Chinese System Classification

DeFrancis, John. The Chinese Language: Fact and Fantasy. Hawaii: University of Hawaii Press, 1986.

There are many debates on what to call Chinese characters, and hope to classify them. There are many categories that linguists group Chinese into which DeFrancis explores: ideographic, logographic, morphographic, to name the main ones. Those that argue that Chinese is ideographic say that each character represents an idea. And although it can be pronounced differently using different dialects the same idea is still present. For logographic proponents say that the Chinese characters represent a word. 'The key point of disagreement leading to these terms is whether a character conveys meaning directly or through the intermediary of the word.' Mophographic comes from the argument, what is a word? Those that claim logography say that a word is one character, where those that favor morphogrphy say that word is more than one character. This view continues by claiming that each character is actually a morpheme, the smallest meaningful unit in the language. Due to the complex nature of the characters even more classifications arise. Phonograms comes from the phonetic element that is claimed to exist in some 90 percent of Chinese characters. This grouping is further elaborated by calling them syllabic phonograms. This points to the phonetic element but also link in that the words come in the form of syllables.

It is widely known that the characters have pictographic beginnings, but they soon evolved into stylized characters. Chinese characters can be broken up into individual units called 'strokes.' These units can be further broken up into three different categories:

Dots: 丶

Lines: l，一，𠄌

Hooks:亅，乛，乙

Although characters are made up of these strokes they themselves hold no inherent meaning or sound value, just as the "丶"part of "x" has no meaning or sound value. Strokes are made by having a starting point, the moving toward any direction from northeast to southwest.

In many dictionaries characters are classified by the number of strokes that they contain. Those wanting to look up a character will not only need to know how many strokes are in a character but also in what order they are written. Ah a general rule "top before bottom" and "left before right." As an example, the 人 character is comprised of two strokes in this order: 丿then丶. The 大, is 一，丿，then 丶. And 囗 is l，𠃍，then －. Simple characters, like these, are then combined with other simple characters to make complex characters. They are usually combined by left-right or top-bottom. 唔 is made up of three simple characters, two 口 and one 五. The two 口 are added to the left and bottom of the 五. Other examples include: 叶，佫，㭉. Using these principles you can keep adding on simple or even more complex characters to the left or top to create an infinite number of characters, 舞，遲，駴，鱡. Ninety percent of the characters in the Chinese dictionary used these two rules left-right or top-bottom.