1. The so-called pictographic method is a word-making method to describe the shape or characteristics of physical objects.
Some hieroglyphs are not directly used to represent specific objects, but to represent concepts related to objects. For example, the word "big" used to look like a person standing upright on the front. Hands and feet spread out, indicating "big". This word-formation method from nouns to adjectives was later developed. Although hieroglyphics have the earliest origin, they are the least in number. Because there are many things in the universe, it is impossible to make a pictogram according to the characteristics of all things, and many abstract concepts can't be drawn at all, and even if they can be drawn, this kind of word-making method is too stupid. Later, in order to overcome the limitations of hieroglyphics and meet the needs of social development, another word-formation method-point-object method was invented.
2. The so-called pointillism is a word-making method that uses symbolic symbols or adds indicative symbols to graphics to express meaning. This word formation method can be roughly divided into two categories: one is simple symbols, that is, symbols that are not graphics (if they are graphics, they are pictographs). The other is the symbol attached to the graph.
Creating Chinese characters with reference to things is the first step in the development of Chinese characters from pictographic characters to ideographic characters. However, this method can not be widely used in many things, and it is not easy to distinguish points and horizontal lines as symbols from other strokes, so our ancestors came up with a way to combine several pictures to express a meaning, that is, understanding.
3. The so-called knowing method is a word-making method that combines two or more words according to their meanings to express a new meaning.
With the development of Chinese characters, it can no longer meet the needs of expression. Because some mean that drawing three or four pictures can't solve the problem. If drawing five or six or seven or eight pictures can solve the problem, it is not like a word, but like a New Year picture. If so, how troublesome it is for us to write today. Writing a short essay is equivalent to compiling a thick comic book. Our ancestors had infinite wisdom. They think that words record words, and words are related to sound. So can words record sound? So he invented pictophonetic characters.
4. The so-called pictophonetic method is a word-making method consisting of pictophonetic characters and phonological characters.
The above six kinds of forms and sounds are common, among which the left form and right sound are the most, followed by the upper form and the lower sound, and the rest are less.
Pictophonetic characters are produced on the basis of pictograph, reference and understanding. Although it still belongs to ideographic characters, it has broken through the shackles of Chinese characters and communicated the connection between Chinese characters and pronunciation. This is a major development of Chinese characters from ideographic to phonetic, and has become the mainstream of Chinese character development. More than 80% of the Chinese characters we use today are pictophonetic characters. It is very convenient to use pictophonetic characters to create characters. Words related to Jin Mu's fire and water, birds, animals, insects and fish, as well as exclamations and onomatopoeia are almost all pictophonetic words. This word formation method can continue to create new words until today. For example, the recently discovered chemical elements "americium, curium and technetium" are all named after newly created pictophonetic characters. For simplified Chinese characters, the methods of pictophonetic characters are also given priority, such as "excellent" and "loud".
In addition to the four word-forming methods mentioned above, there are two kinds of "Liushu": transliteration and borrowing. In the past, there were many so-called transfer notes, and the most popular one was a word-making method that adapted to dialect differences and phonetic development. For example, the original word "Lao" means old age, but because of the different time and region, it is useful to use this sound to express old age, so a word "Kao" with the same radical, similar pronunciation and the same meaning has emerged. The word "Kao" is adjacent to the word "Lao" (the part without dagger) and adjacent to the word "Kao". Therefore, the word "Kao" is still a pictophonetic word in terms of its word formation method. The so-called borrowing method is a way to express new meanings by using homophones ("false" also means borrowing). For example, "Ru" is a water name and is borrowed as a pronoun in the second person. At first, this borrowing phenomenon was mostly replaced by a homonym because there was no such word, but it has been used for a long time and was occupied by magpies. The meaning of some words themselves, but later found another way to land. For example, "Ran" originally meant to burn, and the following four points were already on fire, but after being borrowed by "Ran No", I had to add a fire beside it and turn it into a word "burn".
It can be seen that neither the transfer method nor the borrowing method created new words. There are four ways to make Chinese characters: pictograph, ideograph, ideograph and pictophonetic.