, now written without the dot. Hence we see that while the origin of all writing is pictographic, in Chinese alone of living languages certain pictures have survived, and still denote what they had denoted in the beginning. In the script of other countries they were gradually transformed into hieroglyphic symbols, after which they either disappeared altogether or became further conventionalized into the letters of an alphabet. These picture-characters, then, accumulated little by little, until they comprised all the common objects which could be easily and rapidly delineated—sun, moon, stars, various animals, certain parts of the body, tree, grass and so forth, to the number of two or three hundred. The next step was to a few compound pictograms which would naturally suggest themselves to primitive man:
the sun just above the horizon = “dawn”;
trees side by side = “a forest”;
a mouth with something solid coming out of it = “the tongue”;
a mouth with vapor or breath coming out of it = “words.”
But a purely pictographic script has its limitations. The more complex natural objects hardly come within its scope; still less the whole body of abstract ideas. While writing was still in its infancy, it must have occurred to the Chinese Suggestive compounds. to join together two or more pictorial characters in order that their association might suggest to the mind some third thing or idea. “Sun” and “moon” combined in this way make the character