Radical combination: All Chinese characters are pictographs composed of 869 initials and 265 meaningful initials. Refer to the font and coding of Chinese characters. Page 3
Ideographic: inheritance, the root itself expresses meaning, multiple roots synthesize new meaning, and the configuration of space has an influence on the meaning of words. (Mr. Zhu Bangfu's Yi of Words is about this.)
All-encompassing: all languages and fields can use six basic rules, and they can form the required vocabulary close to their own fields and regions.
Writing in the same language: Chinese characters themselves are not completely phonetic, and different dialects and even languages can still be written in the same language, so as to understand each other in terms of literary meaning and word meaning.
Unique culture such as poetry, couplets, calligraphy art, etc.
Chinese characters in Oracle Bone Inscriptions are one of the three oldest Chinese character systems in the world. Among them, the sacred script of ancient Egypt and the cuneiform script of Sumerians in the two river basins have been lost, and only China's Chinese characters are still in use today.
According to legend, Chinese characters originated from the creation of characters in Cangjie. Cang Xie, a historian of the Yellow Emperor, created Chinese characters according to the shapes of the sun and the moon and the footprints of birds and animals. When he created Chinese characters, the world was shocked-"When it rains, ghosts cry at night." From a historical point of view, the complicated Chinese character system could not be invented by one person. It is more likely that Cang Xie made outstanding contributions to the collection, collation and unification of Chinese characters. What about Xunzi? 6? 4. "Uncover the Cover" records that "there are many good readers, and there is only one Cang Xie who writes alone".
Some people think that the Eight Diagrams in Zhouyi have a great influence on the formation of Chinese characters, but there are few supporters.
original text
Before the invention of writing, oral knowledge had obvious shortcomings in dissemination and accumulation. Primitive humans used knotting, carving and drawing to assist in recording, and later simplified and replaced drawing with characteristic graphics. When the graphic symbols are simplified to a certain extent and form a specific corresponding relationship with the language, the original text is formed.
1994, a large number of pottery were unearthed at the Daxi cultural site in Yangjiawan, Hubei Province. Among the symbols of 170, some features are quite similar to those of Oracle Bone Inscriptions. This discovery infers the formation process of the original Chinese characters to 6000 years ago. In addition, the pictographic symbols on pottery unearthed in Dawenkou, Shandong Province 8000 years ago, the geometric symbols on painted pottery in Anbanpo, Xi 'an, and the geometric symbols on tortoise shell in Jia Hu, Henan Province may all be the manifestations of different stages of the formation (or before) of the original characters.
However, after the Shang Dynasty, are Chinese characters and these geometric symbols in the same strain? This issue is still controversial. Many scholars have suggested that these symbols are not necessarily the precursors of Chinese characters, or even the writing symbols.
From hieroglyphics to ideographs
The stone carving of Mount Tai closing the mountain is said to have been written by Li Si. From Oracle Bone Inscriptions to Xiao Zhuan, Chinese characters have experienced the development process from pictographs to language symbols, and the glyphs have gradually separated from the concrete images of things. Chinese characters in this period are called ancient Chinese characters.
Oracle Bone Inscriptions in Shang and Zhou Dynasties was a relatively complete writing system. Among the more than 4,500 Oracle characters found, nearly 2,000 characters have been recognized. At the same time when Oracle Bone Inscriptions appeared, the words cast on bronze ware were called inscriptions on bronze or Zhong Dingwen. Pan and Mao in the Western Zhou Dynasty have high historical and artistic value.
After Qin Shihuang unified China, Lisi standardized and sorted out the big seal script and the ancient prose of six countries, formulated the small seal script as the standard writing font of the Qin Dynasty, and unified the characters of China. The seal script is rectangular, and the strokes are round and smooth.
Small seal script solved the problem of a large number of variant characters between languages of various countries, and the history of "writing the same language" began. The unification of written language has effectively promoted the spread of inter-ethnic culture and played an important role in the identification of the Chinese nation and the unification of China, which is rare in the history of written language in the world.
