“jealous,”
“treacherous,”
“false” and
“uncanny.” This class of characters, which constitutes at least nine-tenths of the language, has received the convenient name of phonograms. It must be added that the formation of the phonogram or phonetic compound did not always proceed along such simple lines as in the examples given above, where both parts are pictorial characters, one the “phonetic,” representing the sound, and the other, commonly known as the “radical,” giving a clue to the sense. In the first place, most of the phonetics now existing are not simple pictograms, but themselves more or less complex characters made up in a variety of ways. On analysing, for instance, the word
hsün, “to withdraw,” we find it is composed of the phonetic