Pictogram Palace Free Supplement: 弋戈成或

弋戈成或 This character series deals with weapons of war. :/  China, like Europe, had a bloody feudal history of war after war. This is reflected in Chinese characters (hanzi) The following characters are all pictograms: pictures of literal objects.

弋 yi4 is a picture of a retrievable throwing dart on a sling: the throwing dart could be drawn back by a rope. The dot is the dart’s head. The horizontal line is the retrieval rope. The vertical line is the sling bow or launcher.
Yes
It’s a
RETRIEVABLE DART

戈 ge1 is a pole-arm, halbred, i.e. a long handled war ax. The vertical line is the ax pole. The bottom line is the pommel the top line and dot are the forward edge and backward edge of the two-edged pole-arm.
Giant
Enormous
POLE-ARM
My big brother (哥哥 gege) the half-breed has a Giant Enormous HALBRED A DOUBLE-EDGED LONG AX.

成 cheng2 is pole-arm plus ding nail 丁. Ding1 here is pictographic, it is a simplification of the city conquered by the ax-men on the right. Cheng2 originally meant conquest of a city. It has since been extended metaphorically to mean achievement, achieve, become: the metaphore has come to mean more than the original literal meaning.

或 huo4 means “or”. It is a phono-semantic character. The left hand kou 口 is the phonetic element: in oracle bone scripts the square sign was used to indicate dwellings, enclosed spaces, i.e. buildings or even villages.. The right hand ge1 戈 is the semantic idea of city from cheng2 成. Either you defend the city or it falls!

Here’s
Uniforms
OR A CHOICE

I at first found these characters quite difficult: they are HIGHLY stylized and simplified pictures but are indeed pictures. I took solace in that they seem to follow a logical development and do in fact: we are looking at the evolution of the simplest of war-weapons, the slingshot, into more complex ones, axes and pole-arms resulting finally in the emergence of the greatest achievement of civilization: CIVITAS, The CITY

城市

Cheer
His
Exquisite
New
Grand
 ACCOMPLISHMENT ACHIEVEMENT COMPLETED

或 huo4 means “or”. It is a phono-semantic character. The left hand kou 口 is the phonetic element: in oracle bone scripts the square sign was used to indicate dwellings, enclosed spaces, i.e. buildings or even villages.. The right hand ge1 戈 is the semantic idea of city from cheng2 成.

I at first found these characters quite difficult: they are HIGHLY stylized and simplified pictures but are indeed pictures. I took solace in that they seem to follow a logical development and do in fact: we are looking at the evolution of the simplest of war-weapons, the slingshot, into more complex ones, axes and pole-arms resulting finally in the emergence of the greatest achievement of civilization: CIVITAS, The CITY

城市