There is an urgent need for the history of Chinese characters, that is, there is an urgent need for information about Chinese characters.

Chinese characters are hieroglyphics that record Chinese. Chinese characters are also one of the oldest and only hieroglyphics in the world, which can be traced back to more than 4000 years ago. Chinese characters are also borrowed from many East Asian languages, such as Japanese and Korean, and ancient Vietnamese.

The word Chinese character itself may be a regression word from Japanese to Chinese, but it has a long history. In the early Qing Dynasty, the official script of the government was Manchu. At that time, Chinese characters were used to refer to the traditional Chinese characters in China. Before that, China was usually called "Zi" or "written language" in ancient times, because it was not necessary to distinguish it from other countries. So far, the "Ministry of Education" in charge of writing policy in Taiwan Province Province has not used the word Chinese characters, but called them "Chinese characters", such as the standard form of Chinese characters. However, the word Chinese characters has gradually been used by people in charge of non-language policies and other non-governmental organizations. In addition, there are names like "Chinese characters".

The characteristics of Chinese characters are as follows:

Radical combination: All Chinese characters are pictographs composed of 869 initials and 265 meaningful initials. Refer to the font and coding of Chinese characters. Page 3

Ideographic: inheritance, the root itself expresses meaning, multiple roots synthesize new meaning, and the configuration of space has an influence on the meaning of words. (Mr. Zhu Bangfu's Yi of Words is about this.)

All-encompassing: all languages and fields can use six basic rules, and they can form the required vocabulary close to their own fields and regions.

Writing in the same language: Chinese characters themselves are not completely phonetic, and different dialects and even languages can still be written in the same language, so as to understand each other in terms of literary meaning and word meaning.

Unique culture such as poetry, couplets, calligraphy art, etc.

Chinese characters in Oracle Bone Inscriptions are one of the three oldest Chinese character systems in the world. Among them, the sacred script of ancient Egypt and the cuneiform script of Sumerians in the two river basins have been lost, and only China's Chinese characters are still in use today.

According to legend, Chinese characters originated from the creation of characters in Cangjie. Cang Xie, a historian of the Yellow Emperor, created Chinese characters according to the shapes of the sun and the moon and the footprints of birds and animals. When he created Chinese characters, the world was shocked-"When it rains, ghosts cry at night." From a historical point of view, the complicated Chinese character system could not be invented by one person. It is more likely that Cang Xie made outstanding contributions to the collection, collation and unification of Chinese characters. What about Xunzi? Revealing the Secret records that "there are many people who have good books, but only one person has a biography of Cang Xie himself".

Some people think that the Eight Diagrams in Zhouyi have a great influence on the formation of Chinese characters, but there are few supporters.

original text

Before the invention of writing, oral knowledge had obvious shortcomings in dissemination and accumulation. Primitive humans used knotting, carving and drawing to assist in recording, and later simplified and replaced drawing with characteristic graphics. When the graphic symbols are simplified to a certain extent and form a specific corresponding relationship with the language, the original text is formed.

1994, a large number of pottery were unearthed at the Daxi cultural site in Yangjiawan, Hubei Province. Among the symbols of 170, some features are quite similar to those of Oracle Bone Inscriptions. This discovery infers the formation process of the original Chinese characters to 6000 years ago. In addition, the pictographic symbols on pottery unearthed in Dawenkou, Shandong Province 8000 years ago, the geometric symbols on painted pottery in Anbanpo, Xi 'an, and the geometric symbols on tortoise shell in Jia Hu, Henan Province may all be the manifestations of different stages of the formation (or before) of the original characters.

However, after the Shang Dynasty, are Chinese characters and these geometric symbols in the same strain? This issue is still controversial. Many scholars have suggested that these symbols are not necessarily the precursors of Chinese characters, or even the writing symbols.

From hieroglyphics to ideographs

The stone carving of Mount Tai closing the mountain is said to have been written by Li Si. From Oracle Bone Inscriptions to Xiao Zhuan, Chinese characters have experienced the development process from pictographs to language symbols, and the glyphs have gradually separated from the concrete images of things. Chinese characters in this period are called ancient Chinese characters.

