Vol VI: 木，林，森

Hello everyone, welcome to my passion blog: Origin of Chinese Character. In the six episode of this video series, we will keep exploring Compound ideographs using some different examples, which will for sure blow your mind.

As I mentioned in the last episode, compound ideographs are just a combination of two or more different ideographic are pictographic. Maybe I need to correct my self here. We can also combine same ideographic and pictographic. (write out definition and erase)

I hope you guys all familiar with this character so far since I used it as an example several times before.

木Mu

A tree right? What if we add another tree? (write out 林, 木x2) hey! We create a new character, lin, means woods. Wait a second, what if we add another tree? The third character is created, sen, means forest or a area full of trees.

Notice the evolving flow of this group? 木 is just a single tree, while 林 can be a middle size woods, but 森 is a whole forest. Wow

However, ancient Chinese people did not stop here. They created more characters like this.

Thousands year ago, ancient Chinese people define the sun as the brightest object in the sky and write it as 日.

This simple character is created though ideographic, a circle represents the shape of the sun, while the dot, which become a short line later, indicate the light. (draw a sun, then the oracle bon script)

Then people were thinking, can we combine it together also? So， they created 晶, which originally means a group of shining starts in the sky, but latter it goes by brilliant, glittering or light from the universe.

There are a whole bunch of characters like this, I’ll pick some commonly used.

淼 comes from 水 water, and the compound ideographic means a wide expand of water

磊comes from 石 stone, which means build, or a heap of stone.

众comes from 人 people, which means the public, a group of people, crowds.

Isn’t is interesting to notice the meaning of those compound ideographic are just a large collection of the simple pictographic.

Thanks for watching, I hope you enjoy this video, See you next time.

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