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 Chinese culture, but also had a profound impact on the development of world culture. More than fifty kinds of carved symbols have appeared in places such as the Banpo ruins about six thousand years ago.
The origin and evolution of Chinese characters
In Chinese characters, various fonts formed in various historical periods have their own distinctive artistic characteristics. For example, the seal script is simple and elegant, the official script is static and dynamic, rich in decoration, cursive script is fast and electric, compact in structure, regular script is neat and beautiful, the running script is easy to read and write, and it has strong practicability, and has various styles and different personalities. However, before Qin unified the characters, Chinese characters were still chaotic in terms of font and application. In a broad sense, ancient Chinese characters include characters before Xiaozhuan including the Great Seal; in a narrow sense, they refer to characters before the Great Seal in the history of Chinese characters. Here adopts the narrow concept of ancient prose. Ancient inscriptions include oracle bone inscriptions and bronze inscriptions; among them, the former is regarded as the earliest stereotyped writing in China.
Oracle-bone script: written or engraved in the later period of the Shang Dynasty, the text left on tortoise shells and beast bones, most of which are “divine inscriptions”, and a few are “notes for notes”. Most of the oracle bone inscriptions conform to the pictographic and knowing character-making principles, and the pictophonetic characters account for only 20%. The characters are carved with a knife, some are filled with cinnabar, and some are written directly in ink. Because the characters are mostly evolved from pictorial characters, they have a high level of pictology, and there are many types of characters with indefinite strokes. This shows that Chinese writing has not yet been unified during the Yin and Shang dynasties.
Yin dynasty pictorial inscriptions: In the pre-Qin period, copper was called gold, so the inscriptions carved on bronzes were called inscriptions, also called Zhong Dingwen, and Yi Qiqi. Compared with the oracle bone inscriptions, the inscriptions on the bronze inscriptions have a higher degree of pictogram and show a more ancient appearance. The inscription is filled with solid writing, which makes the image vivid and natural.
In the history of Chinese writing, the Xia, Shang, and Zhou dynasties, in terms of their contributions to philology, Shi Lai is the most. Shi Lai is the historian of King Zhou Xuan, he is not innovative, he is simple. The big seal is also known as the text, the seal, the book, and the history book. Because it was written by Shi Lai, it was called “Lao Wen” in the world. The Great Seal Sans can be found in “Shuowen Jiezi” and various bells, tripods and Yi implements collected by later generations. Among them, the stone drum inscriptions made by King Zhou Xuan is the most famous.
The evolution of Chinese characters is a process of gradual standardization and stabilization of Chinese character fonts. Xiaozhuan fixed the number of strokes of each character; official script constituted a new system of strokes, and the font gradually became oblate; after the birth of regular script, the font of Chinese characters stabilized, determining “horizontal, vertical, abbreviation, dot, 捺, The basic strokes of “pick and fold” have been further standardized, and the number of strokes and stroke order of each character have also been fixed. For more than a thousand years, regular script has been the standard Chinese character. Chinese characters are ideographic characters based on pictographs and pictophones as the main body. There are about 10,000 in total, of which about 3,000 are the most commonly used. These three thousand Chinese characters can form an infinite number of phrases, and then form a variety of sentences. After the Chinese characters came into being, they had a profound impact on neighboring countries. At present, archaeologists have unearthed more than 160,000 oracle bones. Some of them 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. Among them, about 3,000 have been verified and studied by scholars. Among the more than 3,000 words, scholars have unanimously interpreted more than 1,000 words. The rest are either uninterpretable, or scholars are deeply divided. Nevertheless, through these more than a thousand words, people can already roughly understand the political, economic, cultural and other aspects of the Shang Dynasty. Oracle 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 the forms of bronze inscriptions (bronze), small seal, official script, regular script, etc., and they have been in use ever since. The scripts of Japan, Vietnam, North Korea and other countries are all created on the basis of Chinese characters.