“Chi Mei Wang Liang” these four words have had different styles of writing in ancient books. With the development of history, they gradually set for “Gui” as their pictograph. The reason why the character patterns are different from today’s is that the people in that time had different subjective views about the meaning of the words. We can infer the Chinese characters’ develop and change from the character patterns’ variation of these four words. Pictograph’s accepted or reject are closely related with people’s subjective views about the meaning of the words, especially during the Chinese characters echoismed. And they also have something to do with the users’ hope that the two words’ forms and characters are harmonize when make up a word during the process of vocabulary disyllabification.

Ma Xulun thinks that he has presented new explanation on theother five scripts except pictograph. Aiming at framing the shapes ofobjects vividly, he holds a belief that the strokes of a character shouldbe changed, no matter straight or curved, according to the object itrepresents. Ma Xulun how to interpret the pictograph theory in accordance with this conviction? Firstly, pictograph characters are all pure single characters rather than compound ones. Secondly, the so-called “category pictograph” is namely to sketch shapes of objects according to their own categories. Pictograph characters are based on the shapes of practical objects, so fiction is forbidden. Thirdly, the original pictograph should be constructed as the way a picture drawn. Fourthly, pictographs, ideograms and radical-radical compounds are three different ways of creating characters, but the latter pair can also be called pictographs. Examining the pictograph theory of Ma Xulun and the specific illustrations he has cited, it is not hard for us to find that he has made a development in this field on the shoulders of predecessors.