The Origin of China's Writing History

It is well documented that China script, Chinese characters, came into being in the late Shang Dynasty, about14th century BC, when a preliminary stereotyped script, namely Oracle Bone Inscriptions, was formed. Oracle Bone Inscriptions is both a hieroglyph and a phonography. Until now, there are still some pictographs in Chinese characters, which are very vivid.

In the late Western Zhou Dynasty, Chinese characters developed into Da Zhuan. The development of seal script has produced two characteristics: first, the lines with uneven thickness in the early days became uniform and soft, and the lines they drew with utensils were very concise and vivid; Second, standardization, the glyph structure tends to be neat, and gradually deviates from the original shape of the picture, laying the foundation for the square characters.

Later, Li Si, the prime minister of Qin Dynasty, simplified Da Zhuan and changed it to Xiao Zhuan. Small seal script not only simplifies the shape of big seal script, but also achieves the perfection of lineation and standardization, almost completely divorced from pictures and characters, and has become a neat, harmonious and very beautiful square font which is basically rectangular. However, Xiao Zhuan also has its own fundamental shortcoming, that is, its lines are very inconvenient to write with a pen, so almost at the same time, a kind of official script with flat sides was produced.

By the Han Dynasty, the official script had developed to a mature stage, and the readability and writing speed of Chinese characters had been greatly improved. After Li Shu, it evolved into Cao Zhang, and now it is grass. In the Tang dynasty, there was Weeds, which expressed the writer's thoughts and feelings with a pen. Subsequently, regular script (also known as original script), a combination of official script and cursive script, became popular in the Tang Dynasty. The print we use today evolved from regular script. Between regular script and cursive script is a running script, which is fluent in writing and flexible in using a pen. It is said that it was invented by Liu Desheng in Han Dynasty, and it is still the font used in our daily writing today.

In the Song Dynasty, with the development of printing, block printing was widely used, and Chinese characters were further improved and developed, resulting in a new type of calligraphy-Songti printing font. After the invention of printing, the carving knife used for lettering had a far-reaching influence on the glyph of Chinese characters, resulting in a kind of printing font with fine horizontal and thick vertical, which was eye-catching and easy to read, and was later called Song Style. There are two kinds of fonts for the moment: fat imitation face, Liu style, thin imitation European style and dangerous style. Among them, the strokes of Yan and Liu are towering, with some characteristics of horizontal, thin and vertical. In the Ming Dynasty, between Qin Long and Wanli, it changed from Song style to Ming style, with fine strokes and square fonts. It turned out that at that time, a kind of Hongwu style was popular among the people, which was used in official posts, lanterns, notices, private stones, and the main cards of ancestral temples. Later, some book carvers created a non-face and non-European skin silhouette in the process of imitating Hongwu's style. Especially because the strokes of this font are horizontal and vertical, it is really easy to engrave. It is different from seal script, official script, original script and cursive script, unique, fresh and pleasing to the eye. Therefore, it has been widely used since16th century and has become a very popular main printing font. It's also called Song Style, and it's also called lead font.

In Chinese characters, all kinds of fonts formed in different historical periods have their own distinctive artistic characteristics. For example, seal script is simple and elegant, official script is static and dynamic, rich in decoration, fast in cursive script, compact in structure, neat and beautiful in regular script, easy to read and write, practical, diverse in style and different in personality.

The evolution of Chinese characters is from pictographic pictures to linear symbols, strokes adapted to brush writing and printed fonts convenient for carving. Its evolution provides rich inspiration for China's font design. In character design, if we can give full play to the characteristics and elegant demeanor of various fonts of Chinese characters, we will certainly be able to design exquisite works with ingenious application and unique conception.

From the ancient legend of Cangjie's word-making to the discovery of Oracle Bone Inscriptions more than 65,438,000 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.

References:

People's Network-People's Daily

Speech time: 1 1-9 2 1:06 The use of characters is a great progress of human civilization. Chinese characters characterized by hieroglyphics are unique in the forest of human languages, and their advantages in writing and language are being recognized and accepted by people who use phonography. There is no consensus on when Chinese characters originated and who created them.

