Studying the origin of Chinese characters has a history of more than 2,500 years in China.
According to the pre-Qin legend, Cang Xie was the lyricist, and Xunzi Jiemu recorded: "Although there are many good books, Cang Xie is the only one handed down from generation to generation." "Lu's Spring and Autumn Annals" records: "Xi Zhong made cars and books". According to legend, Cang Xie is a historian of the Yellow Emperor and a representative of ancient Chinese characters in China. According to Shuo Wen Jie Zi, Cang Xie was a historian of word-making in the period of the Yellow Emperor, and was known as the "sage of word-making". Historian Xu Xu believes that the appearance of writing should be related to Cang Xie. At that time, writing was needed to make calendars, and writing was also needed to make Oracle Bone Inscriptions. Therefore, Cang Xie should come from Zhuan Xu tribe. He was "born in Sri Lanka and buried in Sri Lanka", so there is Cangjieling in Taipei. He lived in the 26th century BC. Based on this, it is speculated that Chinese characters were relatively mature four or five thousand years ago.
In modern times, some people recognized Cang Xie, and at the same time expanded the team of word-makers. For example, Mr. Lu Xun thinks, "... Cang Xie is not the only one in society. Someone carved a small picture on the hilt, and someone drew some pictures on the portal. As a result, word of mouth adds words, and historians can perfunctory notes as soon as they collect them. I'm afraid the origin of China characters can't escape this example. "Lu Xun. On foreign languages. That is to say, of course, Chinese characters can't be created by Cang Xie alone, but gradually enriched by many people like Cang Xie, among whom Cang Xie is only more important and has a greater role. Our concern is not whether Cang Xie created Chinese characters, but the significance of creating Chinese characters. The appearance of Chinese characters indicates that the history of China has entered the era of written records, which is a major event in the long history and has had an important impact on later generations.
Changji's creation
Cang Xie, surnamed Hou, the historian of the Yellow Emperor and the founder of Chinese characters, is known as the "sage of word-making". Today, in wucun, 35 miles northwest of Nanle County, there are Cang Xie Ridge, Cangjie Temple and Bookstores. Historians believe that Cang Xie was born in Sri Lanka and was buried there.
It is said that Cang Xie "began to change the book contract into a rope". Before that, people tied knots and kept records, that is, big knots were tied for big events, small ones were summarized, and connected things were linked. Later, it was developed to carve symbols on wood and bamboo with a knife as notes. With the development of history, civilization is gradual, things are complicated and there are many famous things. The knotting and carving methods of wood are far from meeting the needs. There is an urgent need to create words. The Yellow Emperor was a period of numerous inventions in ancient times. At that time, not only sericulture was invented, but also boats, carts, bows, mirrors, cooking pots and retort were invented. Under the influence of these inventions, Cang Xie was determined to create a kind of writing.
Legend of Cang Xie; Four eyes and heavy pupils, very clever. One year, Cang Xie made a southern tour, climbed a mountain with Yang Que (now Luonan County, Shaanxi Province) and confronted Xuan Huluo? In the water, I suddenly saw a chinemys reevesii with many blue patterns on his back. Cang Xie looked surprised, so he picked it up and studied it carefully. He looked around and found that the pattern on the turtle's back was meaningful. He believes that patterns can not only express meaning, but if a rule is made, isn't it used by everyone to convey their feelings and record things?
Cang Xie thought about it day and night, observed everywhere, and saw the distribution of stars in the sky, the appearance of mountains and rivers on the ground, the traces of birds, animals, insects and fish, the shapes of plants and tools, described and painted, created various symbols, and set the meaning represented by each symbol. According to his own mind, he pieced together several paragraphs with symbols and showed them to people. After his explanation, he also understood. Cang Xie called this symbol "Zi".
