What is "Six Books"?

"Liu Shu" is an ancient Chinese character classification method in China, which was used to describe the structure of Chinese characters. It was put forward by Liu Hui at the end of the Eastern Han Dynasty and gradually improved and developed in later dynasties.

According to the "Six Books", Chinese characters can be divided into the following six categories:

Refers to things: also known as hieroglyphics, are words that directly represent things that pictures or symbols refer to, such as the sun, the moon, mountains and so on.

Comprehension: Consisting of two or more deixis, it expresses abstract concepts or words with specific meanings, such as goodness, evil and joy.

Pictophonetic characters: It consists of a meaningful part (pictophonetic character side) and a part representing syllables (phonetic side). The pictophonetic surface generally indicates the meaning of words, and the phonetic surface indicates the pronunciation of words, such as wood and books.

Note transfer: Glyph has nothing to do with the original text. It is a word that originally expressed other meanings. By setting rules, new meanings are derived, such as "order", which used to mean "command" and later extended to "command".

Borrowing: using the existing glyphs to borrow their phonology to express new words, such as Richong (rushing to read chūng, the original meaning is "collision", and borrowing its sound "chūng" here means another meaning).

Hieroglyphics: Characters that represent an object, an action or an abstract concept by arranging and combining shapes or lines, such as a person, a mouth and a heart.

These six classification methods are mainly to help people understand the structure and meaning of Chinese characters and the relationship between Chinese characters. It also provides a basic classification framework for Chinese character teaching, dictionary writing and Chinese character research.