The Origin and Birth of Chinese Characters

Chinese characters are one of the characters with the longest use time, the widest space and the largest number of people in the world. The creation and application of Chinese characters not only promoted the development of China culture, but also had a far-reaching impact on the development of world culture.

About 6000 years ago, in Banpo ruins and other places, more than 50 kinds of carving symbols have appeared. They are neat and regular, with the characteristics of simplified Chinese characters, which scholars think may be the germination of Chinese characters.

The formation system of Chinese characters is the Shang Dynasty in16th century BC. Archaeology confirmed 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 is an ancient writing carved on tortoise shells and animal bones. In Shang Dynasty, the king had to do divination before doing anything, and Oracle Bone Inscriptions was the tool of divination.

Oracle Bone Inscriptions should be treated before use. Remove the flesh and blood from the Oracle bones first, and then saw them flat. Then, use a knife to drill a notch on the inside of the nail or the back of the animal bone. The arrangement of these gaps is orderly. A fortune teller or wizard engraves his name, the date of divination and the questions to be asked on the Oracle Bone Inscriptions, and then burns the hole in the Oracle Bone Inscriptions with a torch. The cracks that appear when these depressions are heated are called "signs". The wizard analyzes the trend of these cracks, obtains the result of divination, and engraves the divination on the Oracle bone. After the divination came true, these Oracle bones engraved with Oracle Bone Inscriptions became official files and were preserved.

At present, archaeologists have unearthed more than 1.6 million pieces of Oracle bones. Some are complete, and some are just fragments without written records. According to statistics, there are more than 4,000 words on all these Oracle bones, of which about 3,000 words have been verified by scholars, and among these 3,000 words, scholars have interpreted more than 1000 words. The rest are either unreadable or scholars are seriously divided. Nevertheless, through this word 1000, people can already have a general understanding of the politics, economy and culture of the Shang Dynasty. Oracle Bone Inscriptions is a mature and systematic writing, which laid the foundation for the development of Chinese characters in later generations. Since then, Chinese characters have gone through various forms, such as inscriptions on bronze, seal script, official script and regular script, and have been in use ever since.

The evolution of Chinese characters is a process of gradually standardizing and stabilizing Chinese fonts. Small seal script makes the number of strokes of each word fixed; The official script forms a new pen system, and the font gradually becomes flat and square; After the birth of regular script, the font of Chinese characters has tended to be stable: the basic strokes of "horizontal, vertical, left, dot, pick and fold" have been determined, the stroke shape has been further standardized, and the number and order of strokes of each character have been fixed. For more than a thousand years, regular script has been the standard character of Chinese characters.

Chinese characters are an ideographic writing system based on pictophonetic characters, with pictophonetic characters as the main body, totaling about 10 thousand, of which about 3 thousand are the most commonly used. These 3000 Chinese characters can form an infinite number of phrases, and then form various sentences.

After the appearance of Chinese characters, it has had a far-reaching impact on neighboring countries. The characters of Japan, Vietnam, South Korea and other countries are all created on the basis of Chinese characters.

The title of "Han people" originated from the Han Dynasty, meaning people of the Han Dynasty. It was not until the late Northern Wei Dynasty that it became synonymous with China people. Later, the scope of "Han people" became larger and larger. Many ethnic groups have joined the ranks of the Han nationality after the mixed living and integration of all ethnic groups in the past dynasties. It was not until the Republic of China that "Han people" was officially renamed "Han people". Han nationality is the main ethnic group in China, accounting for 93.3% of the total population in China.

After the reunification of the Chinese nation, a powerful and lasting Han Dynasty was established.

So foreigners call China Han Chinese.

Later, many foreigners invaded China, calling the original inhabitants of China Han Chinese.

In the history of our country, there are three prosperous times, namely, the Western Han Dynasty, the Tang Dynasty and the Kanggan Prosperity. So we call ourselves "Han people" and Tang people (such as Chinatown). Because the Qing Dynasty was ruled by Manchu, we don't call ourselves "Qing people".

The symbol of the transformation of Chinese nation into Han nationality is the determination of the name of Han nationality. Huaxia was unified in the Qin Dynasty, and the clan name was once renamed as "Qin people". All countries in the western regions have the habit of calling Huaxia the "Qin people". However, the short-lived national luck of the Qin Dynasty made the title of "Qin people" quickly forgotten by people. The Han Dynasty lasted more than 400 years from the Western Han Dynasty to the Eastern Han Dynasty, which provided historical conditions for the name of the Han Dynasty and the name of the Chinese nation. In addition, the Han Dynasty was a powerful country. In foreign exchanges, other nationalities call the army of the Han Dynasty "Han soldiers", the envoys of the Han Dynasty "Han envoys" and the people of the Han Dynasty "Han people". Therefore, in the unprecedented frequent exchanges between the Han Dynasty and the surrounding ethnic minorities, such as communicating with the western regions, conquering the Xiongnu, pacifying the western Qiang, recruiting and surrendering Korea, serving the southwest Yi and incorporating Fujian, Guangdong and South Guangdong, the name of the Han Dynasty was called the name of the Chinese nation by other ethnic groups. Lv Simian said: "The name of the Han nationality began after Liu Bang proclaimed himself emperor." (History of Pre-Qin Dynasty, Shanghai Ancient Books Publishing House, 1983), p. 22. Lv Zhenyu said: "China people have been called Han since the former Han emperor Xuan Di." (Notes on China Nationalities, Joint Publishing Company, 1950, p. 19. In short, the name of the Han nationality has been called since the Han Dynasty.