Oracle Bone Inscriptions in Shang and Zhou Dynasties was a relatively complete writing system. Among the more than 4,500 Oracle characters found, nearly 2,000 characters have been recognized. At the same time when Oracle Bone Inscriptions appeared, the words cast on bronze ware were called inscriptions on bronze or Zhong Dingwen. Pan and Mao in the Western Zhou Dynasty have high historical and artistic value.

After Qin Shihuang unified China, Lisi standardized and sorted out the big seal script and the ancient prose of six countries, formulated the small seal script as the standard writing font of the Qin Dynasty, and unified the characters of China. The seal script is rectangular, and the strokes are round and smooth.

Small seal script solved the problem of a large number of variant characters between languages of various countries, and the history of "writing the same language" began. The unification of written language has effectively promoted the spread of inter-ethnic culture and played an important role in the identification of the Chinese nation and the unification of China, which is rare in the history of written language in the world.

The development of Chinese characters has undergone many different evolutions. In the early Chinese character system, the number of words was very small, and a large number of things were represented by interchangeable characters, which made the expression of words vague. In order to express more accurately and cope with the increasing new things with the development of history, a large number of words are refined and combined in the form of radical combination, which makes the records in the literature more and more accurate. For example, the earliest means of transportation at sea were "boats"; But today, in addition to ships, there are boats, boats, boats, boats and other small, large and special-shaped ships, which makes it very efficient to identify and understand what kind of ship we are referring to only by looking at one word when recording as words. On the other hand, the way to combine words is to judge the correct meaning by looking at the context (short or often), which is inefficient, but convenient for oral communication (there are too many homophones in Chinese characters, so it is difficult to identify them, so the solution is to combine words, and the other is to pronounce "Li" as a word like Korean and Japanese.

In).

coinage

After Qin Shihuang unified Chinese characters, the number of Chinese characters increased according to the needs of the times, and new words appeared constantly:

Emperor Wendi of the Sui Dynasty was originally a vassal, but because the word "Sui" meant instability, the word "Sui" was removed and created as the national title.

In the Tang Dynasty, Wu Zetian created the word "Qi" (the same as "Zhao") as her name according to the meaning of "the sun and the moon are in the sky".

In the Five Dynasties, the word "Chen" was created in its name, taking the meaning of "flying dragon in the sky".

In modern times, due to the influx of western knowledge, many words have also been created. For example, when beer was introduced into China, how to express it in Chinese characters was a problem. At first, it was translated into skin wine, but later it was inappropriate. About 19 10, the word "beer" was created-translated as "beer". In order to express English units, some disyllabic words have been created, such as Li (nautical mile), Kui (gallon), Kui (kilowatt) and Chi (ruler). However, these disyllabic words have been eliminated in the Notice on the Unified Use of Chinese Characters in the Names of Some Units of Measurement issued by the China Character Reform Commission and the National Bureau of Standards and Metrology on June 20th 1977. They are no longer used in Chinese mainland, but they can still be seen in Hong Kong, Macao and Taiwan.

The composition of modern Chinese characters

The strokes of Xiao Zhuan are mainly curved, and then gradually become more linear and easier to write. In the Han Dynasty, official script replaced Xiao Zhuan as the main script. The appearance of official script laid the foundation of modern Chinese character glyph structure and became the watershed of ancient and modern characters.

After the Han Dynasty, the writing style of Chinese characters gradually changed from wooden slips and bamboo slips to writing on silk paper with a brush. The rapid appearance of cursive script, regular script and running script not only meets the official documents and daily needs, but also forms a calligraphy art with strong oriental characteristics. After the invention of ancient printing, a new font, Song Ti, appeared, which was used for printing. In modern times, fonts such as bold and imitation Song Ti appeared one after another.

Word-building principle

Liu Shu is the basic principle of Chinese character combination, which is mentioned in Zhou Li, but the specific content is not explained. In Shuo Wen Jie Zi, Xu Shen in the Eastern Han Dynasty expounded the structural principles of the Chinese character "Liu Shu": pictographic characters, index characters, knowing characters, pictophonetic characters, phonetic characters and loanwords.

hieroglyph

This word-making method is described according to the appearance characteristics of objects. The so-called painting into its object, the same is true of the body. 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.

