ain text. The four characters are “” (one), “”(person, big), “”(heart), “” (water). These characters closely resemble the shapes or characteristics of the objects to which they refer, though their forms today might not hold as much of a resemblance as their ancient forms. One can compare the modern simplified Chinese character against their ancient Zhuanti forms in the figures. Such characters are called pictographic (Xiangxing) characters.

Initially, the character “” (sky) refers to the head, the primary part of a person, by placing a bar over the character “”(person, big). The meaning later developed and became the sky, heaven and god, the primary part of everything as ancient Chinese people believed. This way of forming new characters from radical parts is called “simple” ideogram (Zhishi) or “combination character” ideogram (Huiyi). These two mechanisms are in fact slightly different in that the first is based on only one radical part, usually with only a very simple additional stroke while the second usually involves two radical parts. For a character formed by these two principles, its meaning usually can be read out intuitively from the combination. For example, the character ‘’ (forest) mentioned in the introduction of the main text follows the principle of “combined” ideogram: it is a stack of three ‘’(tree). However, in this work, we will not distinguish the two mechanisms.

The character ‘’ (, ashamed) is a compound character of ‘’ and ‘’. It follows a different principle, which later became popular in forming new Chinese characters, the so-called pictophonetic formation (Xingsheng). Here, ‘’ and ‘’ have exactly the same pronunciation, and the meaning of ‘’ refers to a psychological phenomenon, which was believed to be related to ‘’ (heart). The same pictophonetic relation holds among ‘’ (add), ‘’and ‘’ (water): the first two share the pronunciation while the last part ‘’ is remotely connected to the meaning of ‘