For the connoisseur of the Chinese language, familiarity with the characters opens a door to understanding the words, and even more. For the layman, the ideogram remains a mystery, a grimoire, a mixture of traits. And yet, it only takes a short time to soak up a character and grasp what basically forged its development and gives it its meaning.
As far as the field of Chinese medicine is concerned, a first character that seems useful to look at, is the one designating the disease, 病, pronounced [bìng]. This character is actually composed of two elements: a radical 疒and a component 丙. In a Chinese character, the radical is a graphic element comprising meaning, such that each ideogram comprising it shares the same semantic field. There is an important usage of the radical in the Chinese language since it allows to classify the words. It is through it that searches are carried out in a dictionary.
The radical 疒 [nì] is the component of most diseases written in Chinese (瘾, 疮, 疮, 疳, etc). Formed from an upper point on a horizontal line, to which is added a curved line to the left with two comma lines, directed in an opposite direction. An old version of this sinogram, certainly more explicit, united two radicals:
a plank of cut wood 爿, coming from the sinogram of wood 木, where the vertical central line designates the trunk of the tree, the horizontal line its branches, and the two strokes down its roots; and
the man 人 (like a coarse circumflex accent, previously containing a horizontal line in the middle, designating the arms, and a circle above, marking the head).
With a little imagination, we guess the flattening of the (ill) man in the radical 疒 (the upper line surmounted by the dot), as well as the simplification of the wooden board by a curved line with two dots. The radical holds the meaning of the ideogram, while the phonetic part is acquired thanks to the component 丙 [bǐng] (remember, the character is pronounced [bìng]).
So this Chinese characters 病 designates disease, defect, damage, affliction. It is is built, like other Chinese characters by an undeniable logic and supplemented by some artistic measure, making the Chinese language an artistic and fun endeavour.
