Chinese characters, also known as Chinese characters, Chinese characters and Tang dialect characters, are widely used in the cultural circle of Chinese characters, which is a unique indicative writing system in the world and the only morpheme word that is still widely used and highly developed in the world.
Originally invented by the Chinese ancestors in the ancient Yellow River civilization in China, its fonts have undergone long-term improvement and evolution.
At present, the exact history can be traced back to Oracle Bone Inscriptions, Zhang Wen and Jin Wen in Shang Dynasty about 1300 BC, and then to Zhang Wen and Xiao Zhuan in the Spring and Autumn Period and the Warring States Period. It developed into official script, cursive script and regular script (and derived running script) in the Han Dynasty, and became the standard handwritten font-print in the Tang Dynasty.
Chinese characters are the main official languages of several generations in China, and now they are the official languages in practice in People's Republic of China (PRC) and the Republic of China. Chinese characters have developed to a high level in ancient times. They are not only used in China, but also used as the only international language in East Asia for a long time. Before the 20th century, it was written and standardized by Korean Peninsula, Vietnam, Ryukyu and Japan.
Extended data:
trait
1, beautiful
It has become an art-calligraphy art, and the calligraphy art of Chinese characters can't be compared with any other words. The following ancient calligraphy works have become priceless. There are many famous works, such as Preface to Lanting, Monument to Shengde of Shence Army, Mysterious Pagoda Monument, and Sacrifice to My Nephew.
2, high recognition.
The field of vision of human eyes is always a surface, not a line, so linear arrangement is difficult to identify; Form a square at a glance. Pinyin text = linear text; Chinese character = box symbol. Chinese characters are more efficient than pinyin characters in reading.
3, easy to understand and to the point
For example, "Bei" is a pictophonetic character as well as a cognitive character. From the perspective of pictophonetic characters, the word "clothes" on the left of the word "quilt" means that the quilt belongs to the category of clothes, and the word "skin" on the right is similar to the word "quilt" in the word-making era, indicating the pronunciation of this word, but with the passage of time, the pronunciation of "skin" and "quilt" becomes different and gradually loses its function of expressing pronunciation.
From the perspective of understanding characters, clothes made of leather are "quilts". The original meaning of quilt refers to a small quilt. In later generations, the meaning of "suffering" was extended on the basis of the original meaning of quilt.
4, image, intuition.
Chinese characters are hieroglyphics, and their distinctive features are closely related in form and meaning, and their intuitive meaning is obvious. The ideographic nature of Chinese characters makes it the most informative character in the world, so it is easy to identify and associate, which also brings great convenience to speed up reading.
Chinese characters are different from other languages in the world, which is the particularity of Chinese grammar itself, that is, parataxis
Whether phrases are combined into sentences or simple sentences are combined into complex sentences, the first consideration is often the combination of semantics rather than the use of grammatical forms. As long as several key words carrying important information are roughly matched in meaning, communication purposes can be achieved concisely, and these words can be combined together, which is called "parataxis".
This feature of Chinese grammar makes it unique in structure, flexible and changeable, with many meanings and emphasis on conception. Its parataxis, flexibility and conciseness are unmatched by other languages. The above characteristics of Chinese grammar are helpful for us to perceive and understand through tacit means in reading, which is very convenient for speeding up reading.
5, a large amount of information
Research shows that Chinese characters, as a complex symbol system, have high information entropy. The basic methods of research are: gradually expanding the capacity of Chinese characters, with the increase of the capacity of Chinese characters, the increase rate of information entropy slows down; After the number of Chinese characters increases to 12370, the information entropy no longer increases significantly.
Scientists in China pointed out that the capacity limit of Chinese characters is 12366 Chinese characters, and the static average information entropy (average information) of Chinese characters is 9.65 bits. According to the famous ZIPF law in mathematical linguistics, this is the most informative character symbol system in the world today.