Loangraph

Loangraphs

The phenomenon of existing characters being adapted to write other words with similar pronunciations was necessary in the initial development of Chinese writing, and has continued throughout its history. Some loangraphs (假借; jiǎjiè; 'borrowing') are introduced to represent words previously lacking another written form—this is often the case with abstract grammatical particles such as 之 and 其. For example, the character 來 (lái) was originally a pictograph of a wheat plant, with the meaning *‍m-rˁək 'wheat'. As this was pronounced similar to the Old Chinese word *‍mə.rˁək 'to come', 來 was loaned to write this verb. Eventually, 'to come' became established as the default reading, and a new character 麥 (mài) was devised for 'wheat'. When a character is used as a rebus this way, it is called a 假借字 (jiǎjièzì; 'borrowed character'), translatable as 'phonetic loan character' or 'rebus character'.