Hanzi is a writing system for recording Chinese, and is still or was used in Japanese, Korean, and Vietnamese. Chinese characters are one of the oldest writing systems in the world, with a history of more than 4,500 years. In a narrow sense, it is a Chinese character; in a broad sense, it is a unique character in the Chinese cultural circle.
Chinese characters are an important tool for carrying culture, and there are currently a large number of classics written in Chinese characters. Different dialects use Chinese characters as their own writing systems. Therefore, Chinese characters have historically played an important role in the spread of Chinese civilization and have become an intrinsic link in the formation of the Southeast Asian cultural circle. In the process of the development of Chinese characters, a large number of poems, couplets and other cultures were left behind, and a unique art of Chinese calligraphy was formed.
Chinese characters are one of the three oldest writing systems in the world. Among them, the ancient Egyptian holy book characters and the cuneiform characters of the Sumerians in the Mesopotamia have been lost, and only Chinese characters are still in use today.
According to legend, Chinese characters originated from the creation of characters by Cangjie. Cangjie, the historian of the Yellow Emperor, created Chinese characters based on the shapes of the sun and moon and the footprints of birds and animals. When he created the characters, the world was shocked - "The sky rained millet, and the ghosts cried at night." From a historical perspective, the complex Chinese character system cannot be invented by one person. Cangjie is more likely to have made outstanding contributions to the collection, arrangement, and unification of Chinese characters. Therefore, "Xunzi: Uncovering" records that "there are many good calligraphers." , and Cangjie is the only one who passed it on."
There is a view that the gossip in "The Book of Changes" has a greater impact on the formation of Chinese characters, but there are few supporters.
Oral knowledge before the invention of writing had obvious shortcomings in the transmission and accumulation. Primitive humans used knotting, engraving, and pictures to assist in recording events. Later, characteristic graphics were used to simplify and replace pictures. Primitive writing is formed when graphic symbols are simplified to a certain extent and form a specific correspondence with language.
In 1994, a large number of pottery vessels were unearthed from the Daxi Cultural Site in Yangjiawan, Hubei Province. Among the more than 170 symbols on them, some of the features are quite similar to oracle bone inscriptions. This discovery estimates the formation process of original Chinese characters to 6,000 years ago. In addition, the pictographic symbols on the pottery unearthed in Dawenkou, Shandong, and the geometric symbols on the Banpo painted pottery in Xi'an may all be manifestations of different stages in the formation of primitive writing (or before it was formed).
However, do Chinese characters after the Shang Dynasty and these geometric symbols have the same origin? This issue is still controversial. Many scholars have suggested that these symbols are not necessarily the predecessors of Chinese characters, or even absolutely certain that they are written symbols.
From Oracle to Xiaozhuan, Chinese characters have experienced the development process from hieroglyphs to ideograms, and the glyphs have gradually become separated from the specific images of things. The Chinese characters of this period are called ancient characters.
The oracle bone inscriptions of the Shang and Zhou dynasties are already a relatively complete writing system. Among the more than 4,500 oracle bone inscriptions that have been discovered, nearly 2,000 words can be recognized so far. At the same time as the oracle bone inscriptions, the characters cast on bronzes were called inscriptions or bell and tripod inscriptions. The "Sanshi Pan" and "Maogong Ding" of the Western Zhou Dynasty have high historical data and artistic value.
After Qin Shihuang unified China, Li Si standardized and organized the large seal script and the ancient texts of the Six Kingdoms, and formulated the small seal script as the standard writing font of the Qin Dynasty, unifying Chinese characters. The small seal script is rectangular and the strokes are round and smooth.
The Xiaozhuan script solved the problem of a large number of variant characters among the scripts of various countries, and the history of "scripts with the same script" began. The unification of writing has powerfully promoted the spread of culture among ethnic groups and played an important role in the identity of the Chinese nation and the unification of China, which is rare in the history of world writing.
