Chinese characters, also known as Chinese characters, Chinese characters and Tang dialect characters, are widely used in the cultural circle of Chinese characters, a unique deictic writing system in the world, and the only morpheme characters that are still widely used and highly developed in the world.
It was originally invented and created by the ancestors of Huaxia people in the ancient Yellow River civilization in China, and its font has undergone long-term improvement and evolution.
At present, the exact history can be traced back to Oracle Bone Inscriptions, Zhang Wen and Jin Wen in Shang Dynasty about 13 BC, then to Zhang Wen and Xiao Zhuan in the Spring and Autumn Period, Warring States Period and Qin Dynasty, and then to the official script, cursive script and regular script (and derived running script) in Han Dynasty, and finally to the standard of handwritten font used today-block letters in Tang Dynasty, which is also today.
Chinese characters have been the main official characters in China in past dynasties, and now they are the official characters in practice in the people's Republic of China and the Republic of China. Chinese characters have developed to a high level in ancient times. They were not only used in China, but also served as the only international common characters in East Asia for a long time. Before the 2th century, they were all written and standardized characters in Korean Peninsula, Viet Nam, Ryukyu and Japan.
Extended information:
Features
1. Elegance
It has become an art-calligraphy art. The calligraphy art of Chinese characters can't be compared with any other characters. The following ancient calligraphy works have become priceless. There are numerous famous works such as Lanting Preface, Shence Army Ji Shengde Monument, Mysterious Pagoda Monument, and Sacrifice to Nephew Draft.
2. High recognition
The visual field of human eyes is always a surface, not a line, so the linear arrangement is difficult to recognize; It is clear at a glance to form a square. Pinyin text = linear text; Chinese characters = box characters. Chinese characters have higher reading efficiency than pinyin characters.
3. Easy to understand and relevant
For example, "Bei" is a pictophonetic word and a knowing word. From the perspective of pictophonetic characters, the word "clothing" on the left side of the word "quilt" means that the quilt belongs to the category of clothes, and the word "skin" on the right side is similar to the pronunciation of "quilt" in the era of word creation, indicating the pronunciation of this word, but with the passage of time, the pronunciation of "skin" and "quilt" has become different and gradually lost its function of expressing pronunciation.
from the perspective of knowing words, clothes made of leather are "quilts". The original meaning of quilt refers to a kind of small quilt. When it comes to future generations, it extends the meaning of "suffering" on the basis of the original meaning of quilt.
4. Image, intuition and expressiveness
Chinese characters are hieroglyphics, and their distinctive feature is that the shape and meaning are closely related, which has obvious intuition and expressiveness. The ideographic nature of Chinese characters makes them the most informative characters per unit character in the world, so they are easy to identify and facilitate association, which also brings great convenience to speed up reading.
Chinese characters are different from other languages in the world, which is the particularity of Chinese grammar itself, namely parataxis.
Whether a phrase is combined into a sentence or a single sentence is combined into a complex sentence, the first consideration is often the combination of semantics, not the use of grammatical forms. As long as several key words loaded with important information are roughly matched in meaning, the communicative purpose can be achieved concisely, and these words can be combined together, which is called "parataxis".
This feature of Chinese grammar makes it unique in structure, flexible and changeable, with many implications and emphasis on ideas. Its parataxis, flexibility and simplicity are incomparable to other languages. The above characteristics of Chinese grammar are helpful for us to perceive and understand by tacit means in reading, which is of great convenience for speeding up reading.
5. A large amount of information
Research shows that Chinese characters, as a complex symbol system, have a high information entropy. The basic methods of research are: gradually expanding the capacity of Chinese characters, and with the increase of the capacity of Chinese characters, the increase of information entropy slows down; After the number of Chinese characters increased to 1237, the information entropy no longer increased significantly.
Chinese scientists have pointed out that the capacity limit of Chinese characters is 12,366 characters, and the static average information entropy of Chinese characters (average information) is 9.65 bits. According to the famous ZIPF'SLAW in mathematical linguistics, this is the most informative character symbol system in the world today.