Cang Xie succeeded in coining words, and strange things happened. On that day, it rained like millet during the day, and I heard ghosts crying and wolves howling at night. Why does it rain like rain? Because Cang Xie created words, words can be used to convey ideas and record things, which is naturally worth celebrating. But why do ghosts cry? Some people say that because of writing, people's wisdom is growing, people's morality is dividing, and deception and cunning are born. The world will never be peaceful, and even ghosts will not be at peace, so ghosts will cry.
There is another saying:
On one occasion, Cang Xie made a mistake in providing the historical records recorded in these knots to the Yellow Emperor, which led to the defeat of the Yellow Emperor in the border negotiations with Yan Di. Later, it was a good way for Cang Xie to resign, travel around the world, visit and record historical events. Three years later, he returned to his hometown, Baishui Wu Yang Village, and lived alone in a deep ditch, "watching the joy of Kuixing and the traces of birds and animals' hooves", sorting out all kinds of materials and creating all kinds of symbols representing everything in the world. He gave these symbols a name, called Zi.
Cang Xie's words are made according to the shape of everything. For example, Japanese characters are marked according to the red circle of the sun; The word "moon" is painted in imitation of the shape of the new moon. The herringbone is looking at the silhouette painting of people ... The first article that the Yellow Emperor learned was very moved, so he was named Cang. It means that a gentleman is better than one person and a villain is better than a gentleman. Later, when God knew this, he sent down millet to reward Cang Xie. This is the origin of Grain Rain Festival on Earth.
Starting from Baishui County, get off the Luohe River along Wei (South) Qing (Jian) Highway, and then transfer to Bai (Shui) Luo (Chuan) Highway. The jeep ran for about an hour between the ditches and forks on the plateau before it came to Shiguan Village, where Cang Xie Temple is located. This Cang Xie Temple, with a history of over 1800 years, has been officially listed as a national key cultural relic protection unit by the State Council.
Cang Xie Ridge is on the west side of wucun, facing the west and east of Cang Xie Temple. This is a big mound five meters high. There are ancient cultural relics from Yangshao to Longshan under the mausoleum. There is a stone lion in Weng Zhong in front of the tomb, and there is a stone square with the word "Cang Xie" written on it. Cang Xie Temple, whose construction date is unknown. According to the existing inscriptions in the temple, "it has not been replaced since the Han and Tang Dynasties". Today's Cang Xie Temple was built in the Ming and Qing Dynasties, covering an area of about 2,700 square meters, with a pair of stone pillars facing south, beautifully carved and elegant; The gate and the second gate are hard mountain buildings, and the worship hall, the main hall and the sleeping pavilion are generous and beautiful. There are inscriptions on the seals of famous people in Ming Dynasty and stone carvings of Cang Xie and his wife. There are many steles in the temple, pines and cypresses, willows and pavilions, and the whole building is magnificent.
A writing system used to record Chinese is still or was used in Japanese, Korean and Vietnamese. Chinese characters are one of the oldest characters in the world with a history of more than 4,500 years. In a narrow sense, it is the writing of Han nationality; Broadly speaking, it is the same word in the cultural circle of Chinese characters.
Chinese characters are the most basic unit of China characters, which have been used since Shang Dynasty at the latest, and have undergone many changes in writing methods such as Oracle Bone Inscriptions, Da Zhuan, Xiao Zhuan, Li Shu and Kai Shu (cursive script and running script). Qin Shihuang unified China, and Lisi sorted out Xiao Zhuan, so the history of "the same name but no name" began. Although the pronunciation of Chinese dialects is very different, the unity of writing system reduces the communication obstacles caused by dialect differences.
In Shuo Wen Jie Zi, Xu Shen in the Eastern Han Dynasty summarized the structural rules of Chinese characters as "six books": pictographic characters, ideographic characters, knowing characters, pictophonetic characters, transliteration characters and loanwords. Among them, pictographic characters, fingering, knowing characters and pictophonetic characters are the principles of word formation, which is the "word formation method"; Annotation and borrowing are the rules of using words, and they are "methods of using words".
