What is Oracle Bone Inscriptions? What are its characteristics?

What is carved on tortoise shells and animal bones is called Oracle Bone Inscriptions. The characteristics of Oracle Bone Inscriptions mainly include antiquity, pictograph, diversity, artistry, practicality and cultural value.

1. Antiquities: Oracle Bone Inscriptions is one of the earliest systematic characters in the history of China, which records a large number of historical events and cultural information of the Shang Dynasty and has important historical value.

2. Pictographic characters: Oracle Bone Inscriptions's word-making method is mainly pictographic, and its meaning is expressed by images or patterns. For example, the word "dog" is the profile of a dog, and the word "sun" is the shape of the sun.

3. Diversity: Oracle Bone Inscriptions includes a large number of pictographs, signifiers, connotative words and loanwords. , not only the glyphs are diverse, but also the strokes are rich.

4. Artistry: Most of Oracle Bone Inscriptions's strokes are slender, showing a simple and elegant style, giving people a unique artistic beauty.

5. Practicality: Oracle Bone Inscriptions is a kind of writing used for divination, which is very practical and widely used to predict the good fortune and bad fortune in the future.

6. Cultural value: Oracle Bone Inscriptions, as the source of China characters, is of great value to the study of ancient China politics, economy and culture. At the same time, it also provides important historical materials for the development and evolution of Chinese characters.

Oracle Bone Inscriptions's word-making method;

1, pictograph: pictograph, which is painted as its object, followed by its body. That is, to describe things or concepts with figures or patterns.

2, referring to things: referring to things, seeing and knowing, seeing and seeing righteousness. That is, by adding some specific marks or indicators to objects or symbols to express meaning.

3, bosom friend: bosom friend, friendship is greater than class. In other words, two or more hieroglyphs are combined to express a new meaning.

4, the combination of sound and shape: the combination of sound and shape, in the name of things, give inferences. In other words, by associating a thing with a sound or word, a new word is produced.

5, transfer notes: transfer notes, build classes, agree to love. In other words, a new word is a combination of one root and another root.

6. Borrowing: Borrowers can be described as pure-note characters with multiple tones, which can be borrowed to express different meanings. That is, borrowing existing words or words to express a new meaning or concept.