210 CultureShock! China
and for the army of terra-cotta warriors who accompanied
him to his grave). But by that time, characters were quite
stylised relative to their original forms. The modern
character for ‘rain’ is ზ; already, the pictographic origin is
less obvious.
Then, and crucially, pictographs began to be combined
to create more complex characters that had new and more
abstract meanings. In some cases, these more abstract
meanings can be guessed from the combination of
pictographs. For instance, rain with lightning streaking from
the clouds to the ground is (but in modern script, it is ),
traditionally meant ‘lightning storm’. In modern usage, it has
come to mean ‘electricity’. But the combinations are far from
always being as obvious as that. For instance, the combination
of a person (ಭ) passing a door () became the character
(in modern script ഁ, which also means ‘lightning’.) One
traditional etymology explains that lightning happens ‘in a
flash’, just as a person moves quickly through a door. This
explanation is wonderful, but hardly intuitive; ‘person in
doorway’ does not automatically suggest ‘lightning’.
Additionally, as we now know also about Egyptian
hieroglyphs, in many cases Chinese combinations are based
on sound as much as or more than they are on pictographic
content. For instance, the character that means ‘meat’
or ‘flesh’ (ೄ) is often combined with other characters
to suggest parts of the human body. The characters it
combines with generally suggest the sound of the body part,
at least the sound that was in use at the time the character
was created.Bird’s Nest and Brain
The flesh character combines with the top part of the character that
means ‘bird’s nest’ (Ӟ) (today pronounced ‘chao’, and in Middle
Chinese closer to ‘nao’) to make the character ା (also pronounced
‘nao’), which means ‘brain’. The etymology is simply phonetic:
this, the components tell us, is the character for that body part
which sounds like ‘nao’. We defy anyone, using any logic other
than phonetics, to explain why a fleshy bird’s nest should otherwise
suggest ‘brain’.