For more than 3,000 years, the writing style of Chinese characters has not changed much, enabling future generations to read ancient Chinese without obstacles. However, after modern western civilization entered East Asia, countries in the whole Chinese character cultural circle set off a trend of learning from the West, and giving up using Chinese characters was an important aspect of this movement. The argument of these movements is that Chinese characters are clumsy compared with western pinyin characters. Many countries that use Chinese characters have simplified Chinese characters to varying degrees and even tried to completely pinyin them. The Latin transliteration scheme of Japanese pseudonyms and the emergence of various pinyin schemes in Chinese are all based on this idea. Chinese mainland simplified the strokes of Chinese characters with reference to the cursive script, and revised and approved the Summary of Simplified Chinese Characters on June 28th, 1956, which is still used in China and New Zealand. Traditional Chinese has always been used in Taiwan Province Province.
Chinese characters are an important tool to carry culture. At present, there are a large number of ancient books written in Chinese characters. Different dialects all use Chinese characters as the writing system of * * * *, so Chinese characters have played an important role in the spread of Chinese civilization in history and become an internal link in the formation of Southeast Asian cultural circles. In the development of Chinese characters, a large number of poems, couplets and other cultures have been left behind, forming a unique art of calligraphy in China.
A Chinese character generally has many meanings and strong word-formation ability, and many Chinese characters can form words independently. This leads to the extremely high "use efficiency" of Chinese characters, and about 2,000 commonly used words can cover more than 98% of written expressions. Coupled with the characteristics of ideographic characters, the reading efficiency of Chinese characters is very high. The information density of Chinese characters is higher than that of letters, so on average, the Chinese expression of the same content is shorter than that of any other letter language.
At present, most areas where Chinese is used use two standardized Chinese characters, namely, traditional Chinese characters (traditional Chinese characters) and simplified Chinese characters (simplified Chinese characters). The former is used in Chinese communities in Taiwan Province Province, Hongkong, Macau and North America, while the latter is used in Chinese communities in Chinese mainland, Singapore and Southeast Asia. Generally speaking, although there are differences between the two writing systems, the individual differences of commonly used Chinese characters are within 25%.
Because of the complexity of Chinese character writing, the theory of Chinese character backwardness has a long history, which holds that Chinese characters are the bottleneck of education and informatization, and there is a trend to promote the "Latinization" of Chinese characters or even abolish them. It is generally believed that Chinese characters also have outstanding advantages. Although it is difficult to learn at first, there is no continuous learning problem similar to a large number of English words after mastering common words, and its ideographic characteristics can fully mobilize the learning ability of the human brain. After the problem of computer input is basically solved, the "Chinese character backwardness theory" and "Chinese character latinization" have actually been gradually abandoned by most people.
At present, the Chinese character system has been basically stable, but the standardization of Chinese characters and the natural extinction of rare words continue.
Word-building principle
Liu Shu is the basic principle of Chinese character combination, which is mentioned in Zhou Li, but the specific content is not explained. Xu Shen in the Eastern Han Dynasty expounded the structural principles of the Chinese character "Liu Shu" in Shuo Wen Jie Zi: pictographic, ideographic, comprehensible, pictophonetic, phonological, transliteration and borrowing.
Pictographic characters: This method of creating characters is described according to the appearance characteristics of an object, so it is also true to draw it as its object. Such as the sun, the moon, the mountains and the water, originally depicted the patterns of the sun, the moon, the mountains and the water, and then gradually evolved into the present shape.
Refers to things: this refers to the expression of abstract things, and so does the so-called "each refers to its thing". If you write "up" on it, people will write "down" on it.
Shape and sound: this is a unique sound expressed by a specific shape (root) in the text. For example: Hu, the word can also be a root, combined with different attribute roots, can be synthesized into: butterfly, butterfly, lake, gourd, Hu, gas and so on. And use the same pronunciation to express different things (some only have initials). However, due to the phonological changes of ancient and modern languages, many similar ancient pictophonetic characters have no homophones in today's Mandarin.
