, nephew, thrift, and immortal", "bei" is the word-building component of the words "wealth, purchase, trade, embarrassment, and defeat", and "horse" is the word-building component of the words "donkey, pack, drive, mother, scolding" and so on. Therefore, understanding the shape, meaning and pronunciation of pictographs from the etymology can help us grasp the meaning and pronunciation of a large number of modern common Chinese characters.

Huiyi: Huiyi is to use two or more independent characters to synthesize a word according to the relationship between meanings, and comprehensively represent the meaning of the synthesis of these word-forming components. The characters created by the Huiyi method are Huiyi characters, which reflect the breadth and profundity of Chinese characters.

Pointing to things: "Those who point to things can see and see, and they can see and see." The top and bottom are also.

Definition: A method of making words that use symbolic symbols or add some indicative symbols to a figure to represent meaning This refers to the method of expressing abstract things, and the so-called "each refers to its own thing" is also. Rubu is written "up" on it, and people are written "down" under it.

Shape and sound: It belongs to the "combined word method". Morphophonetic characters are composed of two parts:

Shape side (also known as "Yi Fu") and sound side (also known as "note"). The form side indicates the meaning or generic of the word, and the sound side indicates the same or similar pronunciation of the word. For example, the word "cherry" is next to the shape of "wood", indicating that it is a kind of tree, and the sound is next to "baby", which means that its pronunciation is the same as the word "baby"; Next to the word "basket" is "bamboo", indicating that it is a bamboo item, and next to the sound is "jian", indicating that its pronunciation is similar to the word "jian"; The lower part of the word "tooth" is next to the shape, which draws the shape of the tooth, and the upper "stop" is next to the sound, indicating the similar pronunciation of the word.

The methods of making Chinese characters include pictographs, huiyi characters, and morphophonetic characters.

There are six ways to make Chinese characters: pictogram, signifier, huiyi, shape, family, and phonetic, transfer, and pretend. Strictly speaking, the two methods of transferring and borrowing should belong to the method of using words, so there are only four actual methods of word making: guessing the shape of the image, referring to things, knowing the meaning, and forming the sound.

Popularly explain what they mean:

Pictogram: Draw a figure to represent meaning. For example, the fields are like rice fields divided by criss-crossing ridges.

Signifier: Indicate with a stroke in a certain part of a pictograph. For example, the "wood" of a tree has a stroke on the top to represent the "end" of the tree, and a stroke on the bottom to represent the root "root" of the tree.

Huiyi: Use two pictographs to represent a meaning. As if "breaking", the horse runs to the door.

Morphophonics: Part of meaning and part of pronunciation. For example, "cypress", next to the wooden character means that it belongs to a tree, and white means pronunciation. This type of wording is the most common type of Chinese characters.

There are six ways to make Chinese characters, namely: pictogram, signifier, huiyi, morphophonic, transliteration, and borrowing.

1. Pictograms.

Pictographs are used to draw the shape and characteristics of the object to be expressed in concrete terms using lines or strokes of words. Among the hieroglyphs, there are also some that are not directly used to represent specific objects, but are used to express concepts related to physical objects.

For example:"Great"The word, originally resembled the shape of a person standing upright in front of him, and the hands and feet were indicated"Great"Meaning. This word-making method of generalizing from nouns to adjectives was developed later. Although hieroglyphs originated the earliest, they were the least numerous.

2. Referring to the law.

It is the use of symbolic symbols or the addition of indicative symbols to the graphics to represent meaning. This kind of wording can be roughly divided into two categories: one is simple symbols, that is, symbols that do not form a figure (when they become a figure, they are pictographs).

The other type is symbols that are attached to a graph.

The use of signifiers to create characters is the first step in the development of Chinese characters from pictograms to ideograms.

3. Knowing the law.

Huiyi is the method of combining two or more words to represent a new meaning according to their meanings. For example, the word "wine" is expressed by combining the "unitary" and liquid "water" in the clay bottle of sake brewing.

Fourth, the shape and sound method.

It is a word-making method formed by the combination of form and sound. Because the shape and sound of the word is produced on the basis of pictograms, signifiers, and meanings. Although it is still an ideographic character, it has broken through the shackles of Chinese characters and communicated the connection between square Chinese characters and phonetics, which is a major development of Chinese characters from ideographic to phonetic, and has become the mainstream of the development of Chinese characters.

