|

Writing in China was created over three thousand years ago. As with some other cultures, such as those of the Sumerians, Egyptians, and Hittites, many Chinese characters evolved from simple pictographs that illustrated a person or thing.
Since its beginnings, written Chinese has changed a great deal. While pictographs were a convenient means of representing nouns, they were not applicable to adjectives and verbs. Today, only a small number of Chinese characters are pictographs. While other forms of characters include ideographs and compound ideographs, the majority of Chinese characters are phonetic compounds, which have an element that conveys meaning and another indicating pronunciation.
|
|