Understanding: This method of word formation is to combine two radicals and derive new meanings. For example, when the sun and the moon merge into one, the sun and moonlight become "bright". The word "people" and "words" together is the word "faith", which means what people said before; There is a letter that this man abides by what he says.
Note turn: this is used to annotate two words, which are synonymous but have different shapes. Xu Shen explained in Hanshu: "Building a class, agreeing to accept each other, and taking the test as usual." , how do you say this? In ancient times, the word "test" could be used to mean "longevity", and "old" and "test" had the same meaning, that is, the so-called old people took the test and the candidates were old. Is The Book of Songs elegant? Bai Pu also said, "Zhou Wangshou test. "There are also some immortal ancients in Su Shi's poem Qu Yuan Tower. Why do you want to compare them? In a word. Among them, "Kao" means "Lao", and it is particularly noteworthy that later generations of philologists have also made a lot of explanations on the aforementioned definition of Xu Shen. Among them, there are three types, namely, shape shift theory, sound shift theory and meaning shift theory. But some people think that these three statements are not comprehensive enough. Jelly Lin, a contemporary archaeologist, also explained that "Zhuan Zhu" is a form (root) to record two words with completely different pronunciations and meanings. Such as "broom and woman" and "mother and daughter" in Oracle Bone Inscriptions.
Borrowing: In short, the word borrowing is used to express something else. Generally speaking, there is a new thing that can't be described, so we borrow a root with similar pronunciation or attribute to express this new thing. For example, "You" originally meant the right hand (first seen in Oracle Bone Inscriptions), and later it was disguised as "You". Smell means to listen to things with your ears. For example, in the seventh chapter of "University", there is a sentence "Turn a blind eye, listen but don't smell, eat but don't know its taste", but it was later used as an olfactory verb (although some people think it is misused).
Summarize the above six books, the first two items, "word-making method" also; Second, the "combination method" is also; The last two items, "using Chinese characters", are the same. These six principles are philological theories summarized by ancient philologists. The rules of Chinese character creation included in it have evolved over a long period of time, and are not created by any one person.
Chinese character structure
Chinese characters are formed by arranging one or more radicals (one-dimensional characters in European languages) into a square in a specific space, so they have another name for square characters. Structurally, Chinese characters have the following characteristics:
There is a high information density in a word. When you express the same thing, you can express the same information in a shorter space than phonetic notation, so the reading efficiency of Chinese characters is very high.
A Chinese character consists of more than 400 pictographs such as gold, wood, water, fire and earth, which are combined together like building blocks.
The meaning of an unknown character can be separated, and its meaning can be inferred from the composition of the root and the configuration of the space. When new things are difficult to express in the evolution of the times, new words can be synthesized and used according to the principle of radical combination. For example, the Chinese word uranium is a new word created in modern times to express a newly discovered chemical element.
The spatial configuration of Chinese character roots has an influence on the meaning: if it is the same combination of "dead heart", the left and right rows of "busy" and the upper and lower rows of "forgotten" are arranged differently, which leads to different meanings; The part with the word "Ai" on the right side of the text indicates that the right hand (left hand means left hand) is holding something and doing something to the left root (bronze inscription and Oracle Bone Inscriptions discovered in archaeology). If the right hand holds something on it, it becomes "Ai". Almost all people with this root are aggressive or use violence to achieve a certain purpose, such as attacking, defeating, knocking, collecting and so on.
Forms of Chinese characters
(China's Calligraphy): The strokes of the Chinese character "Guo" are written in different ways, that is, the fonts are different; Different fonts have different fonts.