Self-evident character

This refers to the method of expressing abstract things, and so does the so-called "each refers to what it is". If you write "up" on it, people will write "down" on it.

Pictophonetic method of word formation

This is a unique sound expressed by a specific shape (root sound) 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, Zhu, etc., with the same pronunciation (some only initials) to represent different things. However, due to the phonological changes of ancient and modern languages, many similar ancient pictophonetic characters have no homophones in today's Mandarin.

Associative compound

This word-formation method combines two radicals to derive new meanings. If the "sun" and "moon" are combined, the sun and moonlight will 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.

Characters that explain/are synonymous with each other

This is used to annotate these two words, which are synonymous but have different shapes. Xu Shen of the Han Dynasty explained: "If you build similar poems, you agree to accept them and often test them." ",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. "The Book of Songs, Daya Pu" also said: "A textual research on Zhou Wangshou. Su Shi's Poem on Qu Yuan's Tower also contains some immortal ancients. Why should we 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. There are three types, namely, deformation theory, sound change theory and meaning change theory. But some people think that these three theories 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. For example, "Broom and Woman" and "Mother and Daughter" in Oracle Bone Inscriptions and so on.

use

In short, this method uses one word 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 taken as the meaning of "You" under the guise. Smell means to listen to things with your ears. For example, "University? In Chapter 7, there is a sentence "See but don't see, 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 four items, "word-making method" 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.

Chinese character structure

Chinese characters are composed of one or more radicals arranged in a square in a specific space, 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 expressing 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 arrangement of Chinese character radicals 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" have different arrangements and produce different meanings; The part with the word "one" 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 "Yi". Almost all people with this root cause are aggressive, or use violence to achieve a certain purpose, such as attacking, defeating, beating, collecting and collecting.

Font (China Calligraphy)

Chinese characters are written in different ways, that is, there are 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 "pen" and "dust"; Left and right structures, such as "word" and "branch"; 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.

pronounce

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 different in different dialects, but it is common in Chinese.

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 (life), "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 don't seem to have changed much from the Han Dynasty to the 20th century, they didn't directly show the changes of Chinese pronunciation. 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 "pronunciation reading" and "training reading". There are often many pronunciations of a word, because the pronunciations introduced to Japan from China are different in different periods.

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

Influenced by Japan, other countries that use Chinese characters later used some disyllabic characters, such as Li (nautical mile), Kui (gallon) and Kui (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.

transfer

The earliest phonetic notation methods are reading if and direct notation. The method of reading if is to annotate words with similar pronunciations. Xu Shen used this phonetic notation when explaining words, such as "accurate reading".

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. The vast majority of Chinese characters can form morphemes independently, such as "I", which is similar to English words with single letters, 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 there are probably thousands of Chinese characters used in daily life. 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. gbyte

18030 is the latest set of internal code characters in People's Republic of China (PRC). GBK contains 209 12 simplified, traditional, Japanese and Korean Chinese characters, while the early GB

23 12 contains 6763 simplified Chinese 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.

The influence of Chinese characters

Derivative words

The writing system of Chinese characters is also one of the most important source characters in the world. Also influenced by Chinese characters are the characters of Khitan, Nuzhen, Xixia, sawndip, Cooper (Fang Bai), GuBuyi (Fang Buyi) and Zinan. But they all died out for various reasons, and few people can recognize the female script in Chinese now. Japanese pseudonyms (Japanese pseudonyms) are also greatly influenced by Chinese characters when they are created.

In addition, Mongolian, Manchu, Xibe and so on. Also influenced by Chinese writing methods and writing tools, the writing method from right to left was changed to top-down writing, and the structure of Chinese characters also changed.

Chinese character cultural circle

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 and even languages use Chinese characters as their writing system. In ancient Japan, Korea and Vietnam, Chinese characters used to be the only official document system in the country, so Chinese characters played an important role in the spread and sharing of civilizations in history.

Because the relationship between Chinese characters and pronunciation is not very close, it is easy to be borrowed by other ethnic groups, such as Japan, North Korea and Vietnam. There was a historical stage when only Chinese characters were written and no Chinese was spoken. This feature of Chinese characters plays an important role in maintaining a unified Han nationality, which is full of various dialect groups but unable to communicate with each other.