The development of Chinese characters has undergone many different evolutions. In the early Chinese character system, the number of words was very small, and a large number of things were represented by interchangeable words, which made the expression of words vague. In order to express more accurately and cope with the increasing new things with the development of history, a large number of words are refined and combined in the form of radical combination, which makes the records in the literature more and more accurate. For example, the earliest means of transportation at sea were "boats"; But today, in addition to ships, there are boats, boats, boats, boats and other small, large and special-shaped ships, which makes it very efficient to identify and understand what kind of ship we are referring to only by looking at one word when recording as words. On the other hand, the way to combine words is to judge the correct meaning by looking at the context (short or often), which is inefficient, but convenient for oral communication (there are too many homophones in Chinese characters, so it is difficult to identify them, so the solution is to combine words, and the other is to pronounce "Li" as a word like Korean and Japanese.
In).
coinage
After Qin Shihuang unified Chinese characters, the number of Chinese characters increased according to the needs of the times, and new words appeared constantly:
Emperor Wendi of the Sui Dynasty was originally a vassal, but because the word "Sui" meant instability, the word "Sui" was removed and created as the national title.
In the Tang Dynasty, Wu Zetian created the word "Qi" (the same as "Zhao") as her name according to the meaning of "the sun and the moon are in the sky".
In the Five Dynasties, the word "Chen" was created in its name, taking the meaning of "flying dragon in the sky".
In modern times, due to the influx of western knowledge, many words have also been created. For example, when beer was introduced into China, how to express it in Chinese characters was a problem. At first, it was translated into skin wine, but later it was inappropriate. About 19 10, the word "beer" was created-translated as "beer". In order to express English units, some disyllabic words have been created, such as Li (nautical mile), Kui (gallon), Kui (kilowatt) and Chi (ruler). However, these disyllabic words have been eliminated in the Notice on the Unified Use of Chinese Characters in the Names of Some Units of Measurement issued by the China Character Reform Commission and the National Bureau of Standards and Metrology on June 20th 1977. They are no longer used in Chinese mainland, but they can still be seen in Hong Kong, Macao and Taiwan.
The composition of modern Chinese characters
The strokes of Xiao Zhuan are mainly curved, and then gradually become more linear and easier to write. In the Han Dynasty, official script replaced Xiao Zhuan as the main script. The appearance of official script laid the foundation of modern Chinese character glyph structure and became the watershed of ancient and modern characters.
After the Han Dynasty, the writing style of Chinese characters gradually changed from wooden slips and bamboo slips to writing on silk paper with a brush. The rapid appearance of cursive script, regular script and running script not only meets the official documents and daily needs, but also forms a calligraphy art with strong oriental characteristics. After the invention of ancient printing, a new font, Song Ti, appeared, which was used for printing. In modern times, fonts such as bold and imitation Song Ti appeared one after another.
Word-building principle
Liu Shu is the basic principle of Chinese character combination, which is mentioned in Zhou Li, but the specific content is not explained. In Shuo Wen Jie Zi, Xu Shen in the Eastern Han Dynasty expounded the structural principles of the Chinese character "Liu Shu": pictographic characters, index characters, knowing characters, pictophonetic characters, phonetic characters and loanwords.
hieroglyph
This word-making method is described according to the appearance characteristics of objects. The so-called painting into its object, the same is true of the body. Such as the sun, the moon, the mountains and the water, originally depicted the patterns of the sun, the moon, the mountains and the water, and then gradually evolved into the present shape.
Self-evident character
This refers to the method of expressing abstract things, and so does the so-called "each refers to what it is". If you write "up" on it, people will write "down" on it.
Pictophonetic method of word formation
This is a unique sound expressed by a specific shape (root sound) in the text. For example: Hu, the word can also be a root, combined with different attribute roots, can be synthesized into: butterfly, butterfly, lake, gourd, Hu, Zhu, etc., with the same pronunciation (some only initials) to represent different things. However, due to the phonological changes of ancient and modern languages, many similar ancient pictophonetic characters have no homophones in today's Mandarin.
Associative compound
This word-formation method combines two radicals to derive new meanings. If the "sun" and "moon" are combined, the sun and moonlight will become "bright". The word "people" and "words" together is the word "faith", which means what people said before; There is a letter that this man abides by what he says.
