The story of Chinese characters

Chinese characters are unique to our Chinese nation and a symbol of Chinese civilization. In our daily life, we can see it anytime and anywhere. It can be said that where there are China people, there are Chinese characters. However, do you know how Chinese characters developed? Here, I will introduce the history of Chinese characters.

There is a legend that in the period of the Yellow Emperor a long time ago, the Yellow Emperor ordered his courtier Cang Xie to create characters. Cang Xie is a strange man with eight eyes. He observed all directions with his eight eyes and saw all kinds of things. He simplified the shapes of these things and carved them on tortoise shells and animal bones, which became the earliest writing. This myth is of course absurd, but it also shows the fact that Chinese characters evolved from hieroglyphics.

In the primitive times tens of thousands of years ago, the ancients learned to express themselves in words, and later learned to use gestures, but some things are difficult to express in words and gestures, so someone came up with a method of marking, but there are too many marks and it is easy to forget. Later, they used graphics to express their meaning, such as "the sun" was painted as a circle and "the tree" was painted as a tree. This is how the earliest hieroglyphs were produced.

With the passage of time, mankind entered the slave society. At this time, there are more things that need to be recorded in words, and it is too cumbersome to express them with some graphic symbols. So people simplified some pictographs and combined some pictographs into a new text, making it easier for people to understand. For example, combining "man" and "wood" into the word "Hugh" means a person sleeping against a tree. In this way, many Chinese characters have been created, and a new type of Chinese characters-knowing characters has been formed. The origin of Chinese characters

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.

1 the origin of Chinese characters

There is a legend about the origin of Chinese characters. China ancient books all say that Chinese characters were created by Cang Xie. It is said that Cang Xie saw a strange-looking god, and the cave looked like a painted picture. Cang Xie painted his own image and created words. Some ancient books say that after Cang Xie created the characters, he let the cat out of the bag, the sky fell, and ghosts and gods cried every night. There is also a legend that Cang Xie observed the footprints of birds and animals printed on the mud, which aroused his paranormal feeling of reading ci. This rumor is not reliable. Writing is the need of the broad masses of people to live realistically, and it has been gradually enriched and developed after a long period of social practice.

1autumn of 954 to1summer of 957, ancient laborers in China excavated Banpo site (now north of banpo village, the eastern suburb of Xi city) for many times, and found that as early as 6,000 years ago, people in the left and right Banpo created illegal symbols, paintings, sculptures and decorations with literary nature in their long-term life and production practice. The carved symbols of Banpo people are mostly left on painted pottery, which can be regarded as original Chinese characters.

In recent years, a number of tombs and tombs (more than 4,500 years ago) have been found in a site in the late Dawenkou culture of Lingyang River in Juxian County, Shandong Province, and a large number of cultural relics have been unearthed. On some pottery statues, a word like a picture is engraved, and more than one word 10 has been published. These characters are drawn according to the shape of objects, so they are called "hieroglyphics". The structure of characters is similar to hieroglyphics in Oracle Bone Inscriptions, but it predates Oracle Bone Inscriptions by 1000 years. So "Pictograph" is the earliest written language in China, which has the characteristics of written language.