Chinese characters have had a great influence on the cultures of neighboring countries, forming a cultural circle of Chinese characters. In Japan and the Korean peninsula, Chinese characters have been merged into their language characters "Chinese characters (かんじ)" and "Chinese characters (? Until now, Chinese characters are still regarded as a part of their writing system in Japanese. In North Korea, Chinese characters are no longer used at all; In South Korea, Chinese characters have been used less and less in recent decades. However, due to the use of a large number of Chinese characters in Korean, the phenomenon of stress is serious, so Chinese characters will still be used when strict expression is needed. Although names of people and companies are usually written in Korean, most of them have corresponding Chinese names.

Japan

Chinese characters were introduced into Japan through the Korean Peninsula in the 3rd century. After World War II, Japan began to restrict the number and use of Chinese characters, and promulgated the List of Using Chinese Characters and the List of Characters for Personal Names, which simplified some Chinese characters (new Japanese fonts), but the Chinese characters used in literary creation were not restricted. In addition to introducing Chinese characters from Chinese, Japan has also created and simplified some Chinese characters, such as "Bi" (crossroads), "Bi" (mountain road), "Yi" (width), "Bi" and "Yi". See Japanese characters.

Korean peninsula

Around the 3rd century AD, Chinese characters were introduced into the Korean peninsula, and Korean was once written entirely in Chinese characters. 1444, King Sejong of Korea promulgated "The Meaning of Training the People" and invented the usage of proverbs and Chinese characters together. Although the Republic of Korea has banned the use of Chinese characters in formal occasions and stopped teaching Chinese characters in primary and secondary schools, Chinese characters continue to be used among the people and can be written according to personal habits, but now fewer and fewer Koreans can write beautiful Chinese characters. The Democratic People's Republic of Korea abolished Chinese characters in 1948, leaving only a dozen Chinese characters. See also: Korean characters.

Viet Nam

Chinese characters were introduced into Vietnam in the 1 century, and Vietnamese people used Chinese characters as their writing language completely, and created text Twitter on the basis of Chinese characters. However, due to the inconvenience of writing, Chinese characters are still the main writing method. 1945 after the founding of the democratic Republic of Vietnam, Chinese characters were abolished and pinyin characters called "mandarin characters" were used. Now there are no traces of Chinese characters in Vietnamese. See: Zinan and Ziru for details.

Chinese folk

Many folk customs in China are related to Chinese characters, such as:

Shooting Tiger: Solving riddles on lanterns, also known as lighted tigers, is closely related to Chinese characters. In the old days, fighting tigers can be roughly divided into two categories: one is that scholars fight tigers, and the riddles are complex and diverse, and the answers are mostly the original sentences in the Four Books and Five Classics; One is street lantern riddles, which are very popular. Tiger hunting is an important activity in the Lantern Festival.

Combination of Chinese characters: People in China often combine some auspicious phrases into one word to pray for good luck. The common combined Chinese characters are "Lucky for Wealth" and "Double Happiness".

The homonym of the combined Chinese character "Confucius and Mencius are eager to learn": China people like to use homonyms to express good luck. For example, bat homophonic means happiness, and beast homophonic means longevity.

Relief map of the cold in September: a folk custom in northern China, in the season of September every year, nine double-hook characters "weeping willows in front of the door, cherishing the spring breeze" are written. These nine words are nine strokes each. Starting from the solstice of winter, the whole map was completed by the end of September.

Flower-and-bird characters: Some folk artists spell Chinese characters with some flower-and-bird patterns. Close up, the details are some flower-and-bird strokes, while from a distance, they are figures. The artistic form of this combination of strokes is called flower-and-bird character, which is a kind of colored calligraphy with flowers, birds, insects and fish. In China, it can only be seen at temple fairs and some holiday parties during the Spring Festival. Flower and bird figures have also become street art in western countries such as Britain and the United States. Most of the early bird strokes were written with auspicious words to pray for good luck. Now the bird tricks seen at the temple fair mainly write the customer's name, and the buyer's purpose has gradually changed from praying for good luck to seeking novelty.

