to represent some thing or idea, and then borrowed to represent other
things and ideas similarly pronounced; and secondly, the indicator,
another character added to the phonetic base in order to distinguish
between the various things and ideas for which the same phonetic base
was used.

All characters, however, do not yield at once to the application of our
rule. 要 _yao_ "to will, to want," is composed of 西 "west" and 女 "woman."
What has western woman to do with the sign of the future? In the days
before writing, the Chinese called the waist of the body _yao_. By and
by they wrote 要, a rude picture of man with his arms akimbo and his legs
crossed, thus accentuating the narrower portion, the waist. Then, when
it was necessary to write down _yao_, "to will," they simply borrowed
the already existing word for "waist." In later times, when writing
became more exact, they took the indicator 月 "flesh," and added it
wherever the idea of waist had to be conveyed. And thus 腰 it is still
written, while _yao_, "to will, to want," has usurped the character
originally invented for "waist."

In some of their own identifications native Chinese scholars have often
shown themselves hopelessly at sea. For instance, 天 "the sky,"
figuratively God, was explained by the first Chinese lexicographer,
whose work has come down to us from about one hundred years after the
Christian era, as composed of 一 "one" and 大 "great," the "one great"
thing; whereas it was simply, under its oldest form, [Illustration], a
rude anthropomorphic picture of the Deity.

Even the early Jesuit Fathers of the seventeenth and eighteenth
centuries, to whom we owe so much for pioneer work in the domain of
Sinology, were not without occasional lapses of the kind, due no doubt