Start from the two the book gives. 人 (person) keeps the two legs of a standing figure. 木 (tree) keeps a trunk with branches spreading above and roots below. In both, the character is a simplified drawing of the thing, reduced to the fewest strokes that still identify it.
Sample answer — four more characters and the reasoning for each:
| Character | Meaning | How the shape carries the meaning |
|---|---|---|
| 山 | mountain | Three peaks rising from one base line — a mountain range drawn in three strokes |
| 日 | sun / day | A closed shape with a mark in the middle: the disc of the sun. Older forms were a circle with a dot; the square is what happens when you write a circle quickly with a brush |
| 雨 | rain | A line for the sky, a shape below it for the cloud, and four short strokes for falling drops |
| 門 | gate / door | Two door-leaves facing each other, each with its panel — a double gate seen from the front |
Then take one step further, and show a compound. This is what makes the system powerful rather than merely picturesque: pictures can be combined to write ideas that cannot themselves be drawn.
木 + 木 + 木 = 森 — a dense forest
日 (sun) + 月 (moon) = 明 — bright
What to explain in your note. A logographic character stands for a word or morpheme, not for a sound. So two people who pronounce the same word completely differently can still read the same character — which is one reason the script held together across a very large country with many spoken varieties.
- Cuneiform — wedge marks pressed into damp clay, adapted to write several different languages: 'cuneiform was widely used all over Mesopotamia by different city-states, even though they spoke different languages'.
- Chinese — a sign per word, still in use today, and the direct descendant of the oracle-bone symbols of Fig. 4.36.
- The Harappan script — pictographic, and still undeciphered.