Page:The Outline of History Vol 1.djvu/249

 as we have already noted earlier, the Chinese language consists of a comparatively few elementary monosyllabic sounds, which are all used in a great variety of meanings, and the Chinese soon discovered that a number of these pictographs and ideographs could be used also to express other ideas, not so conveniently pictured, but having the same sound. Characters so used are called phonograms. For example, the sound fang meant not only "boat," but "a place," "spinning," "fragrant," "inquire," and several other meanings according to the context. But while a boat is easy to draw, most of the other meanings are undrawable. How can one draw "fragrant" or "inquire"? The Chinese, therefore, took the same sign for all these meanings of fang, but added to each of them another distinctive sign, the determinative, to show what sort of fang was intended. A "place" was indicated by the same sign as for "boat" (fang) and the determinative sign for "earth"; "spinning" by the sign for fang and the sign for