Sinographs 101 · Chapter 05
The busiest words
Open any page of any classic and count: the commonest character in the whole classical corpus is not a king or a mountain. It is a little grammar word. Here are six characters from the very top of the table:
| Sign | Key | Says | Means | How to see it |
|---|---|---|---|---|
| 之 | of | of; him, her, it — the classical linker | an old drawing of a foot setting out over a line — but the word it writes is pure grammar | |
| 不 | not | not — the plain negation | a calyx under its stem, by the received account — borrowed early and forever for "not" | |
| 也 | indeed | the sentence-final "it is so" | what the picture once was is honestly disputed; its whole classical life is the closing beat of a statement | |
| 又 | again | again, further | a right hand in profile, two strokes | |
| 有 | have | to have; there is | the hand again, holding meat — the meat-shape came to be written like your moon | |
| 十 | ten | ten; complete | the tally-mark that closed the count |
之 is rank one: nothing in three thousand years of classical writing is written more often. 不 is rank two, 也 rank four, 有 rank nine. Learn these six and the statistics of every page tilt toward you at once.
The fifth move: borrow the whole word
Chapter 04 showed characters borrowing a sound-half (the 木 inside 沐). The little words go further: how do you draw of? not? indeed? You cannot — so the script borrowed whole pictures for their sound alone and let the original meanings fall away. The foot-over-a-line was some concrete old word; the grammar word zhī simply moved into the empty house.1 That is why the table’s “how to see it” column suddenly hedges: with borrowed words, the picture-story is history, not meaning. The stroke shapes are still yours to write — 之 in three strokes, 也 in three — but from here on, frequency is the teacher, and the picture is only the address.
The first reading with no boxes at all
You have met this clause twice — first as a wall of boxes, then half-lit. Today it opens completely:
urn:nabu:kanripo:KR1h0004:001:2a · license: attribution.
Look at what each word does: 未 “not yet” (chapter 04), 之 “it” standing for the thing in question, 有 “there has been,” 也 closing the statement like a struck bell. This is classical grammar in miniature — negation, object, verb, final particle — and every stroke of it is yours.
Have, and the composing numbers
有 goes straight to work on a line you know:
urn:nabu:kanripo:KR1h0059:001:2b · license: attribution.
十 multiplies the counting you already own, because classical numbers compose: 二十, èr shí, is “two tens” — twenty; 三十, sān shí, thirty. And in old dates the annals write “fifteen” as ten and five — with, of all things, 有 standing in for its cousin 又 “again”: the two hands of this chapter meeting inside a number.
And with 之 the two-character phrases of chapters past grow into real classical syntax, read straight: 天下之大, tiān xià zhī dà, “the greatness of all under heaven”; 山中之人, shān zhōng zhī rén, “a person amid the mountains.” The little 之 hinges them — X 之 Y, “the Y of X” — and you will now see that hinge on every page you ever read.
Where this goes
Thirty-five characters, and the reading percentages have jumped: these six alone are about one character in every sixteen of the whole classical corpus. Next: an arrow, the verb “to know,” and the beard that got borrowed — the sentence about the unrecognized gentleman is one chapter away from opening.