Characters that explain/are synonymous with each other
This is used to annotate these two words, which are synonymous but have different shapes. Xu Shen of the Han Dynasty explained: "If you build similar poems, you agree to accept them and often test them." ",how do you say this? The ancient word "test" can be said to be "longevity", and "old" has the same meaning as "test", that is, the so-called old people take the test and the candidates are old. Is The Book of Songs elegant? 6? 4? Park also said, "Textual research on Zhou Wangshou. Su Shi's Poem on Qu Yuan's Tower also contains some immortal ancients. Why should we compare them? In a word. Among them, "Kao" means "Lao", and it is particularly noteworthy that later generations of philologists have also made a lot of explanations on the aforementioned definition of Xu Shen. There are three types, namely, deformation theory, sound change theory and meaning change theory. But some people think that these three theories are not comprehensive enough. Jelly Lin, a contemporary archaeologist, also explained that "Zhuan Zhu" is a form (root) to record two words with completely different pronunciations and meanings. For example, "Broom and Woman" and "Mother and Daughter" in Oracle Bone Inscriptions and so on.
use
In short, this method uses one word to express something else. Generally speaking, there is a new thing that can't be described, so we borrow a root with similar pronunciation or attribute to express this new thing. For example, "You" originally meant the right hand (first seen in Oracle Bone Inscriptions), and later it was taken as the meaning of "You" under the guise. Smell means to listen to things with your ears. For example, "University? 6? In Chapter 7, there is a sentence "See but don't see, listen but don't smell, eat but don't know its taste", but it was later used as an olfactory verb (although some people think it is misused).
Summarize the above six books, the first four items, "word-making method" also; The last two items, "using Chinese characters", are the same. These six principles are philological theories summarized by ancient philologists. The rules of Chinese character creation included in it have evolved over a long period of time, and are not created by any one person.
Chinese character structure
Chinese characters are composed of one or more radicals arranged in a square in a specific space, so they have another name for square characters. Structurally, Chinese characters have the following characteristics:
There is a high information density in a word. When you express the same thing, you can express the same information in a shorter space than phonetic notation, so the reading efficiency of Chinese characters is very high.
A Chinese character consists of more than 400 pictographs such as gold, wood, water, fire and earth, which are combined together like building blocks.
The meaning of an unknown character can be separated, and its meaning can be inferred from the composition of the root and the configuration of the space. When new things are difficult to express in the evolution of the times, new words can be synthesized and used according to the principle of radical combination. For example, the Chinese word uranium is a new word created in modern times to express a newly discovered chemical element.
The spatial arrangement of Chinese character radicals has an influence on the meaning: if it is the same combination of "dead heart", the left and right rows of "busy" and the upper and lower rows of "forgotten" have different arrangements and produce different meanings; The part with the word "one" on the right side of the text indicates that the right hand (left hand means left hand) is holding something and doing something to the left root (bronze inscription and Oracle Bone Inscriptions discovered in archaeology). If the right hand holds something on it, it becomes "Yi". Almost all people with this root cause are aggressive, or use violence to achieve a certain purpose, such as attacking, defeating, beating, collecting and collecting.
Font (China Calligraphy)
Chinese characters are written in different ways, that is, there are different fonts; Different fonts have different fonts.
Chinese characters written in regular fonts (such as regular script, Song style, official script, seal script, etc. ) is a kind of square character, and each character occupies the same space. Chinese characters can be divided into two parts, namely, knowing words and compound words, and knowing words can't be separated, such as "Wen" and "Zhong". Combined Chinese characters are composed of basic components, accounting for more than 90% of Chinese characters. Common combinations of compound words are: upper and lower structures, such as "pen" and "dust"; Left and right structures, such as "word" and "branch"; Semi-closed structure, such as "similarity" and "inclination"; Fully enclosed structure, such as "group" and "meeting"; Composite structure, such as "win" and "point". The basic components of Chinese characters include single words, radicals and other non-word-forming components.
The smallest constituent unit of Chinese characters is strokes.
When writing Chinese characters, the direction and order of strokes, that is, the order of strokes, are relatively fixed. The basic rules are: first horizontal and then vertical, first left and then down, from top to bottom, from left to right, first outside and then inside, then sealed, first in the middle and then on both sides. The stroke order of Chinese characters with different writing styles may be different.
pronounce
Chinese characters are the same writing system in many dialects, and each word represents a syllable. Now, Mandarin is used as the standard pronunciation in Chinese mainland. The syllables of Putonghua are determined by one initial, one vowel and tone, and there are more than 65,438+0,300 syllables actually used. Because of the huge number of Chinese characters, there are obvious homophones; At the same time, it also exists in the case that the same word has multiple tones, which is called polyphonic words. This situation is different in different dialects, but it is common in Chinese.
