Information on the origin of Chinese characters 10

Chinese characters mainly originated from pictographic drawings of memorization, and pictographs are the basis for the formation and development of the Chinese character system. The later evolution has gone through a long process of thousands of years, through the stages of oracle bone inscription, golden script, seal script, official script, regular script, cursive script, line script, etc., and the regular script is widely used today, but it is still not completely finalized.

According to the ancient documents of our country, the era of the emperor has invented the Ganzhi and related records, and in the later inheritance, the name of the Ganzhi was simplified to one word in the Yellow Emperor's era.

There are records of comparative relationships in "Historical Records" and "Erya", but the versions of "Historical Records" and "Erya" are different. Invention numbers: zero, one, two, three, four, five, six, seven, eight, nine, ten, twenty, three, hundred, thousand, thousand.

Legend has it that Cangjie made Chinese characters. "Shuowen Jie Zi" records that Cangjie saw the footprints of birds and beasts and was inspired, divided into different categories, collected, sorted and used, played an important role in the process of creating Chinese characters, and was respected as a "sage of character making".

In the Shang Dynasty, the earliest known mature Chinese character oracle bone inscription appeared, and although the number of characters in the Zhong Ding inscription that appeared later increased, there was no major change in the form.

In the Zhou Dynasty, due to the vast territory and the long-term separation of the princes, the Chinese characters obviously appeared in the late Spring and Autumn Period, and the situation of the text was even more serious in the Warring States Period. After the unification of Qin, in order to consolidate the rule, Qin Shi Huang ordered Prime Minister Li Si, Zhongche Fu Ling Zhao Gao, Taishi Ling Hu Wujing, etc., to sort out the text, and formulated a small seal based on the Great Seal of Qin, which was used as a standard font and was used throughout the country.

Later, according to the popular fonts at that time, a simpler font Lishu was sorted out, and it was widely circulated throughout the country as a common script.

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.

From the ancient legend of Cangjie to the discovery of oracle bone inscriptions more than 100 years ago, generations of Chinese scholars have been working to unravel the mystery of the origin of Chinese characters.

Regarding the origin of Chinese characters, there are various sayings in ancient Chinese literature, such as "knotted rope", "gossip", "pictures", "book deeds", etc., and the legend of the Yellow Emperor's historian Cangjie making characters is also widely recorded in ancient books. Modern scholars believe that a systematic writing tool cannot be created entirely by a single person, and that Cangjie, if there is one, should be the compiler or promulgator of the text.

The earliest carved symbols date back more than 8,000 years.

In recent decades, the Chinese archaeological community has released a series of excavated materials related to the origin of Chinese characters earlier than the Yinxu oracle bone inscriptions. These materials mainly refer to the carved or painted symbols that appeared on pottery in the late primitive society and the early historical society, and also include a small number of symbols engraved on oracle bones, jade, stone tools, etc. It can be said that together they provide a new basis for explaining the origin of Chinese characters.

The Origin of Chinese Characters: The origin story of Chinese characters.

Through systematic investigation and comparison of the carved symbols on pottery shards unearthed in more than 100 sites of 19 archaeological cultures throughout China, Wang Yunzhi, a doctoral supervisor at Zhengzhou University, believes that the earliest carved symbols in China appeared at the Jiahu site in Wuyang, Henan, which has a history of more than 8,000 years. The Origin of Chinese Characters: The origin story of Chinese characters.

As a professional worker, he tried to make a comprehensive arrangement of these original materials through scientific means, such as the comprehensive use of archaeology, paleographic formation, comparative philology, scientific and technological archaeology, and high-tech means, so as to sort out some clues about the occurrence and development of Chinese characters before the Shang Dynasty.