Chinese signs

The painted signs, pictograms make the minority of the Chinese written language. The absolute majority is made by so called ideograms. For example, hieroglyph first had the image of the person that was standing with the legs put widely. The line under his feet was also added. But this image was not describing the person but the thing he does. So the sign meant "to stand". The complicated ideogram contains the sense that is made from the parties of the association between the parts of the sign. Usually such signs were understood only by people of the epoch when they were created in the limits of cultural and territorial society.

The signs were also created from the graphical elements that lost their image character and got only conventional meaning. This is the origins of the majority of Chinese characters the sense of which is connected with the meaning of elements that make the sign.

The majority ofbChinese signs are neither drawings nor ideograms but belong to the third mixed type. In this writing the sign that means the word is read by reading of its part. Another part of the sign means the field to which the word belongs.

Nowadays the general look of the sign has no constant pronunciation. That is why the look of the character doesn't give anything and it won't help you to get to know the sound form of the character. The dictionaries of the Ancient Chinese combine the words according to the notions they belong to.