From the historical drama of the development and transformation of the Chinese nation to the Han nationality, we can clearly see that after the Chinese nation was cast in the melting pot of national integration during the Spring and Autumn Period and the Warring States Period, under the guidance of the idea of "great unification", it staged scenes of the history of national formation and development. Since then, the Han nationality has become one of the most populous nationalities in the world, standing in the east of the world, which is the third stage of the formation of the Han nationality.

The origin of Chinese characters

From the ancient legend of Cangjie word-making to the discovery of Oracle Bone Inscriptions more than 100 years ago, China scholars have been trying to uncover the mystery of the origin of Chinese characters.

Regarding the origin of Chinese characters, there are many sayings in China ancient literature, such as "knot rope theory", "gossip theory", "picture theory" and "calligraphy contract theory". Ancient books also generally recorded the legend of Cang Xie, the historian of the Yellow Emperor who created Chinese characters. Modern scholars believe that systematic writing tools cannot be completely created by one person. If Cang Xie really exists, he should be a text organizer or publisher.

The earliest carved symbols were more than 8000 years ago.

In recent decades, Chinese archaeologists have published a series of unearthed materials about the origin of Chinese characters earlier than Oracle Bone Inscriptions in Yin Ruins. These materials mainly refer to the carved or painted symbols that appeared on pottery in the late primitive society and early historical society, and also include a few symbols engraved on Oracle Bone Inscriptions, jade and stone tools. It can be said that they provide a new basis for explaining the origin of Chinese characters.

Wang, a doctoral supervisor of Zhengzhou University, made a systematic investigation and comparison of the carving symbols on pottery pieces unearthed from more than 100 archaeological sites in China, and thought that the earliest carving symbols in China appeared in Jiahu site in Wuyang, Henan Province, with a history of more than 8,000 years.

As a professional worker, he tried to comprehensively sort out these original materials by comprehensively using scientific methods such as archaeology, ancient Chinese character configuration, comparative philology, scientific archaeology and high-tech means, so as to compare some clues about the occurrence and development of Chinese characters before Shang Dynasty.

However, the situation is not so simple. In addition to the existing small-scale data of Zhengzhou Shangcheng site and Xiaoshuangqiao site (in recent years, more than 10 cases of Zhu Shutao's early characters of Shang Dynasty have been found), other symbols before Shang Dynasty are scattered and lack of contact with each other, and most of them are out of touch with Shang Dynasty characters. There are also some symbols with heavy regional colors and complex backgrounds.

The Chinese character system was formally formed in the Central Plains.

Wang believes that the formal formation of the Chinese character system should be in the Central Plains. Chinese characters are a writing system of independent origin, independent of any foreign language. However, its origin is not single. After many times and long-term running-in, probably in the early summer, our ancestors creatively invented the writing symbol system of recording language on the basis of extensively absorbing and using early symbols. At that time, the Chinese character system matured rapidly.

According to reports, according to the written materials unearthed from archaeological excavations, China had a formal written language at least in the Xia Dynasty. For example, in recent years, archaeologists found the word "Wen" for writing brush and bamboo calligraphy on a flat pottery jar unearthed from Taosi site in Xiangfen, Shanxi. These symbols belong to the basic configuration in the early writing system, but unfortunately such unearthed writing materials are still rare.

Characters first matured in Shang Dynasty.

As far as the written materials of Yin Shang Dynasty are known and seen at present, there are many kinds of written carriers. At that time, in addition to writing on simplified Chinese characters with a brush, other main writing methods were carved on tortoise shells and animal bones, and pottery, jade and Tao Zhu were carved on bronzes. Oracle Bone Inscriptions and bronze ritual vessels used in Yin Ruins are the earliest mature written materials found in China.

The Shang dynasty characters reflected in Yin Ruins are not only reflected in the large number of characters and rich materials, but also in the way of creating characters that has formed its own characteristics and laws. The structural characteristics of basic characters in Shang Dynasty can be divided into four categories: based on the physical characteristics of human body and a certain part of human body; Based on labor creation and labor object; Taking the images of animals and livestock as the basis of word formation; Taking natural images as the basis of word formation. Judging from the cultural connotation of the configuration, the objects selected by these early mature hieroglyphs are quite close to the social life of our ancestors and have strong realistic characteristics. At the same time, the content described by these hieroglyphs involves all levels of people and nature, so it also has the characteristics of extensive sources of configuration.