The form and meaning of Chinese characters are closely related, that is, form expresses meaning and form contains meaning. This feature is particularly prominent in the ancient Chinese characters before Xiao Zhuan. In Shang and Zhou Dynasties, Oracle Bone Inscriptions and Jin Wen expressed the meaning of words in an image way, which had a strong color of depicting objects. They express the meaning of words in a direct or tortuous way, knowing the meaning according to the meaning, and knowing the sound by the meaning, which is the characteristic of ideographic words.
In today's writing below the official script, the structure of Chinese characters has changed from lines to strokes, completely changing the face of pictographs. Most Chinese characters can no longer express the meaning of words from the form, but they seem to record syllables, but in fact, different forms still have the function of distinguishing semantics. Take homophones for example, such as "Wen, Mosquito, Wen, Wen, Wen, Wen, Wen". Although the pronunciation is the same, the form is different, which often indicates semantic orientation. For example, mosquitoes are related to insects, patterns are related to patterns, and culture is related to water. These still mark their semantic differences, but they are further symbolized and have not fundamentally got rid of ideographic.
Chinese characters do not directly represent the pronunciation of words, but use specific symbols to represent words or morphemes in the language. Words or morphemes with homonyms are generally distinguished in different forms, and the same word can also be expressed in different forms. Although most Chinese characters nowadays are pictophonetic characters, they are temporary guest appearances, not full-time phonetic characters, such as "Gang", because pictophonetic characters are just borrowed sounds. People, fire sounds and fire are all ideograms, but if we change the word, such as "light", fire will no longer ideogram, but ideogram. Another example is "horse" from the mother, horse sound, horse is the sound side. In the word "riding", the horse acts as the shape side. So there is no fixed phonetic system and no independent phonetic value.
It is precisely because of the ideographic nature of Chinese characters that Chinese characters have the characteristics of transcending time and space. As long as we know the meaning of a word, we can still understand it no matter how the pronunciation changes. This is why after thousands of years, the pronunciation of Chinese is completely different from that of ancient Chinese, and we can still read ancient books. It is also why the pronunciation of each dialect is different, but it does not affect the accurate understanding of Chinese characters by people who speak their respective dialects. For example, shoes, knowing and caring are pronounced differently in different dialects, but Chinese characters are all written in the same way. You may not understand it when you say it, but you will understand it when you write it. Another example is street-street (gāi), guest-guest (qiě), hole-hole, dirty-buried, etc. There are written and spoken words, which others may not understand, but once written, they all understand. Therefore, Chinese characters also have the visual effect of super spoken language, which is the same as its super time and space.