Historical Records, Xunzi, Lv Chunqiu, Han Feizi and other ancient documents all say that Chinese characters were created by Cang Xie and Juyong in the era of the Yellow Emperor. Xu Shen's Shuo Wen Jie Zi tries to make a more euphemistic explanation, arguing that Fuxi's eight diagrams "hanging the constitution" inspire people to make different symbols according to different things. In Shennong era, "ruling the country by knot", but there were many ordinary things that could not be satisfied in the end. In the era of the Yellow Emperor, Cang Xie appeared. "Seeing the traces of birds and animals' hoof selection, we can see that it is different and different, and it is a book"; He also said that when Cang Xie made a book contract, "pictographic classification" meant words. Later, the pictograms and sounds brought out the best in each other. After a long period of evolution and development, it is summed up as six ways of forming Chinese characters, which are called "six books", namely "referring to things, pictographs, sounds and shapes, memorizing, transferring notes and debiting." Yuanming newspaper said that Cang Xie's observation of the stars, turtle prints, bird feathers, mountains and rivers and even palm prints was the basis of his writing. Before the establishment of modern philology, the theory about the origin of Chinese characters in Shuo Wen Jie Zi was undoubtedly the most authoritative. '

However, the Biography of Confucius in Shangshu and the Collection of Notes say that Fuxi made a contract to replace the knot, and literary works also rose in his time, obviously much earlier than the era of the Yellow Emperor.

Under the influence of the trend of suspecting the ancient times, Liu Jingbian put forward that Chinese characters are actually another viewpoint formulated by Confucius himself. Fortunately, this book was not widely circulated, and Oracle Bone Inscriptions's discovery quickly shattered this myth of Confucius; The appearance of Oracle Bone Inscriptions's verse also shook the legend of the origin of the characters in Shuowen Jiezi, and raised various questions about the legendary "Six Books".

With the discovery of the symbol of Yangshao culture pottery souvenirs, many experts think it is a symbol with Chinese characters. According to archaeological findings, Longshan culture, Dawenkou culture, Liangzhu culture and Erlitou culture have unearthed a large number of pottery with memorabilia symbols, some of which are really very close to words. In particular, pottery symbols and other figures in Dawenkou culture are interpreted as gold, Xu, Huan, Huan Mountain or axe, stick, Dan and so on. So people think that China characters originated from pottery symbols. But to be fair, there are not many existing pottery symbols close to Chinese characters, and even less can be interpreted. It seems too early to conclude that Chinese characters originated from pottery symbols, but the discovery and interpretation of pottery symbols, after all, let people see the dawn of solving the problem of the origin of Chinese characters, and people hope to have more unearthed materials and more research results.

Speech time: 1 1-8 20:43 Word-making principle: Liu Shu is the basic principle of combining Chinese characters. Liu Shu was mentioned in the ceremony, but the specific content was not specified. Xu Shen in the Eastern Han Dynasty expounded the structural principles of the Chinese character "Liu Shu" in Shuo Wen Jie Zi: pictographic, ideographic, comprehensible, pictophonetic, phonological, transliteration and borrowing.

Pictographic characters: This method of creating characters is described according to the appearance characteristics of an object, so it is also true to draw it as its object. Such as the sun, the moon, the mountains and the water, originally depicted the patterns of the sun, the moon, the mountains and the water, and then gradually evolved into the present shape.

Refers to things: this refers to the expression of abstract things, and so does the so-called "each refers to its thing". If you write "up" on it, people will write "down" on it.

Shape and sound: this is a unique sound expressed by a specific shape (root) in the text. For example: Hu, the word can also be a root, combined with different attribute roots, can be synthesized into: butterfly, butterfly, lake, gourd, Hu, gas and so on. And use the same pronunciation to express different things (some only have initials). However, due to the phonological changes of ancient and modern languages, many similar ancient pictophonetic characters have no homophones in today's Mandarin.

Understanding: This method of word formation is to combine two radicals and derive new meanings. For example, when the sun and the moon merge into one, the sun and moonlight become "bright". The word "people" and "words" together is the word "faith", which means what people said before; There is a letter that this man abides by what he says.

Note turn: this is used to annotate two words, which are synonymous but have different shapes. Xu Shen explained in Hanshu: "Building a class, agreeing to accept each other, and taking the test as usual." , how do you say this? The ancient word "test" can be said to be "longevity", and "old" has the same meaning as "test", that is, the so-called old people take the test and the candidates are old. Is The Book of Songs elegant? Bai Pu also said, "Zhou Wangshou test. "There are also some immortal ancients in Su Shi's poem Qu Yuan Tower. Why do you want to compare them? In a word. Among them, "Kao" means "Lao", and it is particularly noteworthy that later generations of philologists have also made a lot of explanations on the aforementioned definition of Xu Shen. Among them, there are three types, namely, shape shift theory, sound shift theory and meaning shift theory. But some people think that these three statements are not comprehensive enough. Jelly Lin, a contemporary archaeologist, also explained that "Zhuan Zhu" is a form (root) to record two words with completely different pronunciations and meanings. Such as "broom and woman" and "mother and daughter" in Oracle Bone Inscriptions.

