The Intact Pictographic method of character construction is based upon the depiction of an object’s shape — drawing a picture of it. To express the concept “sun”, one draws a sun; to express “tree”, one draws a tree, and so on. This was the earliest method of character construction, which is obviously the culmination of the evolution of pictorial recording and pictograms.
Intact Pictographs are different from pictograms, and even more different from pictorial recordings. Pictographic characters can express directly the individual words of a language. Moreover, Intact Pictographic characters are simple in form, far simpler than pictures of pictograms.
Pictographic characters have the great advantage over other types of characters of having a direct visual appeal: it is often easy to remember what object a character represents just by looking at it. Below are a few examples of pictographic characters in Chinese.
Ancient Character |
Modern Character |
Definition |
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日 |
sun: a depiction of the sun |
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月 |
moon: a depiction of the moon |
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水 |
water: water flowing in a curve |
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山 |
mountain: mountain peaks |
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雨 |
rain: rain falling from the sky |
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田 |
field: rice fields and their irrigation ditches |
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牛 |
cow: a cow’s head with horns |
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羊 |
sheep: a sheep’s head with horns |
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马 |
horse: side view of a horse, showing legs, tail and mane |
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鸟 |
bird: side view of a bird, showing its beak, claws and wings |
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鱼 |
fish: side view of a fish, showing its fins, scales and tail |
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人 |
person: side view of a person, showing head, hands and legs |
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目 |
eye: a person’s eye, with the eyeball |
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口 |
mouth: an open mouth |
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齿 |
tooth: an open mouth with a row of teeth |
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舟 |
boat: a small boat floating down-stream |
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门 |
door: a door with two swinging panels under a crossbeam |
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戈 |
dagger-axe: an ancient Chinese weapon |
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木 |
tree: a tree, showing branches and roots |
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瓜 |
melon: a melon hanging on the vine |
Pictographic characters have the merit of conveying meaning directly, but this method of character construction has severe limitations. Among the millions of objects in the world, there are many which cannot be depicted according to any shape and there is no way to depict abstract concepts directly, so the pictographic method was only employed during the early stages of character evolution, and was later gradually phased out of use. From the Qin Dynasty to the present, only a handful of new pictographic characters have been devised — 伞([sǎn] umbrella), 凸([tū] convex), 凹([āo] concave), and few others. Nonetheless, pictographic characters remain the foundation of the whole edifice of Chinese characters; they are all simple single-element characters 独体字 which cannot be analyzed into smaller meaningful components. They can be used as building blocks in creating new characters. They are, however, few: among the 9,353 Chinese characters found in the 说文解字(Shuo Wen Jie Zi), only three hundred or so (4 percent of the total) are pictographic characters.