INDICATIVE CHARACTERS

Indicatives are characters denoting parts of objects, or abstract ideas.

	How were abstract concepts such as "up" and "down" expressed? The Chinese used short bars over or under a longer curve for this representation
	How were abstract concepts such as "up" and "down" expressed? The Chinese used short bars over or under a longer curve for this representation
	Numbers are indicative characters in Chinese. These are numbers in Oracle Bone Script.
	The left is the oracle bone character for "wood". When three circles are added at the bottom, it becomes "roots".
	In most Chinese dictionaries, characters are indexed according to theier ideographic elements. These elements are called side radicals, Most side radicals are actually the first characters to be created. This picture illustrates how our primitive ancestors lived together with the basic elements that inspired their creation of side radical.

	In the Oracle Bone Script, the character "chicken" was a pictograph. Later, a phonetic side radical was added to signify the pronunciation.
	The above tagble shows the ralation between ideographic side radicals (wood, water, metal) and the meaning of the characters.

 

HIEROGLYPHIC CHARACTERS

The hieroglyph depicts the shape of objects line for line, just like photographs. It is the oldest and most exact type of morphology, and the easlest to understand. ASSOCIATIVE COMPOUNDS An associative compound is the composition of two or more characters or signs into a new character.

	Doesn't this character look like the mountain in the picture? Yes, it means mountain, too.
	This is a bronze tomahawk on which is the carved figure of a human face. Its teeth resemble the character "teeth" in the oracle bone script, don't they?
	This is a human with his arms and legs wide stretched, as if saying, "Look how big I am!" this character also means big.

HOW ARE CHINESE CHARACTERS FORMED 字(character): The upper part "宀" means house (roof), the lower part "子" means children. "Children in house" originally meant giving birth to children, and evolved to mean reproductiong in general. The character “字” now implies the process of word derivation.