The art of writing in the Far East emerged in China, between 3000 and 4000 BC, and spread as far as Japan, throughout Asia and the Middle East. This script is made up of signs which convey meaning without representing spoken language. It is a form of language you have to see to understand: it is not phonetic. These signs are ideograms, based on the simplest representations of elements in Nature such as the sun, the earth, the rain, a hand.
These ideograms gradually caught on in Japan, around 500 AD. These Chinese characters adapted by the Japanese language are called KANJIS.
An ideogram represents, in quasi pictorial form, a reality, an emotion, a concept. Among the simplest, there is the one for "China", also known as "the Middle Empire", expressed by a sign emphasizing, in graphic form, the idea of symmetry. |
