The Discovery of Genesis (13 page)

The position of the horizontal strokes is important
Husband
is
, but if the upper horizontal stroke is placed at the top of the figure,
, this designates
heavens, firmament, or sky
, since nothing is higher than the “sky.” Thus
, and
are all characters built upon radical 37
, which in turn is formed from radical 9
.
¹

At this point it should also be noted that Chinese characters are formed in such a way that they have the familiar configuration of a square. Therefore the constituent radicals may be stretched out or squeezed together in order to conform to a given space in the total figure. For artistry’s sake, vertical or horizontal lines of adjacent radicals in a character are lined up as in
, or merged as in
, a combination of
and
. The base of one radical may become the top of another so there need be no repetition of lines, as in
, where and
, and
share the same horizontal stroke.

Two or more simple pictographs joined together express an entirely new idea, giving birth to an ideograph. To illustrate, here are some samples:

,
tongue
, is a protrusion from the
mouth
and is composed of
thousand
and
mouth
. Note the “p’ieh” at the top of the figure
to indicate the
thousand
“movements” of the tongue.