Although Chinese characters are mainly ideographic, they are not without phonetic components. The most common are names and places, followed by transliteration of foreign words, such as sofa. In addition, there are some original words, such as (life), "alas" and "haha" laughter. But even so, there are still some ideographic elements, especially the names and place names of countries. Even foreign names and place names have some ideographic bottom lines. For example, "Bush" must not be transliterated as "immortal".
Because Chinese characters don't seem to have changed much from the Han Dynasty to the 20th century, they didn't directly show the changes of Chinese pronunciation. Special research is needed to infer their pronunciations in ancient Chinese and middle Chinese.
Some scholars believe that before the Han Dynasty, the pronunciation of a Chinese character was two syllables, a small syllable and a large syllable, similar to Korean and Japanese today. See ancient Chinese for details.
The pronunciation of Chinese characters in Japanese can be divided into "pronunciation reading" and "training reading". There are often many pronunciations of a word, because the pronunciations introduced to Japan from China are different in different periods.
In Korean, it is roughly a word and a sound, without training.
Influenced by Japan, other countries that use Chinese characters later used some disyllabic characters, such as Li (nautical mile), Kui (gallon) and Kui (kilowatt). However, due to the official abolition, it is basically not used in Chinese mainland, but it is still used in Taiwan Province Province, and most people understand its meaning.
transfer
The earliest phonetic notation methods are reading if and direct notation. The method of reading if is to annotate words with similar pronunciations. Xu Shen used this phonetic notation when explaining words, such as "accurate reading".
Direct notation is to use another Chinese character to express the pronunciation of this Chinese character. For example, a woman speaks for herself, and the speaker says "Yue" is used for phonetic notation.
Both of the above methods have inherent defects. Some words have no homophones or homophones are so uncommon that it is difficult to play the role of phonetic notation, such as "socks".
The anti-tangent method was developed in the Wei and Jin Dynasties, and it is said that it was influenced by Sanskrit, which used pinyin characters. The pronunciation of Chinese characters can be marked by backcutting, that is, the initial consonant of the first word and the vowel and tone of the second word are combined to make phonetic notation, so that all Chinese characters can be combined. For example, the pronunciation of "Lian" is the combination of the initial of "Lang" and the vowel and tone of "Dian".
Since modern times, Chinese phonetic symbols (commonly known as ㄅㄆㄇㄈ) and phonetic notation methods of many Latin letters have been developed. Phonetic symbols are still a part of teaching in Taiwan Province Province, but at present, Chinese Pinyin is the most widely used in Chinese mainland.
Because Chinese characters are mainly ideographic, the phonetic notation is weak. This feature makes the literature of the last 1000 years, like the western world that uses pinyin, have no big difference in wording, but it also makes it difficult for people to infer the ancient phonology. For example, the pronunciation of "Pang" comes from "Dragon", but today the former is pronounced as "Pang" and the latter as "Dragon" in Beijing dialect. How to explain this difference is a subject of phonology.
Chinese characters and words
Chinese characters are the smallest unit of Chinese.
Morpheme is the smallest unit of Chinese ideogram, similar to English words and phrases. The vast majority of Chinese characters can form morphemes independently, such as "I", which is similar to English words with single letters, such as "I". Most words in modern vernacular Chinese are composed of more than two Chinese characters. However, unlike the relationship between "words" and "letters" in English, the meaning of morphemes is often related to the meaning of each Chinese character when it forms morphemes independently, thus simplifying memory to a considerable extent.
Words include morphemes and phrases composed of several morphemes.
The high efficiency of Chinese characters is reflected in hundreds of basic hieroglyphics, which can be synthesized into tens of thousands of Chinese characters, representing all kinds of things in the sky and underground; Thousands of commonly used words can be easily combined into hundreds of thousands of words.
However, on the other hand, it has become a burden to accurately grasp the collocation forms and usage of these hundreds of thousands of words. There are about tens of thousands of commonly used words in Chinese, with a total vocabulary of about one million. Although it seems daunting in quantity, it is not out of reach to master most Chinese word-formation because of its ideographic nature. Therefore, as far as vocabulary is concerned, its learning difficulty is not high; In contrast, mastering the same number of foreign words has a much greater memory intensity.
From the perspective of ancient Chinese, the original meaning of Chinese characters is more accurate and efficient than the May 4th vernacular movement. For example, Mr. Zhu Bangfu promoted the accurate use of Chinese characters in ancient times.