It was cut into strips, and tied into books. That was cheap, plentiful, durable, and easy to erase and rewrite characters. We had silk (expensive), bronze (expensive and impractical), and oracle bones (religious use only).
Well, it’s for a straight-forward, practical reason.įor a couple thousand years before paper was invented writing materials were limited. Why? Why are all these characters written with the animals balancing on their tails? If you look at the oracle bone script for rat, tiger and elephant you’ll see they are clearly pictures of the animal they signify.īut if you look at the modern versions, you’ll notice something odd, they’re all rotated 90 degrees onto their sides. Pictograms are the earliest characters, thousands of years old, but many are still used every day.
Radical 女 nǚ (woman) and phonetic 馬 mǎ (horse) = 媽 mā, mother (your mum sounds like a horse).īut a small minority are pictograms, that is to say a picture of the thing they represent. The vast majority (around 80%) of Chinese characters are made up of a radical (the general meaning) and a phonetic.