Borrowing: In short, the word borrowing is used to express something else. Generally speaking, there is a new thing that can't be described, so we borrow a root with similar pronunciation or attribute to express this new thing. For example, "You" originally meant the right hand (first seen in Oracle Bone Inscriptions), and later it was disguised as "You". Smell means to listen to things with your ears. For example, "University? In Chapter 7, there is a sentence "Turn a blind eye, listen but don't smell, eat but don't know its taste", but it was later used as an olfactory verb (although some people think it is misused).

Summarize the above six books, the first two items, "word-making method" also; Second, the "combination method" is also; The last two items, "using Chinese characters", are the same. These six principles are philological theories summarized by ancient philologists. The rules of Chinese character creation included in it have evolved over a long period of time, and are not created by any one person.

Structure of Chinese characters: Chinese characters are composed of one or more roots arranged in a square in a specific space in a two-dimensional way (European languages are one-dimensional words), so they have another name for square characters. Structurally, Chinese characters have the following characteristics:

There is a high information density in a word. When you express the same thing, you can express the same information in a shorter space than phonetic notation, so the reading efficiency of Chinese characters is very high.

A Chinese character consists of more than 400 pictographs such as gold, wood, water, fire and earth, which are combined together like building blocks.

The meaning of an unknown character can be separated, and its meaning can be inferred from the composition of the root and the configuration of the space. When new things are difficult to express in the evolution of the times, new words can be synthesized and used according to the principle of radical combination. For example, the Chinese word uranium is a new word created in modern times to express a newly discovered chemical element.

The spatial configuration of Chinese character roots has an influence on the meaning: if it is the same combination of "dead heart", the left and right rows of "busy" and the upper and lower rows of "forgotten" are arranged differently, which leads to different meanings; The part with the word "Ai" on the right side of the text indicates that the right hand (left hand means left hand) is holding something and doing something to the left root (bronze inscription and Oracle Bone Inscriptions discovered in archaeology). If the right hand holds something on it, it becomes "Ai". Almost all people with this root are aggressive or use violence to achieve a certain purpose, such as attacking, defeating, knocking, collecting and so on.

Glyph (China Calligraphy): Chinese characters with "Guo" have different strokes, that is, different fonts; Different fonts have different fonts.

Chinese characters written in regular fonts (such as regular script, Song style, official script, seal script, etc. ) is a kind of square character, and each character occupies the same space. Chinese characters can be divided into two parts, namely, knowing words and compound words, and knowing words can't be separated, such as "Wen" and "Zhong". Combined Chinese characters are composed of basic components, accounting for more than 90% of Chinese characters. Common combinations of compound words are: upper and lower structures, such as "smile" and "tip"; Left and right structures, such as "word" and "family"; Semi-closed structure, such as "similarity" and "inclination"; Fully enclosed structure, such as "group" and "meeting"; Composite structure, such as "win" and "point". The basic components of Chinese characters include single words, radicals and other non-word-forming components.

The smallest constituent unit of Chinese characters is strokes.

When writing Chinese characters, the direction and order of strokes, that is, the order of strokes, are relatively fixed. The basic rules are: first horizontal and then vertical, first left and then down, from top to bottom, from left to right, first outside and then inside, then sealed, first in the middle and then on both sides. The stroke order of Chinese characters with different writing styles may be different.

Pronunciation: Chinese characters are the same writing system in many dialects, and each word represents a syllable. Now, Mandarin is used as the standard pronunciation in Chinese mainland. The syllables of Putonghua are determined by one initial, one vowel and tone, and there are more than 65,438+0,300 syllables actually used. Because of the huge number of Chinese characters, there are obvious homophones; At the same time, it also exists in the case that the same word has multiple tones, which is called polyphonic words. This situation is common among all kinds of people in China.

Although Chinese characters are mainly ideographic, they are not without phonetic components. The most common are names and places, followed by transliteration of foreign words, such as sofa. In addition, there are some original words, such as (Yi Ming) "Alas" and "Haha" laughter. But even so, there are still some ideographic elements, especially the names and place names of countries. Even foreign names and place names have some ideographic bottom lines. For example, "Bush" must not be transliterated as "immortal".

