On the meaning of ‘common sense’ in the construction of Chinese characters

In the classical theory of ancient Chinese character creation, all Chinese characters are classified into six categories: pictographs, self-explanatory characters, associative compounds, mutually explanatory characters, phonetic loan characters and pictophonetic characters (Xu, 1981). The construction of Chinese characters started from ancient people’s observation and depiction of the natural world, which shaped many pictographs. As direct depiction can represent only visualized things, self-explanatory characters were created to represent abstract things or concepts. Both pictographs and self-explanatory characters are single characters. This means that each character is a brandnew creation. As a result of the increasing demand for new characters to express people’s cognition of the objective world, character synthesis and other ways of character creation were invented, including associative compounds, mutually explanatory characters, phonetic loan characters and pictophonetic characters. According to archaeologists, the earliest Chinese characters can be traced back to oracle bone scripts in the Shang Dynasty (from about 1600 BC to about 1046 BC). Before the Qin Dynasty (from 221 BC to 207 BC), the creation of Chinese characters was continuously evolving, and a set of rules (the six ways to create characters) was observed across the states that developed their own character systems. Collectively referred to as ‘Large Seal script’, these characters differed greatly from modern Chinese characters. In the Qin Dynasty, the various character patterns from the