chapter s6x--"show and tell"

In this chapter, we are shown how and where the symbols of words originated from. McCloud refers back to his 'iconic abstraction chart', where he places picture and words together next to each other in historys pages. this shows how back in the times of cave paintings and egyptian hyrogliphics, words were pretty much made out of a picture...or symbol that looked like or reperesented the word. Back when i studied chinses, i was very interested in how the individual characters came to be. They all began with a symbol that looked like the thing itself. One of my favourite examples is this one.

木 mù stands for “a tree” in Chinese, and it is very obvious as a pictogram, a picture of a tree.
By drawing two trees, we get 林 lín, which means forest. 林 Lín is also a Chinese surname. Adding one more tree makes a 森 林 sēnlin, meaning an even bigger forest! 森 sēn also describes something dark and gloomy, like how a dense forest can be like.
Here we see the beauty of using pictographs – they are understandable universally and the tehcnique of multiplying and combining different can create many extended meanings.
As we combine a picture of a person, 人 rén, with a tree, 木mù ，we end up with 休 xīu. --meaning 'A man leaning on a tree' - he is having a rest, 休 xīu!



The history of chinese characters is very much the same as egyptian hyrogliphics or aztec carvings. And over many centuaries, these sumbols evolved and changed into what we now see as the modern characters. For example, in the chart below-- the first row of characters says 'person', or 'human'. IT started off with a simple few lines that looked like a human standing up. Over the many hundreds of years, it has developed to mans likings into its modern form at the end of the row. Just looking at this chart makes me wonder how long it would have taken man to develope these characters into what they are knowns as today...how many chinese characters are there all together? ALOT!... and...how many different languages are there in the world ? :S..... and to think about just how many different symbols and generations passed that this process would have taken intrigues me!...after all every language has its deep histories and all would have surely come from a process much like this on.







chinese characters are intersting in the way that they can be made up of many different charaters put together, like playing pictionary perhaps, where you are required to draw pictures that mean certain things when put together. the image above shows the multiple different symbols in ancient chinses characters put together to form the word 'law'. The image below shows how a cluster of words related to the word "garden", put together forms the word garden. The word "garden" would have evolved from a symbol much different from its modern form like every other word. Yet each of the characters used within this word would have their own history line of different symbols once again to develop into what they are today. I find this concept very interesting as there is so much more behind just this one language..'chinses'...yet there are hundreds of other languages using different techniques and developements! Ahhh its crazzyy...

Back to the book...Chapter six refers to the equalities of word and picture. McCloud states that words can balance pictures out and that pictures can balance words out. I agree with this statement as to me, it is impressively true to my understandings. When McCloud shows us how he can draw the whole scenes out with a caption given to him, and write captions with only an image given to him...i thaught about "guess the captions"--the game commonly seen in the game and comic section of newspapers. It is all very simular--how there are compotitions held where we are given a single image and we have to match it with a single caption which we think is suitable to balance the picture out. With an image given to us, we are then able to explore as far as we want with words to tying the meanings together. This works the same way with say-pictionary- where we are given a word and have the freedom of drawing what ever we like to depict this word.