It is very convenient to use the morphophonic method to make words, and the words related to gold, wood, water and fire, birds, beasts, insects and fish, as well as interjections and onomatopoeia, are almost all morphophonetic words. This method of wording can continue to create new characters to this day. For example, the recently discovered chemical elements "americium, curium, cymbalium", etc., are all named after newly coined morphophonetic characters.

Fifth, the transfer method.

Transliteration is a method of wording adopted to accommodate the divergence of dialects and the development of phonetics. For example, there was originally a "old", which means old, and due to the difference in time and region, the sound kǎo was used to mean old, so a character "考" with the same radical, similar pronunciation and the same meaning as the "old" character was created.

6. False Borrowing Law.

It is a way to borrow homophones to express new meanings ("false" also means to borrow). For example, "ran" originally meant to burn, and the bottom four points were already fire, but after being borrowed by "then", I had to add another fire next to it, which became the word "burning" (shape sound).

The method of making Chinese characters is "pictogram, signifier, understanding, shape, sound, transfer, and borrowing". Pictograms, signifiers, ideologies, and sounds refer to the structure of words, while transfer and borrowing refer to the way words are used.

The methods of making Chinese characters are pictogram, signifier, huiyi, morphophonic, transliteration, and borrowing.

Pictogram is to use the lines or strokes of words to specifically outline the shape and characteristics of the object to be expressed. Signifiers are word-making methods that use symbolic symbols or add indicative symbols to graphics to represent meaning. Huiyi is a method of combining two or more words to represent a new meaning according to their meanings.

The morphophonic method is a word-making method formed by the combination of the morphological and phonological sides, and the transposition method is a word-making method adopted to adapt to the dialect divergence and the development of phonetics.

There is no exact number of Chinese characters, but it is about 100,000, and only a few thousand Chinese characters are used on a daily basis. According to statistics, 1,000 commonly used words can cover about 92% of written materials, 2,000 words can cover more than 98%, and 3,000 words have reached 99%.

The Six Books are the basic principles of Chinese character construction. The Six Books are mentioned in the "Zhou Li", but the specific content is not explained. In the Eastern Han Dynasty, Xu Shen elaborated on the construction principles of the "Six Books" in "Shuowen Jie Zi": pictograms, signifiers, understandings, shapes, sounds, transfers, and pretenses.

Pictogram: This kind of word-making method is depicted according to the physical characteristics of the object, and the so-called "painting into its object, with the body" is also. The four characters such as sun, moon, mountain, and water were originally patterns depicting the sun, moon, mountain, and water, and later gradually evolved into today's shape.

Melon is a hieroglyph. In the word "melon", two skimming represents vines, the middle vertical hook represents melon, and 捺 means leaves. "The general name of Cucurbitaceae plants" is the original meaning of "melon".

shaped like a melon", there are many things in real life that are like melons, for example, "melon skin hat" is a kind of hat; A "melon skin boat" is a type of boat.

Like cutting a melon", the fate of the melon is to be cut, which leads to this meaning. People use "divide" to mean division or distribution. It also refers to the combination of several powerful countries to divide the land of a weak or underdeveloped country.

Fool", means not smart, this word comes from the ancient "melon seed tribe", in the Spring and Autumn Period living in Guazhou (Gansu Dunhuang area) people surnamed Jiang are called "melon seed tribe", they are very industrious, when they are hired to always work non-stop, but lead spring hands are some people regard their honest customs as "stupid", so there is a "fool".

Signifier: This refers to the method of representing abstract things, using symbolic symbols, or adding symbols to pictographs to represent a certain word. Huai's so-called "each refers to its own thing" is also.

For example, people write "up" on it, people write "down" under it, "blade", add a little point to the edge of the knife, it means that it is the sharpest here, this is the blade, and so on. A little arrogant is "stinky", "rich" people with land, "poor" rely on "force" to work, "cheap" is "cheap" in traditional Chinese, and the two "Ge" on the right, fighting for money, are naturally "cheap".

Shape and sound: The shape and sound of the word is composed of two parts: the shape of the meaning and the sound of the sound. Take the simplest structure of the shape and sound of the word for example, the shape side and the sound side are both played by the single character. As a component of morphophonetic characters, these individual characters are all words with sound and meaning.