I’m just an enthusiast, so forgive me if I’m asking something too simple. Students of languages that utilizes Chinese characters often uses pictograms as a way to memorize them. For exemple, comparing the character of mountain (山) to the shape of a mountain, but how much these comparisons really reflect a historically accurate process of the creation of these ideograms based on the actual thing they represent? If anyone has any in depth articles about that, I appreciate if you could share!
(Sorry for any English mistakes, it’s not my first language)
2 comments
Well, there’s definitely a number of characters that are pictograms through-and-through, it’s only that they got simplified and stylised throughout the millennia. 山 is a good example, it has the ground and three peaks, simple as that. These are still just a fraction of all the kanji out there, however. Most characters are compounds, and even when they feature these pictograms as components, they are only used either phonetically, to hint at the pronunciation, or semantically, to link its meaning to a particular field. Both learners and textbooks habitually force etymologically unfounded explanations to the logic behind such characters, so better be vary of those, but otherwise, if you stick to the more primitive ones（川、木、人、口、目、手 etc.）those will be more-or-less accurate.
I don’t have any articles, but [Jigen](https://jigen.net/kanji/23665) shows older, sometimes more pictographic character forms.