From such combinations one passes to what are called _ideograms_: the sign for “words” and the sign for “tongue” combine to make “speech”; the sign for “roof” and the sign for “pig” make “home”--for in the early domestic economy of China the pig was as important as it used to be in Ireland. But, as we have already noted earlier, the Chinese language consists of a comparatively few elementary monosyllabic sounds, which are all used in a great variety of meanings, and the Chinese soon discovered that a number of these _pictographs_ and _ideographs_ could be used also to express other ideas, not so conveniently pictured, but having the same sound. Characters so used are called _phonograms_. For example, the sound fang meant not only “boat,” but “a place,” “spinning,” “fragrant,” “inquire,” and several other meanings according to the context. But while a boat is easy to draw most of the other meanings are undrawable. How can one draw “fragrant” or “inquire”? The Chinese, therefore, took the same sign for all these meanings of _fang_, but added to each of them another distinctive sign, the determinative, to show what sort of _fang_ was intended. A “place” was indicated by the same sign as for “boat” (_fang_) and the determinative sign for “earth”; “spinning” by the sign for _fang_ and the sign for “silk”; “inquire” by the sign for _fang_ and the sign for “words,” and so on. One may perhaps make this development of pictographs, ideographs, and phonograms a little clearer by taking an analogous case in English. Suppose we were making up a sort of picture-writing in English, then it would be very natural to use a square with a slanting line to suggest a lid, for the word and thing _box_. That would be a pictograph. But now suppose we had a round sign for money, and suppose we put this sign inside the box sign, that would do for “cash-box” or “treasury.” That would be an ideogram. But the word “box” is used for other things than boxes. There is the box shrub which gives us boxwood. It would be hard to draw a recognizable box-tree distinct from other trees, but it is quite easy to put our sign “box,” and add our sign for shrub as a determinative to determine that it is that sort of box and not a common box that we want to express. And then there is “box,” the verb, meaning to fight with fists. Here, again, we need a determinative; we might add the two crossed swords, a sign which is used very often upon maps to denote a battle. A box at a theatre needs yet another determinative, and so we go on, through a long series of phonograms.