So my studies of Chinese (that will eventually led to some kind of art, I just don't know i which form yet) has at least helped me understand how the language works.

My notebook

The Chinese language has relatively simple grammar. Like Danish and English, it relies heavily on fixed word order, especially subject–verb–object, and on adverbs and particles to express tense and grammatical relations. Verbs for example do not change form to mark tense the way many other languages do.

The language has a lot of homophones (sounds that are the same - like flower and flour in English). For that reason modern Chinese has compounds, sometimes made from two words that mean the same - 道路 - dàolù - means road-way. Each of the two characters mean road in itself, but in practical life longer words does give less misunderstandings.

A funny example of the homophones in Chinese was made by the scholar Yuen Ren Chao in 1936. He made a small story called Mr. Shi Eating Lions, only using the syllable shi.You can hear it here. Note that each syllable in Chinese can be pronounced in four different ways - called tones. I had a very hard time asking for the toilet back in the nineties when I visited China with the Copenhagen Art Academy. That was a pretty embarrassing experience, and I remember the word to this very day for that reason: cèsuǒ (厕所).

But the reason I am really interested in Chinese is the characters have semantic meaning. In the Latin alphabet an A is simply a sound. It is a way to relate to a spoken language. In Danish we have a lot of vowels and we have added three more letters (æ,ø,å) to ease this transition from letter to sound. Chinese characters are not as some think images where each is a drawing of some concept. But it has roots in images. Just like the Egyptian hieroglyphs the characters had to also refer to the spoken language and therefore very early on you had a mixture of semantic and phonetic parts often included in one character.

This means that a character which originally had one meaning, can be used in another meaning now because at some point the phonetics of the word sounded like another absolutely not related word. An example 萬 was a pictograph of a scorpion. The word for "ten thousand" sounded essentially the same in Old Chinese, but there was no character for it yet, so the scribes simply borrowed 萬 to write "ten thousand".

So it is not just neat pictures of what is said - but it is also that. It is a living history of meaning, changes, and ambiguity - which is the real beauty of it. A word in a poem can have this semantic history inside it and the pictorial elements are still there. Look at this extremely beautiful verse.

霰雪紛其無垠兮，雲霏霏而承宇

It is 2300 years old (older than the current standard script, kaishu, which took its form about 1700–1800 years ago) and it means "Violent snow fills everything chaotically — the clouds snow, snow (or rather snows heavily by repeating the same character), and are like a roof over us."

Watch how the poet has used the rain radical in five places out of eleven:

(The rain radical -> 雨)

And the five characters where it is present: 霰雪雲霏霏 (one time it's a dublicate)

For a painter like me this is simply too fascinating and beautiful.