Chinese characters written in regular fonts (such as regular script, Song style, official script, seal script, etc. ) is a kind of square character, and each character occupies the same space. Chinese characters include letter combination words and combination words, and letter combination words can't be separated, such as "Wen" and "Zhong". Combined Chinese characters are composed of basic components, accounting for more than 90% of Chinese characters. Common combinations of compound words are: upper and lower structures, such as "smile" and "tip"; Left and right structures, such as "word" and "family"; Semi-closed structure, such as "similarity" and "inclination"; Fully enclosed structure, such as "group" and "meeting"; Composite structure, such as "win" and "point". The basic components of Chinese characters include single words, radicals and other non-word-forming components.
The smallest constituent unit of Chinese characters is strokes.
When writing Chinese characters, the direction and order of strokes, that is, the order of strokes, are relatively fixed. The basic rules are: first horizontal and then vertical, first left and then down, from top to bottom, from left to right, first outside and then inside, then sealed, first in the middle and then on both sides. The stroke order of Chinese characters with different writing styles may be different.
pronounce
Chinese characters are the same writing system in many dialects, and each word represents a syllable. Now, Mandarin is used as the standard pronunciation in Chinese mainland. The syllables of Putonghua are determined by one initial, one vowel and tone, and there are more than 65,438+0,300 syllables actually used. Because of the huge number of Chinese characters, there are obvious homophones; At the same time, it also exists in the case that the same word has multiple tones, which is called polyphonic words. This situation is common among all kinds of people in China.
Although Chinese characters are mainly ideographic, they are not without phonetic components. The most common are names and places, followed by transliteration of foreign words, such as sofa. In addition, there are some original words, such as (Yi Ming) "Alas" and "Haha" laughter. But even so, there are still some ideographic elements, especially the names and place names of countries. Even foreign names and place names have some ideographic bottom lines. For example, "Bush" must not be transliterated as "immortal".
Because Chinese characters themselves are not phonetic, although the number and writing methods of Chinese characters have changed from the Han Dynasty to the 20th century, we can't see the phonetic changes. Special research is needed to infer their pronunciations in ancient Chinese and middle Chinese. Some scholars believe that before the Han Dynasty, the pronunciation of a Chinese character was two syllables, a small syllable and a large syllable, similar to Korean and Japanese today.
The pronunciation of Chinese characters in Japanese can be divided into "phonetic reading" and "training reading", and a word often has multiple pronunciations, because the pronunciations introduced to Japan from China in different periods are different.
In Korean, it is roughly a word and a sound, without training.
Besides Japan, other countries that use Chinese characters also use some disyllabic words, such as "Li" (sea), "Hao" (gallon) and "Hao" (kilowatt). However, due to the official abolition, it is basically not used in Chinese mainland, but it is still used in Taiwan Province Province, and most people understand its meaning.
transfer
The earliest phonetic notation methods are reading if and direct notation. The reading method is to use words with similar pronunciations as phonetic notation, which is what Xu Shen used to explain Chinese characters, such as "shooting, shooting and reading accurately". Direct notation is to use another Chinese character to express the pronunciation of this Chinese character. For example, a woman speaks for herself, and the speaker says "Yue" is used for phonetic notation.
Both of the above methods have inherent defects. Some words have no homophones or homophones are so uncommon that it is difficult to play the role of phonetic notation, such as "socks".
The anti-tangent method was developed in the Wei and Jin Dynasties, and it is said that it was influenced by Sanskrit, which used pinyin characters. The pronunciation of Chinese characters can be marked by backcutting, that is, the initial consonant of the first word and the vowel and tone of the second word are combined to make phonetic notation, so that all Chinese characters can be combined. For example, the pronunciation of "Lian" is the combination of the initial of "Lang" and the vowel and tone of "Dian".
Since modern times, Chinese phonetic symbols (commonly known as ㄅㄆㄇㄈ) and phonetic notation methods of many Latin letters have been developed. Phonetic symbols are still a part of teaching in Taiwan Province Province, but at present, Chinese Pinyin is the most widely used in Chinese mainland.
