The context of structure of Chinese language

Needham (1959) says that the mental mechanism for the building and the recognition of ideograms by association is a "mental equation". " More primitive elements of Chinese language were generally pictograms, that is pictures reduced to the essential, made conventional, at the end very stylised. Naturally, concrete objects as the heavenly bodies, animals, plants, implements and instruments could be easier pictured. We reported some in the first part of the list two, having them origins in a Haluon's short popular leader. You will note, the most part of them, in the course of the time, have been included in radicals, (you can see later); but, it isn't always like that: hsiang (elephant) isn't a radical, but it has been classified under the radical number 152 (shih, pig) on the other hand, hu (wine's recipe) has been classified under the radical 33 (shid, studious). This depended on decisions made by lexicographers of successive ages.

In this way, the writing's fan extended and includes indirect symbols by different types of metaphoric substitution, like the part for the whole, the attribute for thing, the effect for the cause, the instrument for the activity, the gesture for the action, and so on. The list shows as the word chin, go up, derives from the picture of two footprints turning up; and as the word fù, that means "summit" derives from the ancient pot's picture.

A third characters class has composed of semantic combinations of two or more than two pictograms, making those called compound by association. In this way fu, wife, has composed by women's signs, hand and broom, fu, father, by the ancient signs of hand and stick; hao, to love, or good, combines signs of women and child.
A particularly interesting example, is the word that means male or man, nan, that includes the radicals of plough and field, indicates " who uses his force in the fields". Obviously, the sounds of the different elements lose themselves in the sound " that result", because this sign existed before that, to represent it, the scribes associated signs having other sounds, So, we have a sort of equation: li + thine = nan. These equations make up a mental half-conscious foundation for people acquiring familiarity with the language" (Needham, 1981).

(source: dlibrary.acu.edu.au)