Indicatives

Indicatives refer to the way of forming abstract characters with indicating signs. There are two subtypes of indicatives: one is composed of a pictograph and an indicating sign.

Indicatives account for the smallest percentage of Chinese characters. The reason is that for most characters there are simpler ways of composition: characters referring to material objects may be composed pictographically and those expressing abstract concepts may be composed ideographically or by way of phonic-compounding.

  Ideographics

Ideographs are compounds, composed of two or more existing characters. In terms of structure, an ideograph is a composition of two or more characters side by side or one on top of another. In terms of meaning, an ideograph is also a composition of the meanings of its component characters. For example, the single character  stands for a tree, two trees together  refers to a group of trees-grove, and the character made up of three trees  means a place full of trees, a forest. And the character  consists of (man) and (tree) , signifies that man is taking a rest against a tree.

  Phonetic-semantic compounds

A phonetic compound consists of a semantic radical and a phonetic radical. The semantic radical indicates its semantic field and the phonetic radical its pronunciation. For example, phonetic-semantic compounds with (tree) as the radical like (pine), (cypress), (peach) are all names of trees; those with (hand) as the radical like (push), (pull), (lift) all refer to actions performed by the hand. However the semantic radical only shows the general semantic class of the character, not its specific meaning. The specific meanings of the characters sharing the same radical-are differentiated by the phonetics they each have. The phonetics in some phonetic-semantic compounds may also be semantic.

There are many objects and abstract ideas which are difficult to express through-pictography or ideography. For example,  the general term for birds, but there are thousands of types of birds in the world, and it is impossible to differentiate each of them by way of pictography or ideography. But this is easily achieved in phonetic-semantic compounds by adding different phonetics to the radical , e.g. (pigeon), (crane), (chicken) and   (swan). Thus there is an enormous number of phonetic compounds in Chinese, and this number is growing larger and larger in the modern period. Statistics show that phonetic-semantic compounds accounted for 80% of the total characters in the Origin of Chinese Characters (Shuo Wen Jie Zi) of the Han Dynasty, 88% in Aspects of the Six Categories of Chinese Characters (Liu Shu Lue) of the Song Dynasty, and 90% in Kangxi Dictionary of the Qing Dynasty. In the modern simplified form currently in use, phonetic compounds make up an even larger percent.