Learning the Language 211The Complexity of Chinese Writing—the
Learner’s Bane and Joy
Eventually, these various sorts of combinations came to far,
far outnumber primitive ‘pure’ pictographs in Chinese. When
Chalmers Johnson, a leading scholar of classical Chinese,
made an exhaustive analysis of more than 10,000 Chinese
characters in 1882, he found just 300 which he considered
to be true pictographs. Even more telling, a famous Chinese
etymological dictionary compiled around AD 100 analyses
9,353 characters, finding that just 364 (3.9 per cent) could
be clearly traced to a specific pictographic origin.
This process of character creation via ever-more complex
combinations of pictographs, increasingly impossible to
guess the meaning of based on their component parts,
each thus needing to be individually memorised, continued
over centuries. In many cases, the changes made were
minor variants of existing characters made for the sake of
literary flourishes by Chinese scholars long past. Eventually,
the growing weight of Chinese tradition (and the growing
burden of memorising the existing characters) squelched
such inventiveness. New characters have not been created
in recent centuries—which is just as well. Perhaps the most
complete modern Chinese dictionary, the Xiandai Hanyu
Dacidian, includes some 56,000 characters. Most are obscure
and archaic.
Less is More
One study done in Beijing estimated that 80 per cent of all
written Chinese documents can be read using just the 500 most
common characters, 91 per cent with the 1,000 most common,
and 99 per cent with the 2,500 most common. That said, for the
learner, it always seems that whatever you are currently reading
necessarily includes some of the most obscure characters.Meantime, even though character creation has halted,
word creation has of course continued, for unlike Egyptian
hieroglyphs, Chinese remains very much a living language.
Today, Chinese create new words by stringing together