Chinese character art

Liang Qichao's calligraphy works have a unique and beautiful Chinese character structure, and the main writing tool, the brush, has a variety of expressive force, thus producing a unique plastic art in China, calligraphy. Seal cutting is an art related to calligraphy. It uses a knife to carve seal characters on stones as seals.

Combination of words

In the history of Chinese characters, new words are constantly combined. All kinds of Chinese characters we see now must not be completed in one breath in a certain era, but gradually developed into today's face according to the needs of the times. For example, the word "person" appeared in the Shang Dynasty, while the word "bump" only appeared in the Tang Dynasty.

In addition, different industries have different requirements for words, so words are formed. For example, China traditional music concerts use subtraction notation and I-word notation, and the specialized agencies of the Taiwanese government also have their own unique characters, such as household registration characters.

Word grouping is often more efficient than word grouping in meaning, but if word grouping is too complicated and happens to become a common word, it will lead to simplification efforts.

simplify

Regular script Ou Yangxun's Inscription of Liquan in Jiucheng Palace. The writing of Chinese characters is complicated; Traditional printing is more complicated. Therefore, there are many simplified characters since ancient times, but most of them are for private use, and official documents still use regular characters. Although relief printing was invented by China people, its help is limited due to the structural characteristics of Chinese characters.

In modern times, western civilization in a strong position began to enter East Asia, and countries in the whole Chinese character cultural circle set off a trend of learning from the West. Some people insist on the tradition of Chinese characters, but many people advocate giving up the use of Chinese characters. These arguments for abandoning the movement of Chinese characters are: compared with western pinyin, Chinese characters are bulky and clumsy, because Chinese characters cannot be written on typewriters and must be typed in a huge typesetting room, that is to say, Chinese characters have become the bottleneck of education and informatization. In this regard, many countries that use Chinese characters have simplified Chinese characters to varying degrees, and even tried to completely pinyin them through political promotion. Japan completely uses pseudonyms, and various pinyin schemes appear in Chinese, all based on this idea.

People's Republic of China (PRC) * * * promulgated the simplified Chinese characters scheme on 1956128 October, and the summary of simplified Chinese characters was adopted on 1964 May. It was republished in 1986 after several revisions and has been used in Chinese mainland. 1977 the second batch of simplified characters (draft) was released, and simplified characters were released. After a period of trial (about eight years), it was officially abolished in 1986 because the font was too simple and confusing. Singapore and Malaysia have published the same simplified word list as the simplified word list.

Japanese and Korean also have their own simplified characters.

Latinise

In the past 400 years, Westerners and China people themselves have put forward many Latin schemes for Chinese characters, mainly including:

Vitoma Pinyin (1867)

Postal Pinyin (1906)

Chinese Roman characters (1928)

New Latin Characters in Northern Dialect (193 1 year)

Chinese Pinyin Scheme (1958)

Cantonese Pinyin (1993)

Universal Pinyin (1998)

At present, the scheme of Chinese Pinyin is the most widely used and accepted scheme of Latin Chinese characters in the United Nations.

The view that Chinese characters are backward has a long history, and it is considered that Chinese characters are the bottleneck of education and informatization, and it has the driving force of "Latinization" or even abolition of Chinese characters. 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.

Variant finishing

Besides word formation, there are many variations. They are words with exactly the same meaning and pronunciation, but they are written in different ways. Some of them were created by celebrities for historical reasons, such as harmony, Hu, Qiu, Hu and Hu.

Chinese mainland published the list of variant forms in 1956, which abolished a large number of variant forms, but later restored some variant forms for various reasons. For example, "Yu" was abolished as a variant of "Yu", but it was restored as a standard word in the Modern Chinese General Character List published by 1988. In addition, different regions have different choices of variant characters. For example, South Korea takes the earliest style of Chinese variant characters as the standard writing. Therefore, in the specification of Korean characters, the word "sweet" should be replaced by "Yan", "stick" should be replaced by "Yan" and "painting" should be replaced by "painting".

In Taiwan Province Province, there are also so-called variants, such as "Taiwan" and "Taiwan", "Ti" and "Ti", and there are also variants of numbers: one, two, three and four are the opposite: one, two, three and four (the last four are used to write bills to improve the difficulty of manual tampering).