China people write Chinese characters not from right to left, but from left to right.

The formal writing of China's ancient prose is: vertical books are arranged in rows, one line is filled from top to bottom, and then the lines are wrapped from right to left. Because of the characteristics of Chinese characters, they can be arranged vertically from top to bottom or vertically from bottom to top. At the same time, Chinese characters do not have to be written vertically, but also horizontally, from left to right or from right to left. Historically, in addition to the formal vertical writing method, there are occasional horizontal writing. For example, banners in couplets must be written horizontally.

It was Mr Chen Jiageng who first put forward the horizontal writing of Chinese characters. 1950 In June, at the second session of the first session of the China People's Political Consultative Conference, Chen Jiageng formally proposed to the General Assembly that Chinese writing should be written horizontally from left to right. 1 95565438+1October1day, Guangming Daily changed the vertical layout from top to bottom to horizontal layout for the first time, and published an article entitled "Tell readers horizontally for this newspaper": "We believe that the layout of newspapers and books in modern China should change with the development of modern culture and its needs, and should change with the changes of people's living habits. The horizontal writing of Chinese characters is a development trend. " Famous scholars such as Guo Moruo and Hu Yuzhi. I also quickly wrote an article pointing out the scientific nature of horizontal writing, saying that people's eyes are horizontal, and the eyes look wider horizontally than vertically. When reading, the eyes and head rotate less, which is natural and labor-saving and not easy to get tired. It is also convenient to write various mathematical, logical and cultural formulas and foreign place names, and it can also improve the utilization rate of paper. After Guangming Daily took the lead in practice, by June 1955 1 1, 17, the central newspaper had been changed to horizontal edition. 65438+654381October 0956+ 1, People's Daily was also changed into a horizontal version, so far, the whole country responded.

Reading from vertical to horizontal is a great change in the writing style of Chinese characters. Someone specially did a special experiment: Top students in Grade Three 10 were selected and divided into two groups, male and female, and they were asked to read lyric essays carefully selected from the same China Youth Daily. Results The gap is obvious: the reading speed of horizontal typesetting is 1.345 times that of vertical typesetting. Someone joked that I didn't know my eyes were long and horizontal until Chinese characters were changed to horizontal writing. Others ridiculed that the western characters were written horizontally, and the readers shook their heads while reading, meaning "no, no, no, that's not true!" " Therefore, there is an innovative consciousness of denying predecessors and creating new schemes; China's ancient prose is written vertically, and the reader nods while reading it, meaning "Yes, yes, that's it!" Therefore, there is a conservative consciousness of superstitious predecessors.

All the above statements have some truth, but they are used by some national nihilists as a handle to attack our ancestors, who are so stupid that they don't even know how long their eyes are. So for the ancients, it is necessary to distinguish the two. Otherwise, wouldn't it be dereliction of duty to let the voices that scold our ancestors pierce our eardrums every day?

As mentioned earlier, Mr. Guo Moruo wrote that the horizontal arrangement of Chinese characters is scientific and suspected of following the trend. Mr. Guo himself is a master of studying ancient Chinese characters. He only got together at the moment when the horizontal arrangement of Chinese characters was a foregone conclusion, but he didn't see Mr. Guo seriously analyze the reasons for the vertical writing of ancient Chinese characters. Under the influence of Mr. Guo, if we can scientifically and comprehensively analyze the reasons why ancient Chinese characters are written vertically and now horizontally (I am ignorant and have not seen relevant information), then we will not leave a handle on national nihilists, at least in the way of writing Chinese characters.

Aside from typesetting and printing, Chinese characters are the most suitable for vertical writing. In the way of vertical writing, Chinese characters are written smoothly and coherently, and there is a trend of one go, while horizontal writing is easy to stop and it is difficult to achieve momentum. Therefore, most calligraphy works are written vertically, and occasionally writing horizontally is not as artistic as writing vertically. The reason is that the characteristics suitable for vertical writing have naturally formed in the development of Chinese characters. Chinese characters are composed of five basic strokes: horizontal, vertical, left, right and folding, which are arranged in two dimensions. When writing Chinese characters, the pen always starts from the upper left corner or above, and the place where the pen is received can be roughly divided into two categories: one is to add a dot in the upper right corner, or to lift the pen to the right to draw a hook, which is suitable for writing a word horizontally on the right, but only accounts for a small part of Chinese characters; The other is in the lower right corner or at the bottom of the pen, or in the middle, which is suitable for writing a word vertically below, accounting for most of Chinese characters. What is said here is only the reason why Chinese characters are suitable for vertical writing, which is determined by historical reasons. Talking about science without history is as unreasonable as mocking Qin Shihuang for not being able to fly.

The earliest Chinese characters discovered today are Oracle Bone Inscriptions and Jinwen (Zhong Dingwen). Oracle Bone Inscriptions and Zhong Ding are not normal written materials. The former only uses Oracle Bone Inscriptions carvings to predict good or bad luck, while the latter is an object with inscriptions, while the real writing materials are specially used to write notes or words. Daily experience tells us that people always act according to their habits. Because Oracle Bone Inscriptions and Jin Wen mostly wrote vertically, it shows that people used to write vertically at that time, which originated from normal writing tools and materials at that time. According to the habit of vertical writing, we have reason to speculate that at least in the Yin and Shang Dynasties, our ancestors had formed a perfect and skilled writing technology system. Such a writing system takes a knife as a writing tool, bamboo chips or narrow wooden boards (strips) as writing materials, and engraves handwriting on bamboo chips (strips) with a knife.