Vol IV: 木，本，末

Hi, everyone, welcome to my passion blog. For the fourth episode, I would love to compare two similar but different characters to illustrate an fascinating way to create Chinese character—ideographic, which is adding indication to certain character to make new ones.

So here is a really simple character

木

Which means tree, it is hieroglyphic. Let me do a quick evolving flow chart so you can see t the branches and the tip, the root. Wow, isn’t the character looks like the way we drew trees back to pre-school!

However, how can you add something to this basic character to create more character with more specific meaning. Here come the indication. I will write out the characters first, try to guess how the indication works here.

Those two characters are

本 and 末

Not too hard to tell the difference, right?

You see the character 本 is created by adding a short line at the bottom of 木 and 末 is created by adding the short line at the top.

Now, make a wild guess what do these two-character meaning?

Maybe you get it right, 本 means root, and origin; and 末mean the end, or the tip.

Using the base character 木，ancient Chinese people add the indication—the short line, at the end of the character to tell others, “here, this is the root of the tree” and add the indication at the top, saying “here is the tip”,

Take a quick look of bronze script, which was invented around 1000BCE to 700 BCE, coming right after oracle bone script. You can see how graphic the character was and the indication is added to the certain part of the tree.

Ideographic belongs to a system called

Chinese character classification. It includes six different methods of creating new characters, ideographic and pictographs are two off them. The more I dig into this well-developed system, the more I admire the wisdom of our ancestor. They build up the characters like architect, design it like artist. But through the process, they were still keeping the character readable and clear. I will introduce the rest in the later episodes. So, come back and check it out! Hope you enjoy this video 😊

Reference:

http://www.vividict.com/WordInfo.aspx?id=2552

http://www.vividict.com/WordInfo.aspx?id=2553