Elegant Long-Tailed Birds Singing: Unveiling the Journey of Chinese Characters

Is this the first time you’re reading an article I wrote? Or have you been following my series “Unveiling the Journey of Chinese Characters” for a while?

In the last sentence of my last article, I asked everyone to guess which Chinese character I want to introduce in this article. Did you make a guess?

It’s “鳥 (Bird)”.

Compared to the characters “魚 fish” and “火 flame”, the Chinese character “鳥 bird” is more like a lifelike picture.

Maybe it is because “魚 fish” is inconvenient to observe in water, while “flame” has no fixed shape and is difficult to describe. Birds that can be seen more easily exhibit a greater variety of images in ancient Chinese characters.

Let’s take a look at following picture containing numerous instances of the character “鳥 bird” which were engraved more than 3,000 years ago.

Did you notice that lots of characters of “鳥 bird” are engraved in the shape of a long tail?

Yes, the character “鳥” is originally meaning “long-tailed bird” (Or long-tailed birds).

You might be curious about short-tailed birds as well — I’ll introduce those in the next article. :P

“鳥 bird” is also one of the radicals in Chinese characters. Almost all of the characters containing “鳥” refers to various long-tailed birds, but there are some exceptions.

For examples, “鳴” is contains both “口 (mouth)” and “鳥”, and it originally referred to animals sounds (especially birds), then gradually took on other meanings; “鶱” means the appearance of a bird flying.

We’ve already learned three Chinese characters now. What do you think about it?

There are 6 categories in Chinese character classification. I’ve only introduced the simplest and the most fascinating one at the beginning. I hope you can enjoy this series of articles. See you next time.