IDEOGRAPHIC NATURE OF THE SYMBOLS.
The Chinese have paid great and praiseworthy attention to their language, and furnished us with all needed books to its study. Premising that the original symbols were ideographic, the necessities of the case compelled their contraction as much as possible, and soon resulted in arbitrary signs for all common uses. Their symbols varied, indeed, at different times and in different States; it was not until a genuine literature appeared and its readers multiplied that the variants were dropped and uniformity sought. The original characters of this language are derived from natural or artificial objects, of which they were at first the rude outlines. Most of the forms are preserved in the treatises of native philologists, where the changes they have gradually undergone are shown. The number of objects chosen at first was not great; among them were symbols for the sun, moon, hills, animals, parts of the body, etc.; and in drawing them the limners seem to have proposed nothing further than an outline sketch, which, by the aid of a little explanation, would be intelligible. Thus the picture
would probably be recognized by all who saw it as representing the moon; that of
as a fish; and so of others. It is apparent that the number of pictures which could be made in this manner would hear no proportion to the wants and uses of a language, and therefore recourse must soon be had to more complicated symbols, to combining those already understood, or to the adoption of arbitrary or phonetic signs. All these modes have been more or less employed.
SIX CLASSES OF CHARACTERS.
Chinese philologists arrange all the characters in their language into six classes, called luh shu, or ‘six writings.’ The first, called siang hing, morphographs, or ‘imitative symbols,’ are those in which a plain resemblance can be traced between the original form and the object represented; they are among the first characters invented, although the six hundred and eight placed in this class do not include all the original symbols. These pristine forms have since been modified so much that the resemblance has disappeared in most of them, caused chiefly by the use of paper, ink, and pencils, instead of the iron style and bamboo tablets formerly in use for writing; circular strokes being more distinctly made with an iron point upon the hard wood than with a hair pencil upon thin paper; angular strokes and square forms, therefore, gradually took the place of round or curved ones, and contracted characters came into use in place of the original imitative symbols. In this class such characters as the following are given:
| tortoise, | chariot, | child, | elephant, | deer, | vase, | hill, | eye. |
altered to