The emblem of the 2008 Beijing Olympics Games is a Chinese seal. The character on the seal looks like a human figure running. It also looks like a distorted wen (文) “letter, literature” or a dancing jing (京) “capital”, which is the same as the jing (京) in Beijing (北京). The ancient Chinese characters gave inspiration to the designers of the emblem and the character on the seal cleverly expresses the spirit of the "People’s Olympics” (人文奥运) advocated by the organizers of the Beijing Olympics.
The ancient Chinese began creating their writing system by drawing pictures of themselves and what they observed. This is called the xangxing (象形) “formal resemblance” method. The character ren (人) in renwen (人文) “humanistic” in its earliest form depicted a human figure standing sideways. Please look at the character in the oracle-bone script and the bronze script of the Shang dynasty (1600 BC—1046 BC) and Zhou dynasty (1046 BC—256 BC) in the illustrations. The shorter stroke slanting downward represents the arms of a human figure while the longer stroke represents the head and the body. By means of just two simple lines the ancients drew a vivid picture of a human figure. Because of this, we say that the character 人 is a xiangxing zi “pictograph”. Through continual development and change, the character is now written 人, which consists of one left falling stroke丿and one right falling stroke . As a result, it doesn’t quite look like a human figure anymore. The character 文, according to some scholars, also represents a human figure, only it is a frontal figure with tattoos on the boby 人 is a simple graph, which can be used as a basic component unit (zigen “character root” or pianpang “radical”) for character creation. In this way many new compound graphs can be created. For example, when one 人 follows another 人, the character cong (从) “follow” is created, which is used in words like suicong (随从) “entourage”, tingcong (听从) “listen and obey”, fucong (服从) “obey”, etc. When three 人 are put together, they form the character zhong (众), which means “many people".
This character is used in words like dɑzhong (大众) “populace"and qunzhong (群众) “the masses”. The way characters like 从 and 众 were created was termed huiyi (会意) “sense conjunction” by the ancients. The term means that a new character is formed by combining the senses of two component parts or root characters.
In compound characters, the graph 亻as a component piɑnpɑng (偏旁) “radical’ is often placed to the left and is termed donlirenr (单立人) “single standing human”. Characters that have this component usually have something to do with humans. For example, 亻standing by the side of a mu (木) “tree”forms the character xiu (休) in xiuxi (休息) “rest”, which indicates “a human taking a rest under a tree”. If we add the character dai (呆) to 亻, we get the character bao (保), which in ancient times was written as a human carrying a baby on his back, so this character means “protect, maintain”. 亻placed by the side of yi (衣) forms the character yi (依) in words like yikɑo (依靠) and yilai (依赖), which means “(a human) leaning against (something), depending on (something)”. In this character, the component 衣 indicates the pronunciation of the character while the radical 亻gives a rough indication of its meaning.
Characters that are created in the same way as 依 are called xingsheng zi (形声字) “signific-phonetic compound characters”. Incidentally, in the big family of Chinese characters, signific-phonetic compounds exceed all other types of characters in number, accounting over 90% of all characters.
Can you think of some other characters that have the single-human radical as a component and explain their relationship with humans?
