On the Origin and Evolution 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 gaps are heated are called? Mega？ . 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 stabilized: OK? Horizontal, vertical, left, point, hold, pick and fold? Basic strokes and strokes are further standardized, and the number and order of strokes per word are also 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.

Morphological evolution of Chinese characters

Chinese characters are constantly evolving, including the evolution of text structure and form, which is not only related to the times, but also related to the differences in countries or regions, text uses and writing materials. The form of Chinese characters refers to the writing shape of Chinese characters, commonly known as fonts.

People are generally used to calling the characters written from the generation of Chinese characters to the font of Xiao Zhuan as ancient Chinese characters; The characters written in the fonts after Qin Lishu are collectively called modern characters.

1, Oracle Bone Inscriptions:

Oracle Bone Inscriptions wrote it on tortoise shell and beast bones, which are often used for divination. As early as the Neolithic Jiahu Site in Wuyang County, Henan Province and the Longshan Cultural Site in garden village County, Chang 'an County, Shaanxi Province, Oracle Bone Inscriptions has been discovered. At present, there are more than 0/0,000 pieces of Oracle bones, and the total number of Oracle bones with characters is about 62,000, and 3978 characters have been sorted out. There are now more than 900 Oracle Bone Inscriptions that can be read and confirmed, most of which are commonly used words; More than 3,000 people can't read and confirm, and most of them are special names such as names, place names and surnames.

2. Jinwen:

Bronze inscriptions refer to the characters carved on various bronzes in the pre-Qin period. The ancients called bronze gold, which is the provincial name of bronze inscriptions. Among the bronzes, the bell is the most musical instrument, and the tripod is the most ritual vessel. Zhong Ding is commonly used to represent ancient bronzes, so it is also called Zhong Dingwen. Among them, the concave is called yin, also called segment, which means empty; The outstanding person is called Yang Wen, also known as knowledge, and knowledge is the meaning of this symbol. Collectively. So far, more than 8,000 pre-Qin bronzes with inscriptions have been unearthed, with more than 3,000 non-repetitive characters on them, and the number of recognizable readers is about 1800 words.

3. Big seal script:

Dazhuan refers to the Qin characters in the Spring and Autumn Period and the Warring States Period. Inheriting the inscriptions on bronze in the Western Zhou Dynasty, and enlightening Xiao Zhuan in the next, the strokes are more linear, and the characters are gradually shaped.

4. Xiao Yan:

Small seal script refers to the common script of Qin State after Qin Shihuang unified China, also known as Qin Zhuan, which is the symmetry of big seal script. After Qin Shihuang annexed the six countries, in order to consolidate political unity, he carried out a series of reforms, one of which was to unify the characters in order to change the chaotic situation of deformed characters in the Warring States period. Generally speaking, there is only one unified writing method for each character, which has abolished many old abnormal characters in ancient Chinese characters. Fonts are further symbolized. Glyphs are developing towards simplification.

5. Official script:

Lishu is a simpler and easier-to-write font than Zhuanshu, which was developed on the basis of scribbling of Zhuanshu in the late Warring States period. This font was originally dedicated to the jailers of the Qin Dynasty, so it was called official script. The Chinese characters in Lishu are completely symbolic in form, that is, the pictographic factors of ancient Chinese characters are completely abandoned, making the characters become symbols composed solely of strokes and losing their original pictographic and figurative functions. For example, birds, horses, fish, swallows and Xiao Zhuan still have pictographic meanings, but Li Shu changed the tail of fish and swallows and the feet and tails of birds and horses into four parts, and the prototype was no longer visible. Thorough strokes, that is, dissolving seal script, changing round strokes into square or truncated strokes, decomposing fonts into the accumulation of several basic strokes, and gradually forming several strokes such as point, horizontal, straight, curved, left, press, pick and hook.

6, cursive script:

Cursive script is a kind of modern font produced by convenient writing. Cursive script? Grass? It means sloppy. There are three common cursive scripts: Cao Zhang, Cao Jin and Crazy Grass.

Because cursive script is difficult to write and recognize, it is not easy to use and spread, and to some extent, it destroys the structural system of Chinese characters and makes them lose their communicative function, so it has always been an auxiliary font, which can not be formally used, but is only used as a work of art for people to appreciate.

Because cursive strokes are simpler than other fonts, it has a great influence on the simplification of Chinese characters later. There are many variations of cursive script in the simplified Chinese characters used today, which shows that cursive script has certain progressive significance in the development of Chinese characters.

7. Run the script:

Running script is a font between regular script and cursive script. It came into being in the late Eastern Han Dynasty and prevailed in Wei and Jin Dynasties. Until today, it is still the most widely used handwriting in daily writing, recording and drafting.

Running script is characterized by informal brushwork, fine brushwork, continuous strokes and independent characters. Various fonts such as seal script, official script, regular script and cursive script have their own rules, but running script has no certain rules. If you write well and have many elements of regular script, it is called regular script, or it is really good; If writing is indulgent and cursive script contains many elements, it is called cursive script or cursive script. Wang Xizhi, a native of Jin Dynasty, was highly regarded as a calligrapher in past dynasties, and his Preface to Lanting was recognized as the best running script in the world.

8. italics:

Regular script is a simplified font evolved from Han Li. The real name is a real book or a real book, which was renamed after the Tang Dynasty. Qi and fingering, that is, neatness and standardization, are exemplary.

It is believed that regular script germinated in the late Western Han Dynasty, and the Wei, Jin, Southern and Northern Dynasties were the stages when regular script gradually matured and official script gradually disappeared. As for the current regular script, its style is generally laid by the works of calligraphers in the Tang Dynasty, and the regular script in the Tang Dynasty completely eliminates the remaining official scripts in the Southern and Northern Dynasties, so the regular script in the Tang Dynasty is completely mature.

The main characteristics of regular script are square, horizontal and vertical, and clear strokes.

The structure of regular script is basically the same as that of Han Li, except that some characters are simpler than those of Han Li, and some official scripts have a little structure and strokes of seal script, but regular script is gone. The main difference between them lies in the different pen shapes. Han Li has long transverse waves, but regular script doesn't. Han Li's Long Cross Wave and Four Waves should be picked up at last, but regular script is not.