The development of Chinese characters has gone through many different evolutions. In the early days, the number of characters in the Chinese character system was insufficient, and a large number of things were represented by Tongjia characters, which caused great ambiguity in the written expressions. In order to improve the clarity of expression, Chinese characters have gone through a stage of gradual complexity and a large increase in the number of characters. However, there are so many things that it is impossible to express them all with a single Chinese character, and the excessive increase in the number of Chinese characters has caused difficulties in learning Chinese characters themselves. Chinese has gradually evolved from single-character ideograms to word-based ideograms.
After Qin Shihuang unified Chinese characters, the number of Chinese characters continued to increase, and many newly coined characters continued to appear:
Emperor Yang Jian of the Sui Dynasty was originally the Duke of Sui, but because of "Sui" The word "辶" in the Chinese character means instability, so the word "辶" was removed and the character "Sui" was created as the country's name.
During the Tang Dynasty, Wu Zetian coined the word "曌" (the same as the word "zhao") as her name based on the meaning of "the sun and the moon are in the sky".
Liu Yan of the Five Dynasties created the word "龑" in his name, which means "flying dragon in the sky".
In modern times, due to the influx of a large amount of Western knowledge, many characters were also created. For example, with the introduction of "Beer" into China, how to express it in Chinese characters was a problem. It was originally translated as skin wine, but later felt that it was inappropriate, so around 1910, the word "beer" was created - translated as "beer". In order to express the imperial units, some polysyllabic words were also created, such as miles (nautical miles), 嗧 (gallons), 瓩 (kilowatts), feet (feet), etc. However, these multi-syllabic characters were eliminated in the "Notice on the Unified Use of Characters in the Names of Some Measurement Units" issued by the Chinese Character Reform Commission and the National Bureau of Standards and Measures on July 20, 1977, and are no longer used in the mainland, but in Taiwan It can still be seen in other places.
At present, due to informatization and standardization of word usage, new characters are no longer added arbitrarily to Chinese characters. The only exceptions are the various elements in the periodic table, such as "helium", "chlorine", "radon", "germanium", "chromium", "uranium", etc. This method of forming characters is still used to name new elements. For details on the rules of word formation for chemical elements, see Elements.
The Six Books is an analysis of the composition of Chinese characters. The Six Books were mentioned in Zhou Rites, but the specific content was not explained. In "Shuowen Jiezi" of the Eastern Han Dynasty, Xu Shen elaborated on the structure rules of Chinese characters in the "Six Books": pictograms, meanings, meanings, pictophonetics, annotations, and borrowings. Among them, the four items of pictography, reference, meaning, and pictophonetic sound are the principles of character creation, which are the "methods of creating characters"; while transfers and borrowings are the rules of word usage, which are the "methods of using characters." What is noteworthy among them is "Zhuanzhu". Xu Shen's explanation of it in the Han Dynasty was: "Jian Lei Yi, agreeing to accept each other, test, and always." Later generations of philologists also made a lot of work on Xu Shen's definition. explanation. It includes three categories: "Xing Zhuo theory, Sound Zhuo theory, and Yi Zhuo theory", these three theories are not comprehensive. Mr. Lin Yun, a contemporary paleontologist, explained that "zhuanzhu" is a form (glyph) that records two words with completely different pronunciations and meanings. For example, "mother and daughter", "broom and wife" and so on in oracle bone inscriptions. However, it should be noted that the "Six Books" are the arrangement and classification of Chinese characters, not the rules for character creation.
The Xiaozhuan strokes are mainly curved, and later gradually became more straight-line features, making it easier to write. By the Han Dynasty, official script had replaced Xiaozhuan as the main calligraphy style. The emergence of official script laid the foundation for the glyph structure of modern Chinese characters and became a watershed between ancient and modern writing.
After the Han Dynasty, the way of writing Chinese characters gradually developed from wooden slips and bamboo slips to calligraphy on silk and paper. Cursive script, regular script, running script and other fonts appeared rapidly, which not only met official documents and daily needs, but also formed a calligraphy art with strong oriental characteristics. After the invention of printing in ancient times, a new font called Song font appeared for printing. In modern times, fonts such as black body and imitation Song fonts have appeared one after another.