Because Chinese characters are mainly ideographic, the phonetic notation is weak. This feature makes the literature of the last 1000 years, like the western world that uses pinyin, have no big difference in wording, but it also makes it difficult for people to infer the ancient phonology. For example, the pronunciation of "Pang" comes from "Dragon", but today the former is pronounced as "Pang" and the latter as "Dragon" in Beijing dialect. How to explain this difference is a subject of phonology.
Chinese characters and words
Chinese characters are the smallest unit of Chinese.
Morpheme is the smallest unit of Chinese ideogram, similar to English words and phrases. Most Chinese characters can form morphemes independently, such as "I", which is similar to that English words consist of a single letter, such as "I". Most words in modern vernacular Chinese are composed of more than two Chinese characters. However, unlike the relationship between "words" and "letters" in English, the meaning of morphemes is often related to the meaning of each Chinese character when it forms morphemes independently, thus simplifying memory to a considerable extent.
Words include morphemes and phrases composed of several morphemes.
The high efficiency of Chinese characters is reflected in hundreds of basic hieroglyphics, which can be synthesized into tens of thousands of Chinese characters, representing all kinds of things in the sky and underground; Thousands of commonly used words can be easily combined into hundreds of thousands of words.
However, on the other hand, it has become a burden to accurately grasp the collocation forms and usage of these hundreds of thousands of words. There are about tens of thousands of commonly used words in Chinese, with a total vocabulary of about one million. Although it seems daunting in quantity, it is not out of reach to master most Chinese word-formation because of its ideographic nature. Therefore, as far as vocabulary is concerned, its learning difficulty is not high; In contrast, mastering the same number of foreign words has a much greater memory intensity.
From the perspective of ancient Chinese, the original meaning of Chinese characters is more accurate and efficient than the May 4th vernacular movement. For example, Mr. Zhu Bangfu promoted the accurate use of Chinese characters in ancient times.
Number of Chinese characters
There is no exact number of Chinese characters, and there are probably thousands of Chinese characters used in daily life. According to statistics, 1000 commonly used words can cover about 92% of written materials, 2,000 words can cover more than 98%, and 3,000 words have reached 99%. Simplified statistics are not much different from traditional statistics.
There are more than 80,000 Chinese characters in history (there are also more than 60,000 sayings), most of which are variant characters and rare words. The vast majority of variant characters and uncommon words have naturally disappeared or been standardized, and generally only occasionally appear in names and places other than ancient Chinese. In addition, after the first batch of simplified characters, there are a number of "two simplified characters", which have been abolished, but a few numbers are still popular in society.
Xu Shen counted the number of Chinese characters for the first time in Shuo Wen Jie Zi in Han Dynasty, and * * * included 9353 words. Later, the jade tablets written by Gu in the Southern Dynasties were recorded as 169 17. On this basis, the jade tablets in Daguangyihui were said to have 22,726 words. After that, Lei Pian, which was officially edited by the Song Dynasty, received 3 13 19 words. Another book, Ji Yun, compiled by the Song Dynasty authorities, received 53,525 words, which was once the book with the largest number of words.
In addition, some dictionaries have more words, such as Kangxi Dictionary in Qing Dynasty, with 47,035 words. There are 48,902 words in the Japanese dictionary of dahanhe, with 1062 words in the appendix. The Chinese Dictionary in Taiwan Province Province has 49,905 words; The Chinese Dictionary has 54,678 words. In the 20th century, the ocean of Chinese characters has the largest number of published words, with 85,000 words.