Because Chinese characters themselves are not phonetic, although the number and writing methods of Chinese characters have changed from the Han Dynasty to the 20th century, we can't see the phonetic changes. Special research is needed to infer their pronunciations in ancient Chinese and middle Chinese. Some scholars believe that before the Han Dynasty, the pronunciation of a Chinese character was two syllables, a small syllable and a large syllable, similar to Korean and Japanese today. See ancient Chinese for details.

The pronunciation of Chinese characters in Japanese can be divided into "phonetic reading" and "training reading", and a word often has multiple pronunciations, because the pronunciations introduced to Japan from China in different periods are different.

In Korean, it is roughly a word and a sound, without training.

Besides Japan, other countries that use Chinese characters also use some disyllabic words, such as "Li" (sea), "Hao" (gallon) and "Hao" (kilowatt). However, due to the official abolition, it is basically not used in Chinese mainland, but it is still used in Taiwan Province Province, and most people understand its meaning.

Phonetic notation: The earliest phonetic notation methods are pronunciation and direct phonetic notation. The reading method is to use words with similar pronunciations as phonetic notation, which is what Xu Shen used to explain Chinese characters, such as "shooting, shooting and reading accurately". Direct notation is to use another Chinese character to express the pronunciation of this Chinese character. For example, a woman speaks for herself, and the speaker says "Yue" is used for phonetic notation.

Both of the above methods have inherent defects. Some words have no homophones or homophones are so uncommon that it is difficult to play the role of phonetic notation, such as "socks".

The anti-tangent method was developed in the Wei and Jin Dynasties, and it is said that it was influenced by Sanskrit, which used pinyin characters. The pronunciation of Chinese characters can be marked by backcutting, that is, the initial consonant of the first word and the vowel and tone of the second word are combined to make phonetic notation, so that all Chinese characters can be combined. For example, the pronunciation of "Lian" is the combination of the initial of "Lang" and the vowel and tone of "Dian".

Since modern times, Chinese phonetic symbols (commonly known as ㄅㄆㄇㄈ) and phonetic notation methods of many Latin letters have been developed. Phonetic symbols are still a part of teaching in Taiwan Province Province, but at present, Chinese Pinyin is the most widely used in Chinese mainland.

Because Chinese characters are mainly ideographic, the phonetic notation is weak. This feature makes the literature of the last 1000 years, like the western world that uses pinyin, have no big difference in wording, but it also makes it difficult for people to infer the ancient phonology. For example, the pronunciation of "Pang" comes from "Dragon", but today the former is pronounced as "Pang" and the latter as "Dragon" in Beijing dialect. How to explain this difference is a subject of phonology.

Chinese characters and words: Chinese characters are the smallest unit of Chinese.

Morpheme is the smallest unit of Chinese ideogram, similar to English words and phrases. Most Chinese characters can form morphemes independently, such as "I", which is similar to that English words consist of a single letter, such as "I". Most words in modern vernacular Chinese are composed of more than two Chinese characters. However, unlike the relationship between "words" and "letters" in English, the meaning of morphemes is often related to the meaning of each Chinese character when it forms morphemes independently, thus simplifying memory to a considerable extent.

Words include morphemes and phrases composed of several morphemes.

The high efficiency of Chinese characters is reflected in hundreds of basic hieroglyphics, which can be synthesized into tens of thousands of Chinese characters, representing all kinds of things in the sky and underground; Thousands of commonly used words can be easily combined into hundreds of thousands of words.

However, on the other hand, it has become a burden to accurately grasp the collocation forms and usage of these hundreds of thousands of words. There are about tens of thousands of commonly used words in Chinese, with a total vocabulary of about one million. Although it seems daunting in quantity, it is not out of reach to master most Chinese word-formation because of its ideographic nature. Therefore, as far as vocabulary is concerned, its learning difficulty is not high; In contrast, mastering the same number of foreign words has a much greater memory intensity.

From the perspective of ancient Chinese, the original meaning of Chinese characters is more accurate and efficient than the May 4th vernacular movement. For example, Mr. Zhu Bangfu promoted the accurate use of Chinese characters in ancient times.

Number of Chinese characters: There is no exact number of Chinese characters, and the number of Chinese characters used in daily life is probably several thousand. According to statistics, 1000 commonly used words can cover about 92% of written materials, 2,000 words can cover more than 98%, and 3,000 words have reached 99%. Simplified statistics are not much different from traditional statistics.

There are more than 80,000 Chinese characters in history (there are also more than 60,000 sayings), most of which are variant characters and rare words. The vast majority of variant characters and uncommon words have naturally disappeared or been standardized, and generally only occasionally appear in names and places other than ancient Chinese. In addition, after the first batch of simplified characters, there are a number of "two simplified characters", which have been abolished, but a few numbers are still popular in society.

