Six Principles of Chinese characters

Chinese characters were formed in different ways. Our ancestors found six principles that underlay the formation of Chinese characters, and called this principles六書. Chinese characters were thus classified into six categories: pictogram象形, ideogram指事, semantic loan(zhuan zhu) 轉注, semantic compound會意, phonetic loan假借, and phono-semantic compound形聲.

• Pictogram
A pictogram is a sign derived from depicting a thing that is picturable.
e.g. 齒、眉、自、心

• Ideogram
An ideogram is a sign which indicates a relatively abstract idea by adding an indexical sign to a pictogram.
e.g. 上、下、本、末

• Semantic Compound
A semantic compound is a sign that combines two or more pictograms to represent a word with the meaning of the combined pictogram.
e.g. 光、泉、黑、災

• Phono-Semantic Compound
A phono-semantic compound is a sign which indicates both the meaning and the sound of a word that it represents — one part of the sign indicates the meaning, and the other part the sound.
e.g. 陰、陽、降、陶

• Semantic Loan
Different people have different interpretations of the term semantic loan (zhuan zhu). One interpretation is that it refers to the fact that the same sign or character may be used to represent two or several words with related meanings. At a later epoch, this same character may be differentiated in shape so that each of the words related in meaning is represented by a character with a unique shape.
e.g. 舟、船

• Phonetic Loan Character
A phonetic loan is a case of phonetic transfer in which the same sign or character is used to represent two or several homophonous or nearly homophonous words.
e.g. 命令、縣令