Among the computer coding standards for Chinese characters, the largest Chinese character coding at present is the national standard CNS 1 1643 of Taiwan Province Province. At present, (4.0)*** contains 76,067 verifiable simplified, Japanese and Korean Chinese characters, but it is not popular and is only used in a few environments such as household administration system. The big five codes commonly used in Taiwan Province and Hongkong include 13053 traditional Chinese characters. GB 18030 is the latest internal code character set in People's Republic of China (PRC). GBK contains 209 12 simplified characters, traditional Chinese characters, Japanese and Korean, while earlier GB23 12 contains 6763 simplified characters. Unicode unified ideographic basic character set contains 20,902 Chinese characters, with two extended areas, totaling more than 70,000 characters.
In the early Chinese character system, the number of words was insufficient, and many things were represented by interchangeable words, which caused the ambiguity of text expression. In order to improve the clarity of expression, Chinese characters have gone through a stage of gradual complexity and a large number of words. The excessive increase in the number of Chinese characters makes it difficult to learn Chinese characters, and the meaning that a single Chinese character can express is limited, so the meaning of many single Chinese characters is expressed through Chinese characters, such as common double spelling words. At present, the development of China characters tends to create new words instead of new words.
In today's world, Chinese characters are the only non-pinyin characters. In human history, there are two river basin characters and Egyptian holy book characters that predate Chinese characters, but they have long since become extinct, so Chinese characters are the oldest characters at present. There are two types of characters used around the world, namely, non-pinyin characters (Chinese characters) and pinyin characters (other characters). Isn't this a strange phenomenon? It is not an exaggeration to say that Chinese characters are China's five great inventions. I also want to say that Chinese characters are a miracle!
Among modern Chinese characters, only Chinese characters were directly created by our ancestors, and other characters were borrowed from other nationalities. Latin alphabet, Slavic alphabet and Arabic alphabet are called the three major alphabet systems in the world. English, French, Italian, etc. In Latin letters, it means borrowing Latin letters; Russian, Bulgarian, Serbian, etc. With kirill letters (or Slavic letters), converted from Greek letters; Latin letters are also transformed from Greek letters. The ancestors of Aramaic alphabet-Alama alphabet and Greek alphabet-Canaanite alphabet were not directly created by their ancestors, but were transformed from Semitic characters. According to the research of Zhou Youguang, a linguist in Chinese mainland, the earliest letters of human beings are small Semitic letters. But they didn't create this kind of letter directly, but borrowed from Sume's nail script and reformed it. The lettering of the nail head was originally in the shape of a pictographic book, but later it evolved into the shape of the nail head due to the limitation of writing tools-sticks and clay tablets. Jiashu was created by Sumerians, Shengshu was created by Egyptians, and Chinese characters were created by China. They are not pinyin characters. Now only Chinese characters are left in the three, and the other two have died out.
Another peculiar feature of Chinese is its super-dialect and super-language. Linguists divide China dialect into eight major dialect areas. Some people say that without Chinese characters, China would have split into dozens of countries. The differences between Italian, French, Spanish, Portuguese and Romanian in Europe are much greater than those in Chinese dialects, but they are always reluctant to admit that their languages are different dialects of "Romans" because they are all independent countries.
In addition, Chinese characters can transcend national boundaries. Historically, Vietnam, South Korea and Japan all used Chinese characters to record languages. Japanese still mix Chinese characters and pseudonyms. The Japanese use Chinese characters, and another great invention is to write Chinese characters and read Japanese. As long as other countries are willing, they can do the same. If this is really done, Chinese characters will become a common international language symbol, just like mathematical symbols, which only express meaning, not sound.
This function of Chinese characters is a miracle from the perspective of human language history, especially from the perspective of non-pinyin characters!
With the development of Chinese characters in China, various fonts formed in different historical periods have their own distinctive artistic characteristics.
The origin of Chinese characters is well documented. This was in the late Shang Dynasty, about14th century BC, when the original font, Oracle Bone Inscriptions, was formed. Oracle Bone Inscriptions is the Oracle Bone Inscriptions carved on tortoise shells and animal bones in Shang Dynasty. Because it is carved on Oracle Bone Inscriptions with different shapes, it is not easy to change after carving, so our ancestors followed the trend in one go. The overall effect or rules are orderly or changeable, which embodies the human nature of pursuing balance, symmetry, harmony and stability. Oracle Bone Inscriptions is both a hieroglyph and a phonography. Until now, there are still some pictographs in Chinese characters, which are very vivid.
