onalized into the
letters of an alphabet. These picture-characters, then, accumulated
little by little, until they comprised all the common objects which
could be easily and rapidly delineated--sun, moon, stars, various
animals, certain parts of the body, tree, grass and so forth, to the
number of two or three hundred. The next step was to a few compound
pictograms which would naturally suggest themselves to primitive man:
[Ch] the sun just above the horizon = "dawn"; [Ch] trees side by side =
"a forest"; [Ch] a mouth with something solid coming out of it = "the
tongue"; [Ch] a mouth with vapor or breath coming out of it = "words."

Suggestive compounds.

Phonetic characters.

But a purely pictographic script has its limitations. The more complex
natural objects hardly come within its scope; still less the whole body
of abstract ideas. While writing was still in its infancy, it must have
occurred to the Chinese to join together two or more pictorial
characters in order that their association might suggest to the mind
some third thing or idea. "Sun" and "moon" combined in this way make the
character [Ch], which means "bright"; woman and child make [Ch] "good";
"fields" and "strength" (that is, labour in the fields) produce the
character [Ch] "male"; two "men" on "earth" [Ch] signifies "to
sit"--before chairs were known; the "sun" seen through "trees" [Ch]
designates the east; [Ch] has been explained as (1) a "pig" under a
"roof," the Chinese idea, common to the Irish peasant, of home, and also
(2) as "several persons" under "a roof," in the same sense; a "woman"
under a "roof" makes the character [Ch] "peace"; "words" and "tongue"
[Ch] naturally suggest "speech"; two hands ([Ch], in the old form [Ch])
indicate friendship; "woman" and "birth" [Ch] = "born of a woman," means
"clan-name," showing that the ancient Chinese traced through the mother
and not through the father. Interesting and ingenious as many of these
combinations are, it is clear that their number, too, must in any
practical system of writing be severely limited. Hence it is not
surprising that this class of characters, correctly called ideograms, as
representing ideas and not objects, should be a comparatively small one.
Up to this point there seemed to be but little chance of the written
language reaching a free field for expansion. It had run so far on lines
sharply distinct from those of ordinary speech. There was nothing in the
character _per s