Xu Shen counted the number of Chinese characters for the first time in Shuo Wen Jie Zi in Han Dynasty, and * * * included 9353 words. Later, the jade tablets written by Gu in the Southern Dynasties were recorded as 169 17. On this basis, the jade tablets in Daguangyihui were said to have 22,726 words. After that, Lei Pian, which was officially edited by the Song Dynasty, received 3 13 19 words. Another book, Ji Yun, compiled by the Song Dynasty authorities, received 53,525 words, which was once the book with the largest number of words.

In addition, some dictionaries have more words, such as Kangxi Dictionary in Qing Dynasty, with 47,035 words. There are 48,902 words in the Japanese dictionary of dahanhe, with 1062 words in the appendix. The Chinese Dictionary in Taiwan Province Province has 49,905 words; The Chinese Dictionary has 54,678 words. In the 20th century, the ocean of Chinese characters has the largest number of published words, with 85,000 words.

Among the computer coding standards for Chinese characters, the largest Chinese character coding at present is the national standard CNS 1 1643 of Taiwan Province Province. At present, (4.0)*** contains 76,067 verifiable simplified, Japanese and Korean Chinese characters, but it is not popular and is only used in a few environments such as household administration system. The big five codes commonly used in Taiwan Province and Hongkong include 13053 traditional Chinese characters. GB 18030 is the latest internal code character set in People's Republic of China (PRC). GBK contains 209 12 simplified characters, traditional Chinese characters, Japanese and Korean, while earlier GB23 12 contains 6763 simplified characters. Unicode unified ideographic basic character set contains 20,902 Chinese characters, with two extended areas, totaling more than 70,000 characters.

In the early Chinese character system, the number of words was insufficient, and many things were represented by interchangeable words, which caused the ambiguity of text expression. In order to improve the clarity of expression, Chinese characters have gone through a stage of gradual complexity and a large number of words. The excessive increase in the number of Chinese characters makes it difficult to learn Chinese characters, and the meaning that a single Chinese character can express is limited, so the meaning of many single Chinese characters is expressed by Chinese characters, such as common double spelling words. At present, the development of China characters tends to create new words instead of new words.

Chinese character

Chinese characters, a writing system for recording Chinese, are still or have been used in Japanese, Korean and Vietnamese. Chinese characters are one of the oldest characters in the world with a history of more than 4,500 years. In a narrow sense, it is the writing of Han nationality; Broadly speaking, it is the same word in the cultural circle of Chinese characters.

Chinese characters are an important tool to carry culture. At present, there are a large number of ancient books written in Chinese characters. Different dialects all use Chinese characters as the writing system of * * * *, so Chinese characters have played an important role in the spread of Chinese civilization in history and become an internal link in the formation of Southeast Asian cultural circles. In the development of Chinese characters, a large number of poems, couplets and other cultures have been left behind, forming a unique art of calligraphy in China.

A Chinese character generally has many meanings and strong word-formation ability, and many Chinese characters can form words independently. This leads to the extremely high "use efficiency" of Chinese characters, and about 2,000 commonly used words can cover more than 98% of written expressions. Coupled with the characteristics of ideographic characters, the reading efficiency of Chinese characters is very high. The information density of Chinese characters is higher than that of letters, so on average, the Chinese expression of the same content is shorter than that of any other letter language.

At present, the Chinese character system is divided into traditional Chinese characters and simplified Chinese characters. The former is used in Chinese communities in Taiwan Province Province, Hongkong, Macau and North America, while the latter is used in Chinese communities in Chinese mainland, Singapore and Southeast Asia. Generally speaking, although there are differences between the two writing systems, the individual differences of commonly used Chinese characters are within 25%.

Because of the complexity of Chinese character writing, the theory of Chinese character backwardness has a long history, which holds that Chinese characters are the bottleneck of education and informatization, and there is a trend to promote the "Latinization" of Chinese characters or even abolish them. It is generally believed that Chinese characters also have outstanding advantages. Although it is difficult to learn at first, there is no continuous learning problem similar to a large number of English words after mastering common words, and its ideographic characteristics can fully mobilize the learning ability of the human brain. After the problem of computer input is basically solved, the "Chinese character backwardness theory" and "Chinese character latinization" have actually been gradually abandoned by most people.

At present, the Chinese character system has been basically stable, but the standardization of Chinese characters and the natural extinction of rare words continue.