Sinographs 101 · Chapter 02
The world in pictures
Six characters, and every one of them is a drawing:
| Sign | Key | Says | Means | How to see it |
|---|---|---|---|---|
| 日 | sun | the sun; a day | the sun-disc squared by the brush, the middle stroke its spark | |
| 月 | moon | the moon; a month | a crescent, shaded within — always drawn waxing, never full | |
| 山 | mountain | mountain, hill | three peaks in a row, the middle one tallest | |
| 水 | water | water; a river | a stream mid-current — the center line the flow, the rest eddies | |
| 木 | tree | tree; wood | a trunk with branches reaching up and roots reaching down | |
| 口 | mouth | mouth; an opening | an open mouth, squared off by the brush like the sun was |
This is the script’s oldest layer: things with shapes, drawn. With the chain and the cosmology of chapter 00 and the marks of chapter 01, you now own seventeen characters — every one simple, none built from another. Hold that thought; it becomes the engine of the whole course next chapter.
Read the landscape
From the Analects — the sayings of Confucius, the book this course will return to more than any other. The speaker formula that opens it arrives next chapter, so we begin inside the quotation marks:
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Note what the parallelism does: the two boxed words are the same character doing the same job — delights — so the clauses mirror. Classical prose leans on this symmetry constantly; the boxes are already teaching you grammar.
The sun pairs with the moon in the word 日月, rì yuè — sun-and-moon, which is to say time itself — and pairs with chapter 01’s 中 to tell the hour:
urn:nabu:kanripo:KR1a0008:011:14a · license: attribution.
The tree stands in one of the Changes’ image-formulas — four characters, three of them yours:
urn:nabu:kanripo:KR1a0001:048:4a · license: attribution.
And the mouth gets a statue and a river. When Confucius visited the ancestral temple of Zhou, the story goes, he found a golden figure by the steps with its mouth bound shut three times over — the old world’s monument to guarded speech:
urn:nabu:kanripo:KR3k0008:030:17a · license: attribution.
What pictures cannot say
Drawable things run out almost immediately. How do you draw bright? yesterday? not yet? A picture-script would stall at a few hundred nouns — and the real script did not stall, because drawing and pointing are only two of its moves. The next chapters hand you the other two, each built on the characters you now hold: characters that combine, and characters that lend nothing but their sound. The picture-story you may have heard — “every character is a little painting” — is charming and wrong; by chapter 04 you will see the true engine, and you will own every part of it before it runs.
Where this goes
Seventeen characters, all simple. That was deliberate, and the wait is over: next chapter the master starts speaking, and characters start combining — with every part of every compound already yours.