How long did Chinese characters originate and where did Chinese characters originate?

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.

According to statistics, there are more than 4,000 characters on the oracle bones found at present, 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.

The earliest writing appeared in the late Shang dynasty around the 14th century BC, when a rudimentary stereotyped script, known as oracle bone inscriptions, was formed. The origin of Chinese characters is the primitive picture, the form of "picture" that primitive people used to express themselves in life.

The earliest writing appeared in the late Shang dynasty around the 14th century BC, when a rudimentary stereotyped script, known as oracle bone inscriptions, was formed. The oracle bone inscription is both a pictogram and a phonetic character, and there are still some pictographs in Chinese characters that are the same as pictures, which are very vivid.

Ideograms are the earliest writing in the history of the formation of Chinese language, and Chinese characters have gone through three processes: ideograms, ideograms and ideograms, and diacritics. In the initial stage of Chinese characters, there are no strokes, no letters, and they slowly develop from drawings and physical notes, and it is natural to integrate the meaning that relies on the most into the font first.

Hieroglyphs come from pictorial writing, but the pictorial nature is weakened and the symbolic nature is enhanced, and it is one of the most primitive methods of word making. It has great limitations, because some physical things and abstract things cannot be drawn. Therefore, after taking pictographs as the basis, Chinese characters developed into ideograms, and other methods of character creation were added, such as huiyi, signifier, and shape and sound in the six books.

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. The origin, evolution, origin, and development history 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 origin, evolution, origin, and development history of Chinese characters.

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 late and historical primitive society.

The origin of Chinese characters has a history of more than 6,000 years, which is the gradual accumulation of scattered characters, and after reaching a certain volume, it is artificially standardized to form a writing system. The evolution process can be simply summarized into five parts: sound, shape, image, number, and reason, and the order is oracle bone inscription, golden script, small seal, official script, regular script, cursive script, and line script.

The earliest Chinese character: oracle bone inscription.

Modern archaeological discoveries have found that the oracle bone inscription unearthed in Yinxu, Anyang City, Henan Province, is the earliest systematic ancient Chinese script in China so far, with a history of about 3,600 years. Before the oracle bone inscription appeared, primitive humans relied on symbols or drawing graphics to remember, and these graphic symbols were basically engraved on pottery, animal bones, and stone walls, but there was no system. The oracle bone inscription is a systematic script and is relatively rich, but the formation of the oracle bone inscription should have taken several centuries to form, and it definitely did not come out in a day.

It's just that the current archaeology cannot confirm that there are earlier writings than the oracle bone inscriptions. Before the emergence of other scripts, the oracle bone inscription became the earliest Chinese character in China without any suspense.

The earliest surviving Chinese character oracle bone inscription was produced in the Yin Shang period, which has a history of about 3,400 years. 1. Chinese characters originate from knotted ropes, and it is believed that the writing was created under the inspiration of the knotted rope records in ancient times. 2. Chinese characters began with Bagua, and it is believed that words are produced from the hexagrams of Yi hexagrams, such as the Qiangua for the sky, the Kun hexagram for the earth, the Kan hexagram for water, and the Lihexagram for fire.

3. Cangjie regarded the turtle as a book, and believed that Cangjie was inspired by the spirit turtle to create a text. 4. Chinese characters and pictures have the same origin, and it is believed that calligraphy and painting have different names and are the same. 5. Chinese characters are derived from pictures, and it is believed that the two are not of the same origin, the pictures come first, the words come later, and the words are produced on the basis of pictures.

Legend has it that Chinese characters originated from the creation of characters by Cangmao Beijie. Cangjie, the historian of the Yellow Emperor, created writing based on the shape of the sun and the moon and the footprints of birds and beasts.

From a historical point of view, the complex system of Chinese characters could not have been invented by a single person. Cangjie should have made outstanding contributions to the collection, sorting and unification of Chinese characters, so it is recorded in "Xunzi Jiesha" that "there are many good books, and Cangjie is the only one".

In the early Qing Dynasty, the official script was Manchu, and the term Chinese was already used to refer to the traditional script of the Han Chinese people. In addition, the Japanese also call it "kanji" to distinguish it from kana, which is derived from kanji. In Korea, Chinese characters are distinguished from Hunmin Jeongyin (Hangul).

Origin of Chinese characters: Cangjie was a historian and creator of Chinese characters during the Yellow Emperor period. The Yellow Emperor was the leader of the ancient tribal alliance in the Central Plains.

As society enters the stage of large-scale tribal alliances, diplomatic affairs between alliances become more and more frequent, and there is an urgent need to establish a set of communicative symbols shared by alliances. As a result, the work of collecting, sorting and sharing the text was handed over to the historian Cangjie.

Chinese characters are mainly used for recorded pictographic drawings. Hieroglyphs are the foundation for the formation and development of the Chinese character system. Later, after thousands of years of evolution, including oracle bone inscription, Jin script, seal script, official script, regular script, cursive script, line script and other stages, so far, often used in regular script, but still not completely finalized.

From the ancient legend of Cangjie to the discovery of oracle bone inscriptions more than 1,000 years BC, Chinese scholars have been working to unravel the mystery of the origin of Chinese characters. Regarding the origin of Chinese characters, there have always been different opinions, among which the more influential theories are: knotted rope theory, gossip theory, carved deed theory, Cangjie character creation theory, carving theory and picture theory.

Chinese characters are by far the longest continuously used script, and they are the only ones that have been passed down to the present day among the major writing systems of antiquity, and Chinese characters have been the main official script in all Chinese dynasties.

Before the 20th century, it was still the official written standard script of Japan, the Korean Peninsula, Vietnam, the Ryukyus and other countries, and all East Asian countries created their own Chinese characters to a certain extent.

In the non-Chinese system, Japan has formulated a "List of Commonly Used Chinese Characters", South Korea has also formulated "Basic Chinese Characters for Nuclear Shed Education", and Vietnam, North Korea, Mongolia and other countries that used Chinese characters in history have now abandoned Chinese characters.

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.

The origins of Chinese characters can be traced back to ancient times, first orally, and later evolved into symbolic writing and hieroglyphs. There are many theories about the origin of Chinese characters, including knotted rope theory, Bagua theory, Hetuluo book theory, Cangjie character making theory, and picture theory. Among them, the most popular is the Cangjie theory of character creation, which believes that Chinese characters and selling were slowly created by the working people in their lives, and were sorted out and developed by "Wu" and "Shi".