“connect.” The former character is a simple pictogram, but the latter is again resolvable into the two elements
“a down stroke to the left” and
“a strand of silk,” which is here understood to be the radical and appears in its ancient form as
, a picture of cocoons spun by the silkworm. Again, the sound is in most cases given by no means exactly by the so-called phonetic, a fact chiefly due to the pronunciation having undergone changes which the written character was incapable of recording. Thus, we have just seen that the phonetic of
is not hsün but sun. There are extreme cases in which a phonetic provides hardly any clue at all as to the sound of its derivatives. The character