How are new Chinese characters created?

Hello all, I’ve been trying for years to find out the answer to that query with little success. I travel to Hong Kong and mainland China 3 or 4 times a year and no one I’ve talked to in those countries seems to know either.

If I develop a new thing and give it a name based on the Latin alphabet, who would design an ideogram that represents that thing in a country like China? Or what would the process be?

I don’t know why needing to know this is bugging me. But it is. Thanks for any help!

Todd

Odds are that your invention would not get a new word/character. It would be use existing words/characters, like how the words for “Coca Cola” are a few existing characters put together in a novel combination.

As I understand it, it’s only the really basic words that get their own character, with most words being two or more characters put together (chosen based on their sound, meaning, or a combination of both). For instance, I remember reading that the Chinese writing of “entropy” includes the character for “fire”, since fire is one of your more common entropic processes.

Both the answers so far are mainly correct, but not totally.

I started a very similar thread recently. Some good answers there.

Bite the wax tadpole. One of my favorite ULs :smiley: