The Origin and Evolution of Chinese Characters?? What is the origin and evolution of Chinese charact

Chinese characters are one of the world's longest-used, most widely used and most popular scripts, and the creation and application of Chinese characters not only promote the development of Chinese culture, but also have a profound impact on the development of world culture.

About 6,000 years ago in the Banpo ruins and other places, there have been carved symbols, a total of more than 50 kinds. They are neat and regular, and have the characteristics of simple characters, which scholars believe may be the germ of Chinese characters.

The formation of Chinese characters as a systematic script was the Shang Dynasty in the 16th century BC. Archaeology confirms that in the early Shang Dynasty, Chinese civilization had developed to a fairly high level, and one of its main features was the appearance of oracle bone inscriptions. Oracle bone inscriptions are ancient scripts carved on tortoise shells and animal bones.

In the Shang Dynasty, kings had to do divination before doing anything, and oracle bones were used for divination.

Oracle bones are processed before they can be used. First, the flesh and blood from the oracle bones are removed, and then sawed and smoothed. Then, the inside of the nail or the reverse side of the animal bone is drilled with a knife.

The arrangement of these concaves is orderly. The diviner, or shaman, engraves his name, the date of the divination, and the questions to be asked on the oracle bone, and then burns the depressions on the oracle bone with fire. The cracks that occur when these concaves are heated are called "megans".

The shamans analyzed the direction of these cracks, came up with the results of the divination, and carved the fulfillment of the divination into the oracle bone. After the fulfillment of the divination, these oracle bones engraved with the divination were preserved as an official archive.

At present, archaeologists have excavated more than 160,000 oracle bones. Some of them are whole, and some are just fragments that are not written. According to statistics, there are more than 4,000 characters on all these oracle bones, of which about 3,000 have been verified and studied by scholars, and among the more than 3,000 words, scholars have unanimously interpreted more than 1,000 words.

The rest are either uninterpretable, or scholars are deeply divided. Nevertheless, through these more than 1,000 words, people can already have a general understanding of the political, economic, cultural and other aspects of the Shang Dynasty. The oracle bone script is a mature and systematic script that laid the foundation for the development of Chinese characters in later generations.

Since then, Chinese characters have undergone the forms of copper inscriptions (golden scripts), small seals, official scripts, regular scripts, etc., and have been used to this day.

The evolution of Chinese characters is a process of gradual standardization and stabilization of Chinese character glyphs and fonts. The small seal fixes the number of strokes for each character; Lishu formed a new pen-shaped system, and the glyphs gradually became flat squares; After the birth of regular script, the glyph font of Chinese characters was stabilized: the basic strokes of "horizontal, vertical, apostrophe, point, pinch, pick, and fold" were determined, the shape of the pen was further standardized, and the number of strokes and stroke order of each character were also fixed.

For more than a thousand years, regular script has been the standard character for Chinese characters.

Chinese characters are ideographic writing systems based on pictographs and with morphophonetic characters as the main body, with a total of about 10,000, of which about 3,000 are the most commonly used. These more than 3,000 Chinese characters can form an infinite number of phrases, which in turn can form a variety of sentences.

After the creation of Chinese characters, it had a profound impact on neighboring countries. The scripts of Japan, Vietnam, Korea, and other countries were created on the basis of Chinese characters.

A pictogram that originated from Cangjie. In view of the Cangjie wording.

The evolution of Chinese characters is very complex, and with the development of social economy, there are more and more things to record, and the number of these symbols is gradually insufficient. Human beings began to create different symbols based on Cangjie's inspiration and teach them to the people around them.

With the gradual improvement of the system, in order to facilitate the recording of words, human beings began to simplify these pictographic symbols, but many of the simplified symbols will be very similar, so on the basis of simplification, they began to slowly evolve the simple distinction of apostrophes and pinchs.

This is how traditional Chinese characters were born.

From the ignorant period of the knotted rope to the transformation of Kurayoshi's character making.

1. The origin of Chinese characters.

Chinese characters have a long history. It is one of the oldest scripts in the world, and one of the only surviving square scripts. As early as more than 6,000 years ago, in the late stage of primitive society, the ancestors of the Han nationality carved symbols on various utensils to remember things, and then gradually evolved into Chinese characters.

Chinese characters are derived from pictures and are readable drawings called "character pictures" or "picture characters". Later, the drawings became more and more symbolic, and gradually detached from the pictures to form pictographic Chinese characters.

2. The basic context of the evolution of Chinese characters.

In the process of long-term evolution, Chinese characters have undergone a development process from oracle bone inscriptions to golden scripts, seal scripts, official scripts and regular scripts, and gradually formed modern Chinese characters. The emergence of Lishu was a watershed moment between ancient and modern writing.

3. The Evolution of Chinese Characters.

The general trend of the evolution of Chinese characters is from complex to simplified, and the glyphs and fonts of Chinese characters are gradually standardized and stabilized. The evolution of Chinese characters can be divided into two stages: ancient and modern characters. In the paleographic stage, the sequence of the evolution of Chinese characters is oracle bone inscription, Jin script, seal script, and Qin Li.

In the modern writing stage, the sequence of the evolution of Chinese characters is Lishu and Kaishu. Lishu was prevalent in the Han Dynasty. The Wei and Jin dynasties were a transitional stage from official scripts to regular scripts.

Regular script prevailed in the Sui and Tang dynasties. Lishu and regular script are formal fonts. In today's writing stage, that is, the Likai stage, there are also auxiliary calligraphy styles - cursive and line script.

The small seal fixes the number of strokes and glyphs of each character. Lishu formed a new pen shape system, the glyph gradually changed from a circle to a square, and the strokes changed from curved to straight. After the birth of regular script, the glyph font of Chinese characters was stabilized, the shape of the pen was further standardized, and the number of strokes and stroke order of each character were also fixed.

With the advent of regular script and the requirement of neat writing of multiple lines of Chinese characters, the squareization of Chinese characters has become stereotyped, the length and thickness of Chinese characters and strokes are restricted in the box, the distribution of strokes and the density are also restricted, and the glyph structure pays attention to balance and symmetry. For more than a thousand years, regular script has been the standard font for Chinese characters. This is the mainstream of the evolution of Chinese character fonts.

The development of auxiliary fonts cursive and xingshu is a tributary of the evolution of Chinese character fonts.

Legend has it that Chinese characters originated from Cangjie characters. The exact history of the origin of the current Chinese characters can be traced back to the tortoiseshell symbol at the Jiahu site about 6,200 BC, then to the oracle bone inscriptions, Zhou inscriptions, and Jin inscriptions of the Shang Dynasty, and finally to the Zhou inscriptions and small seals of the Spring and Autumn Warring States and Qin dynasties.

It developed into the Han Dynasty, which produced official script, cursive script, and companion Jing Kaishu (and derived Xingshu), and in the Tang Dynasty, Kaihua became the handwritten font standard used today - Zhengkai, which is also the modern Chinese character commonly used today.

Legend has it that Chinese characters originated from Cangjie characters. The exact history of the origin of Chinese characters can be traced back to the tortoiseshell symbol at the Panqian Jiahu site about 6,200 BC, to the oracle bone inscriptions, Zhou inscriptions, and Jin inscriptions of the Shang Dynasty, and finally to the Zhou inscriptions and small seals of the Spring and Autumn Warring States Period and the Qin Dynasty.

Modern Chinese characters refer to the regular block shape of Chinese characters after italization, including traditional and simplified characters. Modern Chinese characters have evolved from oracle bone scripts, golden scripts, Zhou scripts, and small seals, to official scripts, cursive scripts, regular scripts, and line scripts. Chinese characters were invented, created and improved by the ancestors of the Han nationality, and are an indispensable link to maintain the dialect areas of the Han nationality.

Chinese characters were invented and improved by the ancestors of the Han nationality in ancient times, and the exact history can be traced back to the oracle bone inscriptions, Chunqing inscriptions, and Jin inscriptions of the Shang Dynasty in about 1300 BC. Then to the small seal of the Qin Dynasty, to the Han Dynasty Lishu, to the Tang Dynasty Kaihua into today's positive seal. The Chinese characters of Guanglu Zhuan Yi refer to the characters from oracle bone script, large seal, golden script, 籀文, small seal, to official script, cursive script, regular script, etc., and in the narrow sense, it refers to the Han Yu with regular block as the standard writing method, which is also the modern Chinese character commonly used today.

Chinese characters, also known as Chinese characters, Chinese characters, and square characters, belong to the morpheme syllabic script of ideograms. Hanyu is a written character for writing Chinese, and is also borrowed to write Japanese, Korean, Vietnamese and other languages, which is a kind of script widely used in the Chinese character cultural circle, and it is also the only highly developed script that is still widely used in the world.