Historical information 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.