Here’s another neat example of Chinese characters conveying their meaning through pictographs. I learned this one from a colleague and was able to apply it when visiting Tiger Leaping Gorge. The character itself is the character for “gorge” or “canyon”. Phonetically, it’s pronounced “Xia2″, the “2″ indicating a medium-pitched tone rising to a higher pitch. “Xia” is pronounced something close to “Shyah” in English. Here is the character:

The character above is actually made up of two other characters. The character on the right is “Jia1″, where “1″ is the high level tone. This character can be either a noun or a verb. As a noun, the character (most commonly with a “zi” sound after it) means “clip”, “pliers”, or something that can hold two things together with a force like a clip. As a verb, it means to “pinch” or “clip”. Here’s the character:

And, the character on the right is a simple one:

This character is “shan1″, which means “mountain” in Chinese. So, you see what happens when you put them together, you have a mountain that pinches…or a gorge. Pretty neat. Even if someone doesn’t know the character for “gorge”, they can most likely guess the meaning by the combination of characters to form a new word.