In the late Western Zhou Dynasty, Chinese characters developed into Da Zhuan. The development of seal script has produced two characteristics: first, the lines with uneven thickness in the early days became even and soft, and the lines they drew with utensils were very concise and vivid; Second, standardization, the glyph structure tends to be neat, and gradually deviates from the original shape of the picture, laying the foundation for the square characters.
Later, Li Si, the prime minister of Qin Dynasty, simplified Da Zhuan and changed it to Xiao Zhuan. Small seal script not only simplifies the shape of big seal script, but also achieves the perfection of lineation and standardization, almost completely divorced from pictures and characters, and has become a neat, harmonious and very beautiful square font which is basically rectangular. However, Xiao Zhuan also has its own fundamental shortcoming, that is, its lines are very inconvenient to write with a pen, so almost at the same time, a kind of official script with flat sides was produced.
In the Han Dynasty, the Qin system was inherited by the Han Dynasty, and the centralized system was further developed and strengthened. Emperor Wu of the Han Dynasty, who is still wise and foolish, invaded the east and cut the west, constantly expanding the territory of the central empire. In order to protect the frontier of Yong 'an, he established a garrison system, which enabled Chinese culture to spread and take root rapidly in the frontier. At the same time, there are higher requirements for the quality, speed and quantity of information dissemination. At this time, the seal script was gradually simplified and evolved into an official script, which was called "official change" in history. This change is not only because Xiao Zhuan is complicated and difficult to write, but also needs to be changed. The most important essential reason is that it is closely related to the invention and popularization of China people's writing tool, the brush. It is the writing form of brush that transforms the image of seal script into straightness and makes the image of Chinese characters turn to abstraction, and initially forms the stroke characteristics of point, horizontal, left, vertical, lifting, hook and folding, as well as the appearance characteristics of square fonts. After Li Shu, it evolved into Cao Zhang, and now it is grass. In the Tang dynasty, there was Weeds, which expressed the writer's thoughts and feelings with a pen. Subsequently, regular script (also known as original script), a combination of official script and cursive script, became popular in the Tang Dynasty. The print we use today evolved from regular script. Between regular script and cursive script is a running script, which is fluent in writing and flexible in using a pen. It is said that it was invented by Liu Desheng in Han Dynasty, and it is still the font used in our daily writing today.
In the Song Dynasty, with the development of printing, block printing was widely used, and Chinese characters were further improved and developed, resulting in a new type of calligraphy-Songti printing font. After the invention of printing, the carving knife used for lettering had a far-reaching influence on the glyph of Chinese characters, resulting in a kind of printing font with fine horizontal and thick vertical, which was eye-catching and easy to read, and was later called Song Style. There are two kinds of fonts for the moment: fat imitation face, Liu style, thin imitation European style and dangerous style. Among them, the strokes of Yan and Liu are towering, with some characteristics of horizontal, thin and vertical. In the Ming Dynasty, between Qin Long and Wanli, it changed from Song style to Ming style, with fine strokes and square fonts. It turned out that at that time, a kind of Hongwu style with thin horizontal and thick vertical was popular among the people, and this font was used for the title cards of official posts, lanterns, notices, private stones, ancestral halls and other gods. Later, some book carvers created a non-face and non-European skin silhouette in the process of imitating Hongwu's style. Especially because the strokes of this font are horizontal and vertical, it is really easy to engrave. It is different from Zhuan Xu, Li, Zhen and Cao, unique and fresh to read. Therefore, it has been widely used since16th century and has become a very popular main printing font. Now